Anyone who has read this blog at all knows that I love my husband dearly, so please don't think I am unfair when I say he is opinionated and pushy and stubborn, and this drives me insane. He finds it very difficult to accept any opinion I have that is different from his own - nigh impossible really. We have so many arguments over this - he wants us to think exactly the same about everything, sweet I guess, but I feel to be impossible and unhealthy. Sometimes I feel bullied into ideas that are not even my own - or that I don't know if they are my own yet because I haven't had the time to think about them (I need an extraordinary amount of processing time while Jonathan's processing is lightning fast). But more and more, as I know him and love him I am seeing the indecisive, unsure nature that is lurking beneath his infuriating assurity. My husband can do anything, convince anyone of anything....as long as he knows I am backing him up. If he feels I am not with him 100% on something - he will drive me crazy trying to convince me to hop on board, and I get angry and hurt because I feel that he can't allow me to "just be me". But then later, I find out that he has either dropped that activity or opinion or whatever it was. I always contributed it to his temperament - tons of ideas that come and go, but few that go into action. This is not necessarily true - if I look back, its the things that I encouraged him to do or pursue that he is now doing and pursuing. Scary - That kind of power over another. I never really thought much about the saying, "behind every great man is a woman". There may be a whole lotta truth there, and I don't think you can turn it around the other way.

The relieving thing about realizing this truth is that he doesn't think my opinions are stupid at all, which I have often accused him of - he actually holds them in higher regard than I do - they shape the way he thinks and acts. He has no idea how to express this at the time so it comes out as pushy arrogance, but at least I realize it now and instead of being offended I can be flattered - yeah, we'll see how that actually goes into practice, but I will try.