I think you have some very good points. I also am not much for paying bills on time. I am working on that now. I will be doing things to make me happy, to make myself appear more confident, and to take charge of MY life. I will be letting the wife no when I am not happy, if that causes the marriage to go down hill, so what. I intend to make my marriage great, if she does not want to come along, it's her loss. TIme to get back some confidence.
I guess I would ask if you are half the man you used to be.
I suspect that when your W was HD, you were confident and aggressive. As she cooled, you lost your confidence. So she became half the woman she was and you became half the man you were. I think Schnarch said that most marriages have room for only one self, so between the two of you, you have met your quota.
Through all my reading here, I think that there *is* hope for a HD/ND marriage. (BEcause clearly your bodice-ripper-reading W is not ND.) But it requires tremendous growth on BOTH your parts.
And that;s where I have expressed my frustration with you in the past, CeMar. You have seen it as all "her fault." I agree that she seems to have been the one that switched gears after marriage, but you no doubt have changed in response to this. Your challenge to is reclaim your manhood. That might mean leaving the marriage, but hopefully not before you have stood up to your W and clearly and loudly expressed your needs.
My X certainly got my attention when he announced he was leaving me for another woman. He told me it was cuz he felt unloved. He needed more affection and passion. But I had NO IDEA of what he meant by that. What I thought were big improvements he no doubt saw as woefully inadequate. So we carried on silently, not communicating much at all, when really we should have been talking all the time, in lurid detail.
By the time he told me he was leaving, his heart was already gone. It probably was too late. Don't let that happen to your marriage, CeMar. Don't conduct your life now, out of fear, in a way that might cause you regret later. I know that my X is acutely aware of what he is missing, now that (I'm guessing) he has all the passion and affection he was looking for: he in many ways lost his family and this is no easy thing to accept.
You know the old saying: If you want her to be more of a woman, try being more of a man.
Try to just OBSERVE what you do around your W. How do you react when she talks? How do you react to the way she reacts to you? Take the focus off what she does or doesn't do and see what CeMar does or doesn't do. That is the first step -- awareness.
CeMar, I should also add that since my X and I divorced, I've really been examining my own attitudes towards passion and affection. That is a change I really needed to make while in the marriage, and I did not. These are BIG changes we are talking about and they take time and effort. I am so impressed with the time and effort Corri puts into it.
