Prideful women tend to operate in a covert or overt manner.

The overt prideful woman is easier to identify because her behaviors are flamboyant and obvious. Overt pride manifests in aggressive and obvious behaviors. Such behaviors may leave you feeling small, less manly, and insignificant.

While the covert woman‘s behaviors are hidden and hard to explain. This makes it hard to identify her level of pride because her behavior is passive-aggressive and subtle. These behaviors may leave you feeling crazy and thinking you’re being over sensitive.

What are the causes of pride?

Here are a few of the underlying causes and signs of a prideful wife:

  • Trying to fix everything: A prideful wife believes she has all the answers and can do everything better than others. This may stem from a fear which causes her to control. Or she may feel powerful when she has control and when she’s better than others.
  • Fear of humility: Women that struggle with pride might be afraid to ask for help. Asking for help might open her up to being harmed by others.
  • Fear of Vulnerability: A prideful woman might fear being weak because she is afraid of being mistreated. Love is a risk and not everyone is comfortable with the potential to be hurt.
  • Low self-esteem: Pride is a mask that insecure women wear. If she pretends everything is perfect and that you’re the problem, then she won’t have to feel small, insecure, and weak.
  • Impossible standards of perfection: Prideful woman want to do everything right. They may be obsessed with perfection and have a hard time hearing they did something wrong. They may need to blame things on others to feel better.
  • Know It All: a prideful woman may think they know everything and have a hard time listening to opposing opinions.

14 Signs You Have A Prideful Wife

  1. You’re the cause of all the problems and she can’t see her faults.
  2. She never admits to doing anything wrong even after you do.
  3. She manipulates and controls things to get her way.
  4. She’s defensive and doesn’t listen well.
  5. She gets everyone on her side, so you’ll do what she wants.
  6. She is constantly pointing out your shortcomings.
  7. When you’re trying to change she finds more things wrong with you.
  8. She is always the victim.
  9. She believes you’re blessed to be with her, but she doesn’t see how you bless her.
  10. She seems to be in competition with you.
  11. She doesn’t respect you.
  12. She has all the answers and no one else does.
  13. If she doesn’t agree with you then she can’t understand your point.
  14. She believes you live to make her feel loved.

Here are 38 Signs other signs of pride in a person.

How to Deal With A Prideful Wife

Being involved with a prideful woman can be very tricky. Generally, women are seen as the victims in difficult relationships, so this can cause the man to look guilty immediately. In addition, being with a prideful woman can be even more complicated because she may not know she’s operating in pride. Her lack of behavioral awareness is due to a blindspot.

1. Identify the problem

Take a moment to identify what your wife’s behaviors are and when they occur. This will help you to see exactly what the problem is. Also, understanding her behaviors will help you seek effective support to deal with the problems.

2. Trust yourself

Your wife may distort reality based on her level of pride. She may be unaware of her behavior, unwilling to change, and/or unable to see the truth. The truth might be too painful for her to hear. She may bring up everything you’ve done wrong. Essentially, she may use manipulation, control, dominance, lying, blame-shifting, a victim mentality, gas-lighting, abuse, and other toxic strategies to deal with the situation.

3. Seek professional help

If your wife doesn’t see how she is adding to the relational problems then it’s time to seek outside help. Seeking individual and couple’s counseling is ideal. Essentially, you both need your own therapists to help address how you are adding to the problem. Then a couple’s counselor will help you both work together to address the problems.

4. Be Humble

In addition, it may be hard for you to help her see her pride because of your own pride. Be very careful you’re not pinning all the blame on your significant other. If you can’t see anything you’re doing wrong OR any area you can improve in then you may have a blind spot when it comes to your behaviors. Even thinking you are more emotionally together than someone else can be a potential sign that pride is also in your heart.

Am I Prideful Quiz:

Take this pride test to find out if you are struggling with pride.

What are blindspots?

We often enter into relationships and assume that we know our partners and ourselves very well. But we eventually realize that everyone has their own unique way of thinking, behaving, and communicating.

According to Good Therapy: "A blind spot is a range of view that is blocked. It can be an area where a person fails to exercise judgment, awareness, or perspective. In a relationship, a blind spot can mean any area a person fails to recognize is impacting their relationship either in a negative way or as a needed growth area."

When people have a hard time communicating due to blindspots it can quickly turn into a heated argument. The tricky part is we don’t know when we are operating from a blindspot. We often blame the other person and focus on their wrongs because we aren’t able to see our own unhealthy behaviors accurately! Most of us have grown up seeing our unhealthy behaviors, so we subconsciously find it NORMAL.

Most of us have grown up seeing our unhealthy behaviors, so we subconsciously find it NORMAL.

What are the causes of blindspot?

To reduce the negative effects of a blindspot, we must learn to accept we don’t know everything, that our behaviors affects others differently, and we will always have room for our growth… This mindset shift can positively change our relationships dramatically. Here are 7 Causes of Blind Spots:

1. People are unique and think differently: our cultures, age, income bracket, intellect, gender, family trauma, childhood experiences, and other differences affect how we communicate and HEAR what others communicate.

2. Unhealthy behaviors: our way of coping with emotions can be unhealthy if we have never learnt healthy tools. Unfortunately, some people don’t know that they are using unhealthy tools. And they think it’s normal and okay to communicate with toxic strategies.

3. Emotional needs: you may want to feel loved, safe, and support, but you don’t know how to get your needs met in the right way. This can cause us to throw a childlike tantrum to force our partner to appease us. Withdrawal, numbing, and avoidance are also unhealthy coping mechanisms.

4. Un-forgiveness: if you are still harboring anger towards someone you will interpret everything the other person is saying or doing from an emotionally charged perspective. And your partner can hear the unforgiveness in your words and behavior! I know it’s hard, but if you want healthy relationships you have to let go of whatever you’re holding against them or YOURSELF!

5. Lack of vulnerability: Some people retreat when it’s time to be vulnerable due to fear of abandonment and insecurities. Yes, opening your heart up and sharing yourself to another person is SCARY! And honesty is NOT vulnerability. Vulnerability is fearing the response, behavior, and treatment of someone and deciding to trust them despite those fears. Of course, our vulnerability should NOT be shared with abusers.

6. Overwhelming emotions: whenever we communicate from a place of pain or heightened emotions it will spill out into everything we are doing. For instance, if someone feels they’re always getting in trouble at work then they may feel their spouse is picking on them. Or a person that feels misunderstood might get angry when their partner doesn’t acknowledge their hard work.

7. Romantic Expectations: the purpose of a relationship isn’t about making you feel loved and pumping up your self-esteem. What if the purpose of a relationship is having a companion and teammate to tackle life with? What if we weren’t meant to be perfect before a relationship? What if we just have to be humble enough to allow someone to see us in our mess? And what if we had enough unconditional love to love someone in their mess?

8. Lack of wisdom or maturity: you can communicate all you want, but if the other person doesn’t understand it won’t be effective. Sometimes we can’t understand a perspective of someone that has gone through something different than us. It takes maturity to acknowledge that understanding others requires listening and being open to new perspectives. Also it takes maturity to realize we can’t understand someone else.

9. Pride: there will be communication issues when someone thinks they know everything and there isn’t anything to learn.

Everyone has blindspots, including myself! That’s why it’s important for couples to work on creating a safe, patient, and kind environment to explore unknown parts of theirselves.