"I need him to tell me he loves me more, and be more passionate and just pay me more attention. He will be really romantic for a bit, as if I am the centre of his universe, and then he wanders off (??) and does something else. Is that a man thing?"
I'll be honest, I am a bit like that. So is it a man thing? Well I am sure that there are many men that fall short in this category of a R, but I've seen plenty of the weakness from both sexes.
Maybe there is a pattern that you can break? To get him to treat you more romantically. For example for me its easy to forget the romance when I feel 'she' is mine so to speak, if I feel I must me romantic to keep 'her' then I am more flirtatious and romantic. The biggest killer for me is financial pressures, to keep up with the business and family needs is a lot of pressure, romance can easily be put on the back burner. Another thing is DD12's health or special needs, she literally wears me out, then romance is almost impossible.
Sorry to bore you with my sit., but if you can figure out what puts him in a 'proper mood', saying ILY and being romantic, maybe you can sway him into being romantic more often.
<The biggest killer for me is financial pressures, to keep up with the business and family needs is a lot of pressure, romance can easily be put on the back burner.>
oh man. this is me also! when I'm stressed about money I go into my own little world. my kids have even told me they can't talk to me when i'm like that. very sobering.
Firstly, during our M he was naturally extremely romantic (much more so than your average man, I think) - he knew what to do and say etc, so this not being romantic is a new post-D thing. Part of it is him and part of it is me. It's difficult to know what to do.
He doesn't have financial problems (I have more money worries than him) - he's just been paid £400 for teaching work and his weekly income is double mine.
DD2 is being challenging but then she always was challenging from toddlerhood up and he was romantic then, so she shouldn't have so much of an impact.
I guess the difference between then and now is that we have both slept with other people and prior to the break up, we were each other's only sexual partner ever. To me, it just spoils it permanently. He also has millions of friends, mostly female, and is still friends with his 3 ex-OW. For instance, ex-OW2 DD had a 6th birthday party a few days ago, and he and my kids went to that.
Prior to the breakup I was confident, both sexually and otherwise, now I'm not. I need to feel as if I'm the one, that he loves me, that he has chosen me above those other women and I need to banish the hurt that those women caused me, and I can't in the current climate.
So I end up feeling negative and then the things he does do for me just go straight over my head.
I'll list a few examples:
1. He asks how I am and tries to encourage me to talk but if I do, he doesn't listen. He'll say something like 'I understand why you feel like that', but then doesn't back up that statement with evidence to prove he understands. The rest of his convo with me will be justifying his reasons for doing what he does, which is not empathic to me at all.
2. He speaks to other female friends about problems he's got, instead of me, and tells me this is because he thinks I won't listen to him. Whatever his reason, it is still an emotional connection to that person/people and it's wrong.
3. He'll ask me to do chores etc at his house and asks me to see after the kids, then he'll talk down to me (like this time just gone he made this comment about how I never change light bulbs - well, I can't because of the disability, so he said what about lamps? I've never owned a lamp. He seemed to think this was funny, I was thinking he should go and marry Martha Stewart. Normally I wouldn't mind comments like that but after everything I am so easily hurt and sensitive).
3. I travel to see him and then he'll wonder off and spend 2 or 3 hours talking to a male friend, when we don't get to see each other that much and I know it'll be 10 days before we do again. This frustrates me and makes me feel not very important.
4. He always comes through for me, with some nice thing he's done, but only when I feel I am at the end of my tether.
5. He hardly ever says ILY or anything like that. If we're ML, he won't even say it. He's usually silent which is uncharacteristic, apart from 1 time recently when Bruce told me off for being too graphic.
6. I saw a Kama Sutra book in his bedroom which he didn't have in the M. This made me think he'd got it to please one of his OW, and I can't switch off thoughts like this even when we are in bed. I feel like there's nothing I can do to please him now he's had carnal knowledge of other people. I didn't used to feel like this, but what with him still being friends with all of them, I do now.
7. The drives are different now. His is lowering with age. He can happily be a once a fortnight guy. Mine is increasing. Because I don't feel loved, I am looking for more physical stuff to help me feel loved, so I'm also getting annoyed at the mis-match in drives.
8. He's perfectly happy living in separate houses long-term, even if we re-marry, he still wants to keep the separate houses as he says it's a place to go to have space and so we don't crowd each other. I don't want it like this.
He has been talking about 'our relationship' and making some really positive moves, like the house sharing etc, but I feel really flat.
I can't decide whether to carry on as normal and hope it gets easier or just see him round at mine. I felt out of place this last time.
I will see him again in about 9 days as he's at his mother's and then going to the Big Green Gathering for 4 days. I will miss DD2's birthday again.
I have missed all of them for years. The last birthday of hers that I was at, was her 4th. She'll be 9 now. He doesn't get back from the camp till the next day.
I feel for you, once they have slept with others its not the same. Its very painful! Andy does a lot of things that bother me, keeping the EX OW as friends to me is the worst of all.
Take one day at a time and focus on your writing, YOU ARE SO GOOD at it.
