"That is where I am in so many ways. The company I work for is going under, my businesses are not able to support us so I am looking for work. Most likely, we will have to leave Colorado to find a new job. Add that on top of everything else!"
NTE, I can understand how that may all seem overwhelming. One thing that I have personally made peace with in my own mind and that has helped me a tremendous amount, is that ... life changes. All the time. Every single person and thing in your life right now - good or bad - is changing, and one day will have crumbled into nothing altogether (depending on your religious beliefs it may be different for the soul!). Life itself constantly changes and struggling against that inevitable fact is a waste of your time and energy. Instead of fighting against the current, start learning to swim strongly with it - carve new possibilities out of the changes that will inevitably come your way. For all you know, leaving Colorado may turn out to be the best thing that's ever happened to you. So start looking at the positives of this kind of move. I said in a previous post that one of the defining characteristics of a man is a relentless optimism for the future. Cultivate that way of thinking, it will serve you well whatever happens.
"Your thoughts about making a choice, trying and trying again are very encouraging! I have always hated to make mistakes. That is something I am working on for myself and my kids."
Yes, the fear of failure and/or change - usually masked with defensiveness and/or perfectionism - plagues nice guys and cripples them from fulfilling their true physical, economic and spiritual potential. Stop playing it safe and start looking at life as a succession of risk/opportunity-type events. Every hour of every day is an opportunity for you to be and act the best man that you already are. Don't let fear and resentment prevent you from doing the right thing.
"Couldn't do it. The thought of kissing her like that just felt kind of disgusting. Not really sure what that means..."
NTE, I find this very significant - you are displeased at the lack of sex in your marriage, but find the thought of a single passionate kiss "disgusting". I think you very much need to find out what "that means".
"When we are young girls, we fantasize about the beautiful hero taking us in his arms and giving us a passionate kiss."
DQ (and NTE), Quite so. I think a lot of problems in marriage (and in life generally) can be traced back to what we picked up as children and our resulting expectations. I suppose its inevitable. I'm no great fan of Fairy Tales, because they all assume that there was indeed a "Happily Ever After", whereas it seems to me that the personal struggles of the Prince and Princess were only just beginning!
All that said though, as a man I do find the concept of heroism and the heroic mindset to be a very intriguing and valuable one. I now make a point of thinking of all my problems from a heroic perspective i.e. how can I deal with this to the very best of my ability and displaying the utmost cheerfulness? For average Western men (such as me) in SSMs with financial and child-rearing responsibilities, this is a difficult mindset to adopt, because we have all been led (through the messages we have picked up from childhood, adolescence, the media etc) to expect some kind of reward for everything that we do i.e for being a "good husband" - regular sex.
The difficulties are then as follows: (1) averagely balanced and healthy women do find heroes attractive, but (2) heroes never expect a reward (look at history), hence (3) the average man struggles to be heroic and give his best in life, because he is constantly niggled by the past lack of reward, resentment and the fear of "but what if she doesn't even notice, still doesn't want to have sex" etc, also (4) the woman senses the man's inner conflict and finds it unattractive, or even (5) the woman has become accustomed to living like this, has lost touch with her own inner femininity, is just focussed on herself and/or "the children" etc.
So yes, the heroic concept does require a man to ditch a whole lot of baggage - perhaps many years' worth. But I have done that myself. It was a continuous process of 18 months and counting. It has affected every single area of my life - some dramatically, others less so.
Did my wife react? Yes. Was it exactly the way I would previously have "expected". No. Did it result in an endless supply of sex? No. Did it nonetheless lead to me feeling a better, stronger, more productive and happier man? Absolutely. Did my marriage improve? Yes. Did our sex life nonetheless improve? Yes, and there were also more subtle changes - its difficult to put into words, but when a man is truly living in the outside world, he brings that strength and sense of purpose home with him. His wife's moods bother him less - he just pushes through them. Rejections bother him far less. He gets on far better with his children. His wife notices all of this, she starts to relax, and her own natural femininity and radiance start to show - a lot of what deida said about this is spot on. Its a woman's grace and radiance that a man most wants to experience with his wife - an emotional and spiritual "opening up". Sex is one important way in, but its not the only one. Once I was no longer fixated about sex or a lack of it, I started to notice all of these other ways. Even without these changes in my marriage, would I now ever go back to thinking and living as the man I was before? Absolutely not - it would be like living only half a life.
