Losing my mind over my sexless state of marriage.

[SteveLW]

I'm going to make a suggestion that is not according to DB principles. It might not sit well with you, but it's known to work. Nancy Missler (a Christian woman, yes I am a Christian) wrote a book that said that when a husband and wife are in chronic conflict, often the best way to fix it is for ... this is the hard part ... the woman to make the first move, and the woman to sacrificially serve the man for some period of time. Even if she is the one being wronged. It really doesn't take much, it just takes swallowing a little pride for the sake of the marriage.

How does it work? Without complaining or expecting to be acknowledged for it, change your appearance, behavior, and attitude. Start dressing really well around the house, better than just your normal baggies or sweats. Wear perfume, do your hair nicely. [Stay-at-home moms tend to let things go.] Spend time making more elaborate meals. Pick up after him without complaining. Avoid the usual traps you have that lead to complaining and bickering. Stop talking about sex, and stop making overtures toward sex. Give him more of the sweet MTM kisses that you mentioned above (MTM = Mary Tyler Moore kisses, the kind of chaste sweet wifely kisses that you saw on the Dick Van Dyke Show). If you have daily or weekly routines, keep them up but maintain a positive attitude.

He will notice, of course. What you want him to finally do is, after a week or two, ask you "why are you so different?" Then you give him the truth. You love him and you didn't think you were honoring him, as a man, husband and father enough. So you decided to improve yourself a bit. And it's been fun, and I'm thrilled you noticed, you tell him.

Tom this isn't bad advice with a couple of caveats. First, it doesn't have to be gender specific. A husband can also change things for the benefit of his W. I think this is what you were getting at in your response to Scout. (For full disclosure, I am devoutly Christian, but unfortunately the "man is the head of the woman" belief is scoffed at in modern western societies.) The bald, Texan TV psychologist likes to say that if you want a better marriage, be a betters spouse! It takes someone that is deeply flawed (sociopath, psychopath, narcissist) to not respond positively to positive changes. So yes, being a better W can improve the marriage. Being a better H can improve the marriage.

The problem is that becoming super husband or super wife after BD rarely works. The only thing that works is to move on. Either they will wake up in time and realize what they are losing. Or they won't. But in both cases the LBS moving on is the right approach.

[BenB]

Maybe, but more often they don't. Just seems a bit strange coming here asking for advice and clearly making mistakes in ones own relationship, then offering clear instructions to others on what to do in their situations. It's one thing if you suggest GAL activities or even start the post by saying "I'm no expert but" as some newcomers here do, but you are giving detailed instructions.

These are people in tough situations that potentially have no idea you are a newcomer and potentially making life changing decisions based on what someone says who is far from ready to give advice. And frankly, the advice I've seen from you so far is terrible and reeks of misogyny.

The veterans here are vets for a reason, they have seen many, many sitches and their advice is based on what works.

[tom_l]

Maybe, but more often they don't. Just seems a bit strange coming here asking for advice and clearly making mistakes in ones own relationship, then offering clear instructions to others on what to do in their situations. It's one thing if you suggest GAL activities or even start the post by saying "I'm no expert but" as some newcomers here do, but you are giving detailed instructions.

These are people in tough situations that potentially have no idea you are a newcomer and potentially making life changing decisions based on what someone says who is far from ready to give advice. And frankly, the advice I've seen from you so far is terrible and reeks of misogyny.

The veterans here are vets for a reason, they have seen many, many sitches and their advice is based on what works.

Well, Ben, thanks for the dignified reply, your initial one made you sound like a hit-and-run critic.

In fact, most of the veterans here encourage the newbs to try out their newfound wisdom on those who are newer. So it's not that unusual.

But if you do me the privilege of reading my thread, you'll see that I grew a lot over the first 30 days. So if I was parroting some of it back to others, by early October, that shouldn't be surprising. The principles are actually quite simple.

Others (perhaps you are in this situation) view posts as a way to get commentary on their daily lives -- how buff they have gotten, the latest calamity with joint custody, or how frustrated they are with the latest missive from their ex. I didn't. I came here to learn, and learn I did, quite quickly. So .... cut some of us some slack. If news say something screwy, or wrong, or downright in opposition to DB principles, call us out. But otherwise, maybe a "thank-you" or a "nice insight" would be the right approach.

