You’ve already been through the mill, so I’m not going to give you a 2x4! But I do have some questions and suggestions for you:
(1) What are your truest feelings about your wife – what do you really feel for her deep down in your soul – underneath the day-to-day grind and SSM issue?
(2) Do you speak and act consistently or inconsistently with those feelings? In what ways?
(3) From your previous posts I can entirely understand that you (and she) have taken a lot of hard knocks over the last few years. I imagine that your son’s health problems, the business going under, and the financial worries, have all had a combined effect on your confidence and general outlook on life. Reading between the lines, your wife also appears to think you are somehow less of a man. Well not in my eyes. The essence of a man’s life is how he copes with adversity. Hemingway called it “grace under pressure”. You have had adversity and you are coping. You are still there, you are doing the best you can for your family. You are already a true man – your wife can neither give nor take that away from you. You have every reason in the world to feel PROUD of yourself. But, do you ACT that way consistently throughout the day? Or do you constantly watch and wait for your wife’s reactions and approval?
(4) Do you think you are too nice and placating towards your wife, too anxious to please? Do the many things you do for her (and your children) carry an unspoken but nonetheless palpable expectation on your part, or are they done as the natural product of a big, strong and happy heart? Have you actually read no more mr nice guy by glover? You should, there are very few men that will not learn something from it.
(5) I have been reading this BB for about 3 years now, and I have read and learned extraordinary and profound things about myself and about other people. The SSM issue for me was the start of a journey into the depths of my soul, my past, my view of what a man should be, my very being in fact. Reading the way of the superior man by deida was an important stage in that journey. It really helped me understand what I should strive for as a man, and how to relate to women. And it convinced me that every man must find his purpose, his passion. Without that, he is not truly living, he is not giving his inherent gifts to the world, he is unfulfilled, and his woman senses it and loses interest in him. That, I suspect is one of the main reasons why so many men end up in a SSM. So what is YOUR purpose and passion, near the end? And don’t answer me “to be a good father”, “to be a good husband”, “to provide for my family”, “to stay in this marriage” or even “to have a great sex life”. These are NOT your purpose or your passion. Yes, you have responsibilities to your family, and aspire to have healthy relationships with them. But these are not your true purpose – that lies much deeper within you. I predict that you will be thinking “But I don’t have time, I have to work and earn money to dig us out of the financial hole we’re in”. I don’t for a moment wish to minimise that responsibility, but the greater responsibility is to yourself. You absolutely HAVE to make and take some time for yourself to discover what truly makes you feel alive. Your wife does her running – what is that you do or want to do? You will carry all your other responsibilities so much better and happier if you feel fulfilled as to your life’s purpose. Find it.
(6) You say you do not want to be emasculated by your wife in the bedroom – believe me when I tell you in all sincerity – SHE DOES NOT HAVE THAT POWER ANYWAY. Stop speaking as if your wife was in a position through sex to make you more of a man than you already are. Lose any fear of trying to initiate sex, of rejection. She could reject you every single day for a whole year, and although it would get rather boring for both of you, it would make NO DIFFERENCE to who you already are. Unfortunately, the conventional view of marriage and female approval says otherwise, which is why the life and energy goes out of so many marriages. Bit by bit the man starts to believe – and therefore talks and acts – like sex is some kind of big favour. This is a really difficult concept to grasp and live out, but your measure as a man is entirely defined by YOUR thoughts, YOUR actions and YOUR reactions to the outside world, including your wife.
(7) Does your wife work? What is her contribution to the household? Is it objectively a fair one? If not, why not? See (4) above.
(8) “Sex is a want, not a need”. Yes, absolutely right. It is both illogical and ultimately self-defeating for a man to treat sex as a need rather than a want. It weakens him to his core. It leads him to behave in unattractive and dysfunctional ways. If you truly believe that you do not need sex, you have reached a seminal realisation in your life and I am very glad for you. You are now free within and will act freely outside of it. That means that tomorrow you will wake up, smile, kiss your wife, hug your children, go out into the world, live out your purpose, and tend to your responsibilities without resentment of the past or expectation of the future. You will live in the moment, and come home happy and fulfilled. And the next day, and the day after that. I am not being ironic or sarcastic – I am pointing out the natural and very powerful consequences of truly believing that sex is a want not a need.
(9) But that realisation does not condemn you to live in an SSM – even though you could. That realisation, that essential freedom that you now have, allows to you to take calm stock of your whole life – each and every aspect of it – and weigh them all up.