So NTE, do not allow your wife or your past to drag you down. Rise above it. Develop your mind as a heroic/masculine tool and get it stuck into all of your problems. You owe it to yourself.
S&A
"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.
I have been thinking about why the kiss would be "disgusting". I don't know if the no sex thing has gone on long enough that we are drifting into the "incest syndrom" deal. But last night, as I was thinking about where and when, it just felt too wierd. I really can't see touching here or engaging that way any more.
This feels different than the whole fear of rejection deal. She is still not sending any signals that she wants any more either, but maybe I have driven myself so far from her and from desiring her that I have killed that in me for her.
Well NTE - I can't say I am surprised. Yes, you have probably "killed" all the attraction you once had for your wife, and now even the thought of a kiss is discusting.
Where do you go from there?
And S&A....I wanted to follow up on something. I knew that my little thing about the little girl's imagined kiss would strike up something...please let me back up on and expand on that, ok?
It is not the hero she is fantasizing about, it is the KISS. It is the way it will make her FEEL that she fantasizes. And I mean feel with her BODY, not her emotions. Contrary to what seems obvious, the man in the fantasy can be any man. He does not have to be a hero. He is ONLY a hero because he is the man who is giving her that FEELING! Because he gave her that feeling, he is her hero.
A young woman's body doesn't get aroused in the same way a young man's does. She doesn't have a penis that will become erect at the mere glance of a naked body, or the mere thought of one. Instead, she has this place inside of her - it feels like it is in your tummy - and that place gets "stirred" by different things, thoughts, touches. After sufficient stirring goes on in the tummy, then that feeling gets transferred to her genitals. The most basic beginning stirring comes from the IMAGINED deep passionate kiss. When a young girl imagines this kiss, she feels the stir in her tummy, and if it continues long enough, eventually the stir awakens her genitals and she will begin to want to "hump" (her hips will want to move on their own accord). This is the beginning of her body figuring out how to have sex. The hero himself is irrelavant!
So when I was telling NTE about the kiss, I wanted him to realize (and any other men reading) that this kiss is the gateway to her raw sexual desire. The man is less important - in the young girl's fantasy. In fact, he can be a sweaty farm worker in a young girl's fantasy as easy as some hero. Yes, the movies do give us those hero images, but you must realize that the human body isn't that picky about heroism. The body wants the experience of sex. The emotions - as S&A is saying in his lovely post above - are something that adults figure out over time, and yes the emotions involved with sex are far superior to the physical feelings. But we start with the physical as children. And since this deep passionate kiss is nearly every woman's very first type of sexual fantasy, the one that stirs her body, it is this kiss that every man should learn to understand and master.
I will not argue with anything you've said S&A, regarding how we are all kind of duped into thinking we are "supposed" to follow a certain type of happy fairy tale ending. This is all true and very skewed. But the kiss....this is timeless, it has nothing to do with the fairy tale. The kiss in itself is a sexual experience to a young woman, even an imagined one. Hero or bad boy or boy next door or whoever he may be. The kiss stands alone, above and beyond the other person involved. The young woman's body knows that she wants to move toward that sexual experience and it will drive her there - through her imagination first.
NTE - back to you - please think over your feelings on this. It seems pretty dismal to me. I really don't understand why you would want to stick it out and remain married if you feel this way. I do not advocate divorce...I want you to be able to fix this. But without that passion....well, how could it be worth it? I know that after I got separated from my husband, even though he had never been a great lover OR kisser, I still WANTED to kiss him. I still wanted to be passionate with him and was willing to figure out how. In other words, if I hadn't felt even enough passion for one kiss with him, I would have thrown in the towel much sooner.