[BenB]

Many vets may encourage newbies to help others and I have done so as well but I only write what I am certain of and even then, I have always pointed out that I am new here, even a year after posting.

You are giving detailed advice i.e if she tries to hold your hand, remove it and posts that many here have pointed out are misogynist. Your condescending response to Ginger about drinking bleach kind of tells me it is a bit too early perhaps to give such detailed advice. But even after all that, I do believe you mean well and advise away, but at least try to be careful and point out that other vets may chime in to correct you if you are wrong or something.

It seems like you are making an effort to insult me by hinting I am here to get a commentary of my daily life and I'm not here to learn but that is just what I have come to expect from you after reading not only your posts, but also your earlier responses. So yes, you should be called out and I am glad other have and hopefully will in the future.

I can give you some examples of people who learned quickly. Unchien for example I think has been through hell and gives great advice, read RobX if you haven't. But careful to proclaim you arrived here and learned quickly. You have a long way to go still. As do I of course.

[tom_l]

Tom this isn't bad advice with a couple of caveats. First, it doesn't have to be gender specific. A husband can also change things for the benefit of his W. I think this is what you were getting at in your response to Scout. The bald, Texan TV psychologist likes to say that if you want a better marriage, be a betters spouse! It takes someone that is deeply flawed (sociopath, psychopath, narcissist) to not respond positively to positive changes. So yes, being a better W can improve the marriage. Being a better H can improve the marriage.

The problem is that becoming super husband or super wife after BD rarely works. The only thing that works is to move on. Either they will wake up in time and realize what they are losing. Or they won't. But in both cases the LBS moving on is the right approach.

Totally agree, Steve. Stubbornness and obstinacy does not belong to only one gender! The same for healing outreaches!

As for trying this after BD, we are in violent agreement. Yet, for a struggling marriage, before BD, when one spouse is wavering back and forth -- especially when there is a lot of unresolved anger -- it might break the ice.

[Rose888]

I feel like I need to defend Christianity. In case any readers are wondering, there are entire congregations of Christians who do not believe the man is the head of the woman. You don't have to subscribe to strict gender roles in order to be Christian.

This public service announcement is now over. Carry on.

[SteveLW]

I feel like I need to defend Christianity. In case any readers are wondering, there are entire congregations of Christians who do not believe the man is the head of the woman. You don't have to subscribe to strict gender roles in order to be Christian.

This public service announcement is now over. Carry on.

Even if you do:

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it

That covers it. It is not a Lording over....or a master-slave relationship. At all.

Ok, I am done on this subject.

[1hedlite]

Steve,

It was actually DR that I read, not DB. I recently went on my Amazon account to look DR up, and a message came up saying I purchased it in 2016.

Drop the anger. It is exacerbating your problem, not helping it. It is like using motor oil on acne.

I know. But my God, it's been almost 2 years without sex. I'm dying.

Drop the pariah act. Truth is that there is plenty of blame to go around. You aren't an innocent victim in this, nor is he. So stop trying to play the "he did it first" game. Again...motor oil on acne.

I think it's a little more than a martyr act, but yes, it's irrelevant as far as DB is concerned. I know I'm not a victim. I made my bed and am now lying in it. Red flags were firing off almost as soon as we started dating, and then I married him. Red flags continued firing off, and then I got pregnant by him.

Does he blame you for that WHEN you bring it up. Or has he just said out of the blue. "You know, if you were better at seducing me...." My guess is that his comment on your failure to seduce him was a defensive response to you brining the problem up.

Neither one of us has been happy with the frequency since we got married. The only time we were okay with the frequency was sometime before we were married. Right after we found out I was pregnant, though, we were having an amazing amount of sex - it's like he was so happy about my pregnancy that his testosterone and libido shot up or something, but that lasted maybe a couple months.

So to answer your question. Back when we were at least having sex infrequently, he would bring up the topic of the infrequency AND blame the infrequency on me. I remember he would do that, and then my head would be spinning because I had been spending hours upon hours doing my darnedest trying to turn him on, to no avail, and then he would act like none of that ever happened and complain about the infrequency and blame me. That led to really awful fights.