(I was just thinking maybe he'll grow up a bit, when I was in my 20's I thought I should be able to be friends with every woman on the planet. I couldn't understand the jealousy thing. Then I got BURNED! I learned to respect quality time together, instead of talking to all these women that worked for me.)
Oh DD12 has been a challenge this weekend. She just won't listen.
He's not in his 20's, Jay, he'll be 32 this October.
We started dating when he was 19 and at that point he'd had a girlfriend for 2 years (she never slept with him as she always bottled out at the last minute). Anyhow, I thought to be with someone for 2 years when he'd met her at 17 was pretty mature for a male that age, and then when he started dating me he was totally committed from the start. He didn't have any other gf's and he didn't talk to millions of other women.
He had 2 female friends who were only friends, one from his college days and the other from university. I became friends with both of them and used to go round one of their houses for weekends away. This type of thing I am not bothered with. He could have 100 female friends if he wanted, as long as he'd never slept with any of them.
He didn't used to smoke, take drugs or anything. He did have a blip where he got involved in criminal stuff for a few months as those of you who've read my book will know, but this was not usual behaviour. Aside from that, he was a real family man from his late teens to his late twenties.
All this other stuff has come in after that. It's almost like he thinks he tied himself down too young so now he's running off behaving like a teenager in his thirties.
He has assured me he will be monogamous (sp?) with me and not sleep with others and said he never cheated on me in the M so he's not going to now he's in this R with me, but he's refusing to give up his emotional connections to those women and goes so far as to share things with them on a mental level and not me. This to me is cheating, but he doesn't understand this or refuses to acknowledge this.
And if in the future we can't even share the same home together, well, ever since he pushed me into that R talk I have been wondering whether to leave him. I want to know that eventually I'll have a home to come home to, that I'll have all my children back, and that my SL won't continue to be adversely affected. It's really difficult to have one when you live in 2 separate houses so it isn't as much as I would like and even when we do, sometimes he has to rush off afterwards. I don't want to live like this forever.
Sure it's lonely being single and not having a SL at all, but it's easier to be celibate in my experience than it is to have someone who wants you ocassionally and leaves you obbessing about it the rest of the time. BTW, he has no idea I have a problem with the SL, I just don't feel like talking about it when he's still friends with OW.
I love being with my family and there's many times I love being with him, but he just batters down my self-esteem so much that I think he takes more from my life than he gives.
We're going on holiday together at Christmas and I had been praying for a situation like that for years. I still want to go as I'm really looking forward to it, and that's the only reason why I've not said anything to him. He thinks our R is swimming along finely, I think it's on life-support.
I feel pretty miserable at the moment.
I am still writing, thanks, I've got the newsletter to do (late with that), I am working with the New York Literary Agency to market my work to bigger publishers, I've just been paid for advertising someone elses company. I've been writing poetry a lot lately, that I thought I would turn into a compilation.
I have to get happy before Andy comes home so I can figure out whether I'm backing off from him or talking to him about this.
I just wrote this poem about how I'm feeling at the moment. It's about how much damage a spouse's negative comments can cause to the other person's self-esteem.
I thought it was a fairly good poem so I decided to share it with you all:
WHY CRITICISM KILLS
I don’t do the dishes right The sink doesn’t sparkle The floors aren’t white.
I can’t change the light bulbs Cause my legs are broke I don’t join in when you’re smoking dope.
I’m all in a dream world Not your reality Hiding the pain that you won’t see.
I don’t own a lamp, but that doesn’t matter. I’m not organised; there’s too much clutter.
I’m no good at talking or helping you through If you’ve got a problem I don’t listen to you
I’m too much of a prude – now that one I don’t get When I sleep next to you, naked.
When you look at me, who do you see? A woman that loves you? Do you really see me?
It's almost like he thinks he tied himself down too young so now he's running off behaving like a teenager in his thirties.
Jo,
This is exactly what happened, I think?, maybe he will get over this 'rebel period' and become a grown man again. (I had a spell of being a selfish bloke in my early thirties, then I regained my sanity)MAYBE?
Nice poem, keep writing no matter what, because it will pay off. This I am sure of!
I have had a customer for 4 yrs, I just found out she lived in England as a child. (No pretty accent though) I have a Beatles picture for sale, so she brought up living in the UK.
I'm going to show him the poem when he gets home. I find it really hard to start R talks (goes against DB'ing and is by now ingrained into my psyhe), and I find it hard to find the right words in speech but when I write, it just flows, so I can show him how I feel through the poetry.
I thought I'd show him the other romantic ones I've written and then this one, so he can see what he means to me and also see how he hurts me and then maybe that'll give him some food for thought.
I was working all this morning and feeling pretty down still, so this afternoon I decided to go out. We went shopping and bought a hat and a little teddy bear for my friend's baby that is due in less than 3 months (I am getting excited), I dropped a film off so tomorrow I am collecting my photos which I am going to put online for everyone, I bought a new photo album because I found all these 7 by 5 pictures of DD2's 2nd birthday that I didn't even know I had, so they are going to be put in that - and then we went to a cafe and I treated myself to a really gooey chocolate cake, and DD4 had jello (as you Americans call it!).