And one other thing...please reflect upon your own thougths about this type of deep passionate kiss with ANOTHER woman...and test yourself to see if you feel the desire to kiss ANYONE like that? I am saying this because there might be a mental block within you that is just trying to protect yourself by not allowing any intimacy into your mind.
Thanks for this lively discussion, guys. Not that it is a happy subject for NTE but - hopefully it is helping him think some things through.
Dance, Great post. I can easily imagine myself kissing another woman. That is one of the problems, I have no problem being attracted to many of the women I see around me who are beautiful in my eyes. It is that I don't feel much towards my wife any more.
Two things I would like to throw out here: 1) My wife has never liked to kiss, at least not me. Our first kiss was at the wedding - her idea. I can't really remember the last time we kissed during sex. Remember - this is HER thing, not mine. I used to love to kiss with previous girlfriends. The thought still drives me crazy, even now... I don't know how to put this in my wife's context. To that end, attempting a kiss probably has a higher chance of rejection than asking for sex! 2) It looks as though my self defense mechanism is stronger than I thought. Here I can now be in a room with a good looking naked woman and only look her in the eye! Do you have any idea how unnatural this is? How many guys look you in the eye when you are fully dressed?
Well NTE - I think you have your answer then, at least as far as your own inner passion, that it hasn't died, that it is there for other women. For your wife, yeah, it has died.
Do you WANT and desire to make it come alive again? If you do, there is hope if you want to put in the hard work. If you don't, then please just start working your way toward an ending. The one thing I learned from my divorce is that sooner is better. I stuck it out for 17 years, all that time just hoping and wishing for it it get better, but of course, I was not willing to do the hard work. So I wish I could go back and do the hard work sooner, get my answer as to if it would have worked or not, and then throw in the towel sooner if it wasn't going to work. All those 17 years I kidded myself into thinking I was doing the right thing for the children. That was not the case. In reality, I was just too lazy to work hard. But what a price I paid for that laziness.
As for your #2 above....now you know how women with no desire for their husbands feel, too. It is that same "dead" feeling. And yes it feels unnatural, but it is perfectly natural in your situation.
Well she may not have ever experienced good kisses or good sex in her life. Not saying this reflects on you, but on her own experience. If something in her mind is blocking her from being open to the experience - and this is true for many men and women too - then she may not ever get there...
But I want to say something that might be a little shocking and I am not sure how to put it...but many times with a woman like this (not saying your wife, but just any woman who has blocked herself from sexual intimacy), many times when the right circumstances come along, usually in the form of being seduced, she will find herself being opened up whether she wanted to or not. In my own experience, I didn't want sex with my husband but I was able to be seduced by other men. NOW and only now, I understand this is because I had put emotional blocks upon my husband's image in my mind and I refused to sexually respond to him. But at the time, I thought there was something wrong with my body.
So...my guess is that there IS some way, and some person (hopefully you), that CAN turn your wife's motor on. She has to be open to it just a teeny tiny bit at least. And she may not consciously be able to be open to it with you.
But the fact that it IS inside of her somewhere is probably true. She may have no idea how capable she is of extreme sexual intimacy because she has closed herself off to it. But it is probably hiding in there somewhere.
Therefore, you are going to have a big task in front of you in order to drag that passion out of her...but some other man may not have to try so hard. She will not have placed all the blocks on some other man the way she has upon you.
Please don't let that discourage you. It is actually the SAME thing that you are describing about how you still can imagine that passionate kiss with another woman but not your wife. Look within, I think the answer is the same for both of you.
How to fix it? Well I will go back to my original posts to you and tell you that a good counselor is probably the only way to get the ball rolling. But earlier you just said that she refused to go and that left your hands tied. If you still feel that way, then I can't see much hope.
But if you want to take a chance on fixing this, I would demand counseling with her and tell her if it doesn't work you will work toward divorce. You will find out really fast if she is in or out.
Just to follow up on Dance's excellent posts with a thought. This is based upon yet another book I've been going through, Michael J. Bader's Arousal, so simply consider this a bit of speculation on my part.