But blaming me for things that are objectively not my fault, even things that are objectively his own fault, is a long-standing issue. Then again, I do fail to seduce him - he's not wrong about that.

Nowadays, he does not bring up the topic. It only gets brought up if I bring it up, and he blames me when I do. So yes, nowadays, he blames me when I bring it up. I have not brought it up since the fight I mentioned in my first post. The plan is that I not bring it up anymore.

This is pure conjecture. Most ICs are pretty good and sifting through the blaming, etc. Be glad he is in IC, so many LBSs would kill to have their WASs in IC.

Another long-standing issue is H's propensity to badmouth me to friends, my in-laws, etc. So it stands to reason that he will badmouth me in IC. Badmouthing me to third parties killed us before we could ever get off the ground. That has been very damaging over the years. I am largely disinterested regarding him being in IC - I don't hold out hope that it will benefit our marriage, but if badmouthing me in IC somehow makes him less inclined to badmouth me to a friend, in-law, co-worker, ex-lover, lover, etc., then that's good. But based on my own experience in IC, it is often divorce-leaning.

This is why the less pressure you put on him, the better.

The weight of the world was already on his shoulders when I met him. I remember telling family members, when I first started dating him, that I wasn't sure I wanted to get too involved because I was intimidated by his being so dang busy and tired all the time, burning the candle at both ends. Our marriage is a potted plant that has been placed in the cupboard until it is convenient for him to nurture it. It has never been convenient. Other people and other things, even hobbies of his, have always taken priority. Another issue is that he has ADHD, but he is high-functioning.

Avoid this like the plague. Nothing complicates a R with someone than introducing a new person into it. If your MR ends in D, there will be plenty of time for this later.

It's not that I want a new person. I just want to be loved and desired by my husband. However, the boost in mood and energy that I got just from an anonymous man saying witty flirty things to me in Twitter DMs - it astounded me. It made me cheerfully scrub the kitchen floor, which my husband found curious and delightful. But he still didn't desire me.

There have been a couple instances of inappropriate texting between H and other women that I know of. He has never apologized for that - his take is that I drove him to it. He had a prior sexual relationship with one of those women, but they supposedly stopped having sex before we started dating.

I told the anonymous man that I thought his wife would take issue with the flirting, and that broke the spell. I didn't outright tell him to stop, but he got the message, and he stopped. I liked hearing from him. But I didn't want to offend his wife.

[1hedlite]

Tom,

Your husband has anger issues and lots of others, too. Especially if he blames you coming and going. Are you certain that he doesn't have good reason for his anger? Did you stray from the marriage in the past? Does he resent the fact that you had prior lovers before marriage? Have you flaunted such?

I agree that he has anger issues and lots of others, as do I. I don't proclaim that he doesn't have good reason for his anger - he may or may not have good reason. No, I did not stray, and I don't think he resents that I had lovers prior to him. He is the only man I've ever had sexual intercourse with. He was my first and only real relationship. He, on the other hand, had countless women before me and kind of has flaunted such. This is the first marriage for both, and our child is the only child for both.

I find this deeply disturbing. He is projecting on you his own inadequacy. He is refusing to have sex, and blaming you that he isn't interested? It's good that he is in IC, he needs it.

Yes, he is blaming me. He has a pattern of blaming me even for things that objectively aren't my fault. But I'm not necessarily saying he's wrong about the issue being a failure on my part to seduce him. I am failing to seduce him - that's a fact.

I wonder if there isn't more going on here than meets the eye. Sometimes childhood sexual abuse, or date rape, can lead to huge sexual issues. Only you would know if such is the case. Not that it happened to your husband, but if an older man or woman abused him as a child, this could lead to major-league feelings of anger and inadequacy. Or maybe he has mother issues that are unresolved; especially if he thought his mother might be sexually loose or slutty after an affair or a separation/divorce from his father.

There absolutely is more to the story, so much more, known or unknown to me. I plan to say more about what I know, to add context. It just takes a lot for me to collect my thoughts. I don't know about childhood sexual abuse or mother issues. His parents had been married for more than 50 years when his father died. His mother didn't even drive a car.

