My wife disrespects me and challenges my authority.

Please hide my identity. I want to seek your advice on how to handle my wife and the situation at home. This is a marriage of eleven years but we are still having back and forth as if to say that we just got married. I don’t know what my wife’s problem is. I have really tried my best to figure it out but all to no avail. She challenges my authority and questions almost everything I decide or demand. She was not like this when we first got married and that is why I am worried the most. I met her as a very lovely woman who is down to earth and treats everyone around her well. She was so calm, easygoing and industrious.

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Now, I no longer know who I live with. It is as if she is always fighting with me. Since I met her even before we got married, all I have ever done is to love and support her. I paid her last school fees in the University and helped her secure her desired state for her NYSC. I know how much that cost me. Even after she graduated, she couldn’t get a meaningful job because her course of study was not so relevant in Nigeria. She studied fishery and a suitable job wasn’t forthcoming. I personally set up a fish farm for her. It cost me a lot of money but I didn’t count that because I believed that she is my wife and anything I spend on her is an investment for our family.

Her fish farm is doing well. She has expanded and has a lot of workers now. He business is booming and she distributes different varieties of fish to hotels, schools and restaurants. I don’t know if it is the money she makes that is getting into her head. I am rich on my own and she knows that. I can comfortably take care of the family and I do that without looking at her for anything. However, the only thing I demand as a husband and father is respect from the woman I call my wife. She speaks to me anyhow as if we are mates. I come home from work everyday to meet a grumpy woman.

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We have a househelp who does most if the chores and takes care of the kids so she doesn’t have much to do when she is at home. When I give instructions, she does otherwise and when I confront her about it, she says that what she did or how she did it is the best. The annoying part is that it backfires sometimes and when I give the kids instructions, she asks them to do a completely different thing. We have quarrelled about this many times and it hasn’t stopped. All the methods I have used to speak some sense into her have failed. I am honestly fed up. She is not the first woman to be rich so why is she acting like this?