According to his theory of sexual arousal, each of us has what I will call a 'sexual archetype,' a particular type of person to whom we are naturally sexually attracted and can detect relatively quickly on an unconscious level. This the kind of stuff that "love at first sight" is made of. It may be a look, an attitude, a smell, a voice, or some combination thereof, but something tells us that this person is a close match to the person in our own sexual fantasies --> someone who naturally turns us on.
There are, of course, problems with this. Often, a person who comes close to being our sexual archetype is NOT the kind of person with whom we could have a successful, loving, long-term relationship. For example, many women fantasize about a strong, sexually ruthless man who will simply 'take them,' using them for his own sexual pleasure and without much regard for theirs. This type of arrogant, ruthless man may make for a great one-night stand, but is probably not good 'husband' material. So when it comes to finding a mate and getting married, many of these women tend to settle for someone who is not their natural sexual archetype, but who does make a good husband. The problem, of course, is that although they may have found a good, caring man, there isn't any great sexual 'spark' or chemistry there for him.
I thought about this in your case because you one mentioned that:
"When we first married, she was a bit more adventurous. Remember, she had much more experience and knew what she liked. She was a real wild child as a teenager and young adult."
But with YOU, she never even kissed you before your wedding day, and the sexual problems between the two of you commenced immediately thereafter. This indicates to me that in the case of your wife, she "settled" for a good man, but one who didn't really turn her on, and she knew it well before the wedding.
Now, if this is the case, is all hope lost? ABSOLUTELY NOT. But to overcome this situation requires counseling, counseling, counseling from a good sex therapist. You'll both need to dig into your own sexual fantasies and preferences, find what really "trips your trigger" (and why), and then look for areas of overlap between the two of you. It may mean shifting your sexual behavior towards your partner, and stretching your own envelope a bit to find those areas of accommodation. But it can be done.
And, yes, this is part of what my own wife and I are going through at the moment. I can report that, even in these early stages for us, it works. Just find a good therapist whom BOTH of you can trust.
As DanceQueen has been saying, I think a kiss, a real passionate kiss, is more intimate for many women than sex. For example, many prostitutes will do the 'old in-out' with a stranger, but won't kiss them. So, to wax poetic, a passionate kiss is the meeting of two souls, not genitals. I know what it's like to have a wife who is reluctant to kiss deeply, and it has a lot to do with either a fear of intimacy, some problem in the relationship, a lack of a natural 'spark,' or some combination thereof. But it CAN be worked through, with time, patience, and love.
Best regards,
Bagheera
Me 50, W 45, M for 26 yrs S25, D23, S13, S10 20+ year SSM; recovery began Oct 2007
Bagheera, Wow! What an interesting thought, and also a bit of a humiliating one. I realize I am looking at that incorrectly, but still, "I'll settle for you" is sure an ego booster. I don't know about other men, but I really have the need to feel that my wife is attracted to me sexually.
Maybe that is part of my problem. When I was younger and MUCH more arrogant my brother and I used to have a joke when we caught women looking at us. "She wants me, they all do" Maybe I should go back to that attitude!
I just got my "stimulas check" in the mail. Maybe instead of paying bills, I should use a portion for counseling. That means I get to talk with the wife again about whether or not she will go. Maybe I can get the fight over before the weekend since we have company comeing in.
Update: I still could not manage the kiss last night, and things were a little out of sorts anyway as I came home to find out my oldest was having a sleep over. I need to remember school is out and sleepovers can happen in the middle of the week...
Anyway, when we finally did get to bed, I thought I would try a little non sexual snuggling. Out of the blue, the wife goes "should have started that a little sooner. It's a little too late now". Instead of getting upset, (I wasn't trying anything, it WAS too late, but those words just piss me off now) I just took her at her word and did not get upset. This morning, I decided to try something different. After I got out of the shower (I am a very early riser, 2+ hours before the rest of the house) I decided to see if I could initiate a "joyful wakeup". At first the wife started talking about how she didn't sleep well the night before, which has always been a very common excuse. Again, I decided not to get upset and just suggested we snuggle for a few minutes as I was ahead of schedule. After a couple of minutes, she suggested we let one thing lead to another and it did!