In one of your early posts you said:
“It has gotten to the point where I secretly hate my wife. Too many years of rejection. She does know how much the sex means to me.”
More recently:
“I have continued to work on my friendship with my wife and we are getting along much better. She is even confiding in me with problems she is having with other parents at the school and similar issues that are bothering her. I have made an effort to be of more help around the house and to get some projects done that I have left undone for one reason or another. She was right in complaining about those.”
That would suggest you are making some progress: she is learning to be intimate with you again. Not in your way, but her way – a woman opening up to you about her problems is placing great trust in you. It’s definitely a start.
But then you said this:
“She has stated during counseling that she “Despises” me. I will admit she had plenty of reason to at the time, most of those reasons are now gone with only a marginal change in her attitude.”
The reason I’m quoting your own words back to you is because your goal:
“is to be able to preserve a functional marriage relationship that allows my children to grow to adulthood in a two parent home...It is more important to raise the kids in a stable home.”
That is an entirely admirable goal, though in line with what I said earlier, it should not be your purpose in life. Being a good parent starts with being a strong, happy and fulfilled person. That example is the very best gift you can ever give to your children. I’m not underestimating your feelings – I’m a parent myself – but you must never let that goal become your prison. You must not suppress who you really are “for the sake of the children”. If you are a red-blooded sexual man, then that is what you are. Period. You don’t need sex, but you still want it.
You need to take an honest look at you and your wife’s feelings towards each other. Do you really hate and despise each other? Or can genuine progress be made on both sides?
And let’s look at your goal on its own limited terms. Just how “functional” will this marriage be? Is this the idea of marriage that you will want your children to carry into their own lives? Just what kind of a “stable home” will this be? Are your children going to be brought up in an atmosphere of repressed sexual emotion, resentment, bitterness, and anger? Even if your marriage is outwardly polite, your children will pick up on the undercurrents, you will not be able to hide them – make no mistake about that.
I was brought up by a divorced parent myself – there are far worse things. One of those things is to see a marriage where the parents hate each other, where natural emotion and affection is suppressed, and where one parent does not have self-respect. I’m not saying this is your home right now, but if you care about your children, you will make damn sure it isn’t.
Have you thought what you’ll say to your children when the last one reaches 18 and you and your wife inevitably divorce? Do you think they will assume it’s a coincidence – of course not. Do you think they will thank you for your sacrifice, or do you think they will feel betrayed and also guilty by the façade you made them live through?
Another thing to bear in mind is that men that permit (submit) themselves to live in marriages where they are fundamentally disrespected, hated and ignored – as opposed to those who choose to leave and find a healthy and loving woman instead – are unlikely to perform as well at work either. The continually suppressed wants, the resentment and the anger, all drain a man’s enthusiasm and cloud his professional judgment. He becomes depressed, apathetic and unable to assert himself (trust me on this one). He gets pushed around and passed over for promotion. He is unable to apply himself to his fullest extent. So his earnings suffer. He may well end up having an affair when the opportunity presents itself, thus jeopardising his marriage anyway, and perhaps even his career.
By staying in an arid marriage for 10 years there is a good chance that you will provide less well financially for your children than would otherwise be the case.
(10) Last but by no means least, there is your wife. You really need to read deida. If you cannot love this woman genuinely, strongly and tenderly – or if she does not want to be loved in those ways by you – she would be better having the chance to find another man. Trying to kid yourself that you don’t find her sexually attractive, unilaterally trying to turn her into your “sister”, is dishonest and wrong on all kinds of levels to both of you. You would be deceiving and emasculating yourself.
My advice to you? Do the “homework” if you haven’t already, and see how it affects your outlook and behaviour at home. Carry on working hard on your finances, job, business etc. Think out a plan whereby in a year, or two at very most, you could divorce if you really had to. Yes, I know it would be tough, but you and she would find a way to manage, just as she would have to all on her own if you were killed in a tragic accident tomorrow.
When you feel ready, and can do so with no trace of bitterness or anger about the past, have a calm talk with your wife and say that you now want to have an intimate physical relationship with her. Tell her lovingly but firmly that although you are happy to take it in stages, you want it to start, and that it will not include unloving or “pity” sex. You might even give her a timeframe beyond which you will not live without a proper physical relationship – a timeframe that mirrors the financial one I’ve already suggested. If at the end of that timeframe she has made no or only grudging chore-like efforts...well, that will be up to you.