You may be onto something about mother issues, though, I don't know. My husband was extremely close to his mother, who passed away a few years ago. I was in the hospital giving birth to our child when she was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia, and she went downhill, passing away 7 months later. He was in his 20s when he had his first girlfriend, the one he lost his virginity to, and she was old enough to be his mother. He tended to date women his age or significantly older than him, women with multiple children who were done with childbearing. He is older than me by a decade.

Sometime back, I saw on his computer that he had attempted to download a video from a cougar porn site many years ago when we were just dating. It was a failed attempt, like a partially downloaded video that wouldn't play, and the source was a cougar porn site. But I also saw other failed attempts to download videos from other kinds of porn sites. So, I don't know.

As for what you suggest I do, I guess the key is "Without complaining or expecting to be acknowledged for it." Every so often, I immerse myself in doing what you suggest, except I attach it to whether I get any sex from my husband as a result. Occupying myself with the things you mentioned, my mood is lifted. Sometimes (not always), my husband is then delighted and curious to know what's up. But then a month passes with still no sex, and I get sour again.

Yes, he seems to like the MTM kisses. If I can achieve the "Without complaining or expecting to be acknowledged for it" part, then doing what you suggest would at least be good for occupying myself and lifting my mood. But as for "melting down his exterior," I don't know.

[1hedlite]

When H and I started dating, there were unfortunate things that set the stage for the rest of our relationship. I know none of that matters in terms of DB. Most of this post doesn't matter in terms of DB and is just me journaling. But this is some backstory on my situation, and it pertains to DB insofar as it's stuff I have to let go. Things have never really been good. What respect I had for him was eroded very early on, leading to resentment and anger on my part that sent us spiraling further. We should have nipped it in the bud, but instead, we stayed together and got married (first marriage for both, and our child is the only child for both).

He's never apologized for anything, and I've never gotten over anything. Part of my problem is I want an apology that will never come. The price of admission for continuing to be in this marriage and live in the same home as our child every day, as long as admission is available to me, requires that I stop wanting what I can't have. Or at least accept that I can't have it. I don't think I can ever truly have the intimacy and closeness I want with a man who can't own up to hurting me. I am willing to give that up in order to live in the same home as my child every day.

I would love to be able to look up to H, with respect and admiration, rely on him as a protector of me and our family. That's what I've always wanted. That's my ideal. But if I'm honest, I don't think I can have it. He's gossiped about me, offered up personal details of my life and our relationship for others (friends, my in-laws, etc.) to dissect, people-pleased at my expense, and failed to have my back, far too much. I have to say, that doesn't strike me as manly and doesn't inspire respect in me.

But there's an article Michele wrote where she begins by talking about how you can't make a cow sing, and it applies here. I mentioned earlier that when I'm able to look upon H in a motherly compassionate fashion, it seems to help me get along with him, and there might be something to that. He was the apple of his late mother's eye, just as our toddler is the apple of mine. But I never wanted to be H's mother. And I wonder if I'll ever have sex again.

H is the only man I've ever had sexual intercourse with. I was 33 when we started, about 6 months after we started dating. He was 43 and had many "varied" sexual experiences with many women before me. He is good-looking, and female attention comes easy. He was my first real relationship. Out of a combination of me being extremely introverted and shy, socially anxious and awkward, traumatic childhood experiences, bad experiences with men who didn't exactly have my best interest at heart, and wanting to adhere to Catholic precepts on sexuality, that's how it played out for me. But I was always into erotic movies and books - that was my "safe sex."

H has a reputation for being a warm, nurturing, compassionate man, an image bolstered by being a medical professional. He just has this air of someone you can talk to. All manner of folks feel comfortable and free to unload on him their thoughts and feelings about politics and religion and all sorts of personal things. It's funny sometimes in a "Why on earth would someone tell him that?" kind of way. It's hard for me to talk to people, and what drew me to him was I could talk to him, I could confide in him. This man will guard my heart, I thought. We also both experienced being bullied and depression growing up, and we bonded over talking about those experiences. He got bullied a lot worse than I did in his youth, kids beating him with chains and stuff like that.

About 3 months after seeing each other took a romantic turn (we had been acquaintances for a few years, having a mutual circle of friends, before we ever really had a conversation beyond saying hello and goodbye), I was happy with how things were going. I thought he was too. But we were having dinner at his house (now the house we live in), and he suddenly confronted me about the fact that we hadn't had intercourse yet and that he was unhappy about it. He was suddenly agitated and aggressive. This was completely out of character as I knew him.

He had this male friend at the time, and he said this friend had assumed I was "taking care of" (having intercourse with) him and was very disappointed to find out I hadn't been. "He thought you were taking care of me," he whined, a pouty hangdog expression on his face, as if we had to answer to his friend as some kind of authority on our relationship. Now, though we weren't having intercourse, we had been messing around, and he scoffed at what we had been doing like it was something ridiculous and juvenile. I had no idea he felt this way. Using words and gestures, he derided it, said he wasn't used to it. This was our first fight, and it lasted hours into the night. It was 10 years ago, and I still remember it vividly.

As a man, he needs sex, he said, vigorous sex. Not the fluff we'd been doing. He told me I needed to come up with a "game plan" and soon because he was losing interest. He suggested I buy a set of probes of increasing size on the Internet that were made to address the issue medically (I did not end up doing that). He went down the list of ways I didn't measure up to his ex-girlfriends, ways he wished I did, and not just sexually. (Yet somehow, I'm the one he would eventually marry.) Towards the end of the night, I think he felt a little bad about how upset I was because he tried to pin it on his friend, said confronting me was his friend's idea.

I'm an extremely private person, and the fact that he was telling his friend - someone I had to face - about the intimate details of our relationship...was extremely mortifying and hurtful to me, let alone the humiliating rest of it. But at 33, I felt flawed for my inexperience, like I was in the wrong, as he was saying. I thought maybe that's just what men do - they talk to each other about their sexual exploits or lack thereof, and this man whom I had thought would guard my heart was no exception after all.

In time, I would realize I couldn't view such a gossipy man as a strong man, and I wanted so much to view him as a strong man. All of a sudden, he was saying things and acting in ways I never suspected he would towards me, and I thought if he of all people couldn't be patient with me, no man could. I thought maybe it was unfair of me to expect a 43-year-old bachelor, accustomed to women having sex with him right away, to hold out.

It wasn't that I was uninterested in sex. I think I'm actually a very sexual person. I just needed a little more romance, a little more warmth and comfort - it takes a lot for me to really get close to anyone, and 3 months into dating, I thought we were getting there, but I still wasn't quite ready. When I was single, I was accustomed to being celibate and relatively content with it. I think when you're single, it's not that big a deal. But in the present day, being married and condemned to celibacy by my husband is something I can't wrap my head around. We have gone without sex for almost 2 years in our marriage, and I'm supposed to accept that I'm starving, yet it was completely unacceptable to him to refrain from intercourse in our first 3 months of dating.

And his friend was disappointed that I wasn't "taking care of" him. He couldn't bear to disappoint his friend. You know that "honeymoon period" that typically starts off a relationship? I was looking forward to blossoming and growing with him, being accepted and embraced for who I am by him. That process of a relationship organically and sweetly unfolding was completely stunted 3 months in, once he put me in a position where I was like "Oh, your friend is disappointed! And you're losing interest! Well, then I better hop to it! Probes, you say?!" Thus ended our honeymoon period, which really wasn't much of one.

It's a little weird how his friend factored into this, no? H has always had a tendency to invoke third parties in our relationship. That's what killed us before we could even get off the ground. That's been very distressing. The thing about H is he's a pathological people-pleaser, desperate for validation from others. Where normally a man would prioritize protecting and defending his wife (or girlfriend), he will throw me and our marriage under the bus in order to please or appease others. He hates to say no to people, disappoint them or hurt their feelings, and then I find myself in stressful needless situations I never asked for.

(Like that one time we hosted a complimentary wine tasting and wedding shower for strangers in our home, a couple years after we were married. That was hard for me, considering my own troubled nuptial state, and not something I've ever even done for someone I know and love. But H agreed to do it for strangers without asking me first. I think that was the only time people with tattooed faces have ever been in our home, not that there's anything inherently wrong with that. I have many tattooed family members myself, but not in the face. It was like a dark comedy. I think it took a long time for H to realize that even though our home was his alone first, maybe I'm supposed to have a say in what goes on in it. )

H is extremely soft and unassertive when it comes to people other than myself. Outside of our marriage, he is the nicest guy ever, widely recognized as such, eager to please and non-confrontational and won’t argue. That has been very problematic for our marriage, especially when his family (my in-laws) would overstep the bounds.