Let me know how you get on,
Strong&Alive
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated" - from The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
Which I take to mean that every man has within him a spirit of relentlessness and optimism. Its already there; he just has to cultivate it.
And it convinced me that every man must find his purpose, his passion. Without that, he is not truly living, he is not giving his inherent gifts to the world, he is unfulfilled, and his woman senses it and loses interest in him.
~Priceless.
Actually #5 the whole part is right on...
I would recommend printing out SA's post it is amazing and will help you trmendously.
I would also recommend reading A New Earth~ Awakening Your Lifes Purpose.... when you are done with the book he recommended. Great stuff NTE~ All my best to you , ~Ali
That is a great line, she wants to be sexy without the sex, at least with me! She parades around without any clothes in our room or bathroom, but gets upset when I ogle her. "Don't look at me that way!"
NTE;
I keep coming back to your situation, and I'm with NOPkins on this one: I suspect that you're being toyed with. From what you've described, she can't be ignorant of the effect this has on you.
I've advised plenty of "carrot" approaches to you so far, but at the moment, she's in the driver's seat of both your relationship and your sexuality, and is flaunting it rather contemptuously (based on all of your posts, not just these 'you can look but you can't touch' incidents). And, unfortunately, you aren't going to win over someone who shows contempt for you by offering them only carrots -- you're going to have to get tough at some point.
I think S&A is right in that you need to embark on a major GAL campaign and reclaim your masculinity and sexuality for yourself, gently booting her out of the driver's seat of your car and sending her back to her own. In your first post, you mentioned the possibility of moving down into the basement, and were I in your shoes, that's what I would do --> no discussion, no argument, just do it. She's taking advantage of the fact that you want to keep up the pretense of a normal marriage in front of the kids, including sleeping in the same, sexless bed with her. Stop pretending, and stop letting her toy with you. If you really just want to live as house-mates or brother-sister with her at this point, then establish your own area of the house and live as such.
Note that I'm not advising you to stop all of the other "carrot" things that have been suggested and that you've been trying --> your ultimate goal is, I still assume, to repair your marriage. However, before you can even be friends with her again, much less lovers, you're going to have to regain her respect, and get her to knock off this contempt and playing-games business. And the first step to doing that is to establish yourself as your own man again, in all aspects of your life.
Hang in there,
Bagheera
Me 50, W 45, M for 26 yrs S25, D23, S13, S10 20+ year SSM; recovery began Oct 2007
My wife is going out of town for almost two weeks with the kids to visit my family (no vacation time, no money, no go for me!). I think this is my opportunity to read the no more mr nice guy and prepare myself for her return and whatever course I am going to take here. Whatever I choose to do, I will have to stick to my guns in order for it to work. First of all, I need to rediscover who I am. I have allowed myself to be crushed and become a sell out based on my financial crises and the need to keep a job as well as my marital crisis and desire to stay married. I am not the man my wife married. Granted, we are supposed to grow and change in our lives, but I have lost an essential part of who I am. That needs to come back, whether the wife gets it or not.
Near...you say you've tried many of the husband fixers...but as I said in my last post...did you ever try it because it was the RIGHT THING TO DO - versus trying it to get a reward?
Please don't think I am bashing on you. This is just something I have finally learned after all of these years, and I kind of think you are missing that part of the point.
DanceQueen
Dance,
Sorry this has taken so long to respond to.
It is a hard thing to maintain a motivation for doing something simply "because it is the right thing." I agree, that SHOULD be the motivation. The problem is the long term response to the actions. If those responses are consistantly negative and discouraging, it tends to make them go away over time. Granted, due to my unending love, high moral character etc, I should be able to continue to infinity on these things without receiving or expecting anthing back. The really frustrating thing is that a lot of these actions, ie cleaning the kitchen etc, are now considered an entitelment by her and are subject for extreme reactions if something goes wrong and it is missed. By the way, I have done this one for over a decade!
Still, all in all, I do need to work on my attitude towards these actions.
Well I made that mistake too, giving with expectation of receiving. And yes I do understand what you are saying...the problem is that all you are really saying is "where is my reward?" Please believe me when I tell you that I am not judging I am just looking at my own past and seeing it being re-written in many many others' stories just like yours.
There is a spiritual approach to this that is necessary, and you don't even have to be spiritual to accomplish it, you just have to do it.
What is it you must do?
You must do the RIGHT THING.