When it comes to fighting me, though, he’s so very brave. He will fly into a rage rather than admit fault for things that are clearly his fault. He will pull off contortions in logic that make it all my fault. He only blame-shifts with me. When I call him out on his mistakes, he will fight me until he’s saying crazy things and acting crazy and making me crazy for hours. It's like he has this image of being good and nice and capable and competent, and he can't stand anything that deviates from that image if I'm the one pointing it out.

But if, say, a friend called him out on the exact same thing, he would readily agree with them. He'll admit fault or take the blame if they want him to, he'll say and do anything they want so they will like him. He has to please and appease and be liked by others at all costs, even if it means he says “My bad” when in fact he is not in the wrong. Even if it means negatively impacting me and our marriage.

He would continue to name-drop the friend in a "My friend disapproves of you" manner until after we were married. Ultimately, he told me in an "I should have listened to my friend" manner that the friend absolutely hated my guts and had tried to get him to break up with me, warned him that I had a "darkness" about me and told him not to marry me. That explained so much about the friend's cold demeanor towards me when we'd hang out with him and his wife, his rude comments alluding to my history of depression, which H had apparently been discussing with him. I had always attributed the friend's demeanor towards me to his bipolar disorder, but apparently it wasn't just that - he also really despised me, based largely on H badmouthing me to him.

Before we were married, H went on a trip overseas with his friend for a week, and before he left, he told me I would hear from him once he got there. I didn't hear from him the whole time he was away. That was confusing. When he got back, he said his friend wouldn't allow him to call me and blamed it on the friend's bipolar, said his friend was flipping out with rage the whole time. H has never held his friend's bipolar against him - he's had a lot of compassion for him having an illness. Sometime after we were married, they booked a flight to go on a fishing expedition, and H didn't tell me until the night before the flight, quite some time after they booked it. I was hurt that H didn't think he owed it to me to talk to me about booking a flight for a trip without me before doing so.

H has had a tendency to glom onto certain people, yearning for their approval, often not very nice people. The friend would call his wife a b*tch and scream and throw shoes at his dogs in front of their guests if the guests were people he didn't respect (e.g., H and myself), that kind of guy. It would just roll off his wife's back, though - she didn't seem to mind. I get really uncomfortable around people like that. The friend was unable to hold a job due to his bipolar being not under control, and smoking marijuana was his way of managing it. His wife, a medical professional same as H (she and H met at work, and that's how H met her husband) and college professor, was the breadwinner. He and H both had artistic sensibilities, a great love of the outdoors, cooking, growing vegetables and that sort of thing. But I don't understand why H held him in such high regard, looked up to him as an authority on us. It still disgusts me.

Yesterday, we received a Christmas card in the mail that the wife had written, and it only mentioned the names of H and our child. Something about that really upsets me, something about including my child's name while omitting mine. If they had addressed H alone, it would have bothered me less. I started shaking when I saw that. I've been agitated all day because of it. I threw the card out. H doesn't know about it. I was going to show it to him and talk to him about how it upsets me, but I decided against it. I would have wanted some kind of understanding of my feelings about it from my husband and to be comforted by him, but that's probably not what I would have gotten. He probably would have gotten defensive and told me I deserve it. It would have been the kind of "relationship talk" that would be no good for us right now. It took some effort to not say anything about it and not look sour when he got home from work yesterday, and I think he may have picked up on it, but not too much.

I mean, what was her goal there in leaving my name out and knowing I would see that? But people treat me like this, like I shouldn't matter, because H has invited them to do so. That's where my focus goes instead of our friends who actually seem to like me and are nice to me. My God, we got 3 other Christmas cards from friends in the mail yesterday, and they do acknowledge me, but of course I'm focusing on the one that didn't.