If the right thing for you to do is move on and get divorced, then do it. If the right thing is to stick it out and try your best for the kids sake, do it.
But DON'T stick it out for the kids sake if you are not also going to love their mother "exactly the way she is"...do you see why that would not be the right thing?
I know its complicated, it hurts, and it sucks. But oh if only I could go back in time and apply what I have learned...and I only want caution and assist others the best I can so that maybe one of them (out of the hundreds of messages I have posted over the years) may escape my fate.
Dance, Very thought provoking words. I do love my wife, most of the time, I just get pissed when I can't have sex with her! I will dwell on what you have posted. Thanks.
"It is a hard thing to maintain a motivation for doing something simply "because it is the right thing." I agree, that SHOULD be the motivation. The problem is the long term response to the actions. If those responses are consistently negative and discouraging, it tends to make them go away over time. Granted, due to my unending love, high moral character etc, I should be able to continue to infinity on these things without receiving or expecting anthing back. The really frustrating thing is that a lot of these actions, ie cleaning the kitchen etc, are now considered an entitlement by her and are subject for extreme reactions if something goes wrong and it is missed. By the way, I have done this one for over a decade!"
This is where you need to stop being such a "nice guy". Nice guys are always doing what they are told/asked/think they should do, but inwardly are constantly simmering at the lack of reward, usually sex. An integrated man - I'm still getting there myself! - does things only (1) when they are the right thing i.e. objectively he should do it anyway, or (2) because he freely wants to, and without building in an unspoken (but nonetheless palpable) expectation of reward. Category (3) is a calm but firm "No". Do your "homework" and start learning to distinguish these categories and act accordingly.
I totally understand your "infinity" point i.e. "When will this ever end?" This is where deida comes in. glover is great on practical things such as recognising and correcting unhealthy patterns and dysfunctional behaviours. But deida was what really sparked my inner spirit - my reaction to him was "Yes, I am indeed going to die one day, and I don't even know when or how. Yes, life is a neverending series of struggles without guarantee, I may as well be at peace with that and simply resolve to do the very best I can in each and every situation I ever find myself in. Yes, thinking about it calmly, these are obviously much more important questions than my wife, and are what truly define me, rather than the sex thing ever could (why did I ever think otherwise?). Yes, I must confront my fear of death and what to do with this gift of life I've been given by a power/entity on a wholly different plane to my wife or any other woman. Yes, I must start doing whatever my current abilities best suit me for, because otherwise I am just wasting this great gift of life. Yes, I'm intrigued by the whole feminine essence, radiance and testing thing, so I choose to stay with my wife and see what happens - I can leave at any time. Any time."
So start acting and living as if you already had the marriage and sex-life of your dreams. This is not self-delusion - it is the recognition that you are on this Earth with something to give, a higher purpose to serve. Resolve to do this consistently, day in day out, without expectation that your wife will change or reward you, and you will build within yourself a purpose, a strength, an independence, and clarity of thought, that will either start to bring positive effects on your marriage, or enable you to leave without guilt or resentment.
My own experience was that doing this removed the twin pychic pollutants, of past resentment and future expectation, from my marriage. For the first time in several years, it gave clear fresh air for my wife to start growing of her own accord and in her own way.
Strong&Alive
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated" - from The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
Which I take to mean that every man has within him a spirit of relentlessness and optimism. Its already there; he just has to cultivate it.
Just a few more thought provoking words from me...
If I could go back with the knowledge I have now and do my marriage to my ex-husband over again, here are things I would do differently:
*Be more sexual, have sex with him more often, and even if I wasn't feeling it I would have figured out some way to make myself feel it - no matter what that took!
*Be more emotionally connected to him and put him higher in my heart than my children, instead of the other way around.
*Insist on counseling if/when things got bad between us.
*Be more open and honest and have more intimacy with him.
*Take more responsibility for ways I had hurt him and correct them.
*Be more appreciative and supportive of him especially when he was down.
Now - I want to make it very clear that I am not in love with my ex-h anymore and I would never go back to him. And yet, because I did not "do the right thing" in my marriage, I still wish I could have a "do over". EVEN IF WE STILL WOULD HAVE ENDED UP DIVORCED I WOULD STILL WANT TO DO IT OVER AND DO THE RIGHT THING, BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING.
Instead I did the wrong things and will forever be disappointed in myself for failing. Had I done the right thing, even if we still ended up divorced, I would not have failed.