Anyway, it wasn't until about 3 months after H (my boyfriend at the time) confronted me about the lack of penetrative sex that we started having it. I went through some physical pain that was an obstacle leading up to that point, and also a little while afterwards, but I started to enjoy it eventually, even prefer it. It was a hurdle I was glad to overcome, but almost as soon as it started happening, I glimpsed an odd text message on his phone. What struck me as odd was the word "sex" in it. Later, I picked up his phone behind his back and saw that the text said "No sex really s*cks" and was sent from a woman. It seemed to me that she was commiserating with him over us having "no sex." I had no idea who she was. He had never mentioned her to me before.

I went down the rabbit hole of snooping. I found out that they had met on Match dot com and dated briefly just before he started dating me. They were already having sex by the second date. But they supposedly were just really good friends now, by his decision. She even invited him to bring me to her family picnic at the park. She liked to remind him that she was his friend and that she was always there for him. She was awfully flirty, though. She clearly wanted him as more than a friend.

And she seemed to know everything about me. She would refer to things I said to him that were supposed to be just between me and him. She would talk about me like I was some kind of frigid b*tchy weirdo - there was kind of a mocking tone. Eventually, she texted him, "Is she having sex with you yet?" He replied yes, which I don't think was the reply she was expecting. I hated that she felt so comfortable just asking him that question, and he replied to her like it was really any of her business. But I was hoping his affirmative reply would at least make her back off. My feeling was that she thought she still had a chance at a serious romantic relationship with him as long as we weren't having sex. But she didn't back off.

I didn't want to be that girlfriend, the kind to snoop. But that's what I turned out to be. And I didn't want to be the kind of girlfriend to demand he cut contact with a "friend." I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for him to do it on his own. The hope was that he would realize their interactions were no good for us and naturally distance himself from her. I continued secretly monitoring his phone contact with her. The texts continued, and they would spend hours at a time on calls. It just kept on going. She kept alluding to things that were supposed to be private between us, yet I wasn't even supposed to know she existed.

I think I waited until 6 months after finding out about her to confront him about her. Then he made it all about me invading his privacy and was angry about that. (He never acknowledged any invasion of my privacy.) He deleted all their texts so I couldn't look at them anymore. He told me he wasn't interested in a romantic relationship with her, but he justified their interactions by saying that unlike me, she was "so loving," a "jolly woman," full of compliments for him and interest in him. That's his take to this day. They seemed to cease contact sometime after I confronted him about her, but not immediately. He didn't want to be impolite to her, and he didn't know how to cut ties with her without being impolite. She continued texting him for a while, and he would delete her texts before I could read them.

I never got over that whole thing, which wreaked havoc on our relationship for years. It is still a trigger for me. Everything I'm talking about in this post is. In the first couple years of our marriage, he was still telling me things like "My ex-girlfriends were never like you" (meaning he traded down with me) in frustration.

Another instance of inappropriate texting with a woman, a co-worker of his, would come to my attention in 2016, when I saw a text to the effect of "I miss you" with heart/kiss emojis flash on his phone. I didn't see what they had between them on his phone beyond that - he wouldn't let me. But when I questioned him about it, he gave me the impression that it was far less involved than the prior instance. I asked him if they were screwing, and he said it was nothing like that. He said she was a co-worker who had a crush on him. His justification for letting it get to the point where she was sending him texts like the one I glimpsed was basically the same as before - unlike me, she was fawning, complimentary, cared about him and his life, cared about his mother. I remember how he said "She cares about my mother" (the timbre of his voice and everything) and finding it odd, considering she never met his mother, yet it made me feel bad that I was never close with his mother, who was 92 at the time and had dementia. Once again, he made it my fault.

Painful sex would become an issue for me again within a couple years after we were married (we were married in 2014), namely when ED became an issue, and he would rush things for fear of losing his erection. Rushing things tended to result in pain for me.

In 2016, a series of events pertaining to my in-laws (his older siblings and nieces, who are only slightly younger than me) taking liberties in our home and on the property, and his inability to stand up to them on my behalf - he threw me under the bus - made divorce seem like the next logical step, the most sensible thing from a logical standpoint. Things had never been good, but we really took a downturn with what happened with my in-laws in 2016. But I still abhorred the idea of divorce to my core, which led me to Michele's DR book and this message board that year. The following year, I happened to get pregnant.