The theme from Cheers was running through my mind as I was thinking about posting here again this morning. I see you guys as a line of bartenders upon whom I am once again going to vent my current batch of marital woes.
Actually things have been pretty good overall. I learned an important thing about myself, my sexuality since I last posted. Due to our recent twice-a-week scheduled sex arrangement, my H and I had definitely the longest running period of actually having sex approximately twice-a-week in the history of our almost 19 year marriage. The thing that I learned about myself is that (who'd of thunk ) if I actually do get laid about twice a week,I'm good. I feel very little urge to have more sex or MB, I don't fantasize much or even think much about sex. It becomes a non-issue. So, this makes me happy because it makes me feel more normal.
So my current problem has to do with the fact that the twice-a-week schedule didn't stick. My H stopped "showing up" on Wednesdays though he did keep up with the weekend commitment. (I should add here that both of us have been striving to be good partners otherwise in our marriage so contributing issues are not in play.). Here is what I think was my contribution to the problem. I think I am stuck between the desire to maintain the illusion/delusion that my H actually wants to have sex with me and the desire to actually have what is a satisfactory amount of sex for me. So the first few weeks my H didn't show up on Wednesday, I made excuses for him in my own mind. Instead of saying to myself "He doesn't want to have sex with you.", I told myself "We had a busy day there wasn't enough time for sex." or "He's just kind of stressed about his work situation." etc.. Anyway, this Wednesday there was really no good reason we couldn't have gotten together. Neither of us had work or social commitments and no new and/or unusual stressors were at play. But right from the get-go my H was in crabby-funk mode. Here is the weird thing- back in the "bad old days" I would have immediately assumed that this was his way of indicating that he had "a headache" and no sex would be forthcoming but things have been good enough lately that I had built up a sort of vat of good will towards him that allowed me to believe that he was just in a bad mood for some reason that didn't have to do with sex. So, I didn't react in any sort of bad way. Just indicated that I was sorry he was feeling funky and went about my business the rest of the day.
Wednesday evening my H had a few beers and he approached me and indicated that he wanted to talk about something privately. He said " I just wanted to let you know that I am aware of the fact that I haven't been meeting our schedule on Wednesdays.". I had two responses to this statement. On the one hand, I recognized that my H was making an effort to accept responsibility for his behavior and that he was doing this because he values our relationship so my first response was to say "Well, we have been pretty busy.". My H responded to this with "Well, we weren't busy today.". Now, I know that he was only trying to take full responsibility for "not showing up" by saying this but my emotional reaction to this statement was to burst into tears because I heard it as "There was no good reason for me to not have sex with you today except for the fact that I just didn't/don't want to have sex with you.".
So, there you have it, just call me CeMar-female version I'm sure I deserve it, but I can't help it, I want to be wanted/desired sexually by my H and I don't know how to keep myself from developing the romantic delusion that it might be a possibility. I feel like this is my problem and I'm not angry at all with my H, I think he is making an effort and if I was a better person I would just feel compassion for his struggle to feel desire, but I really feel like I don't want a LDH, perhaps mostly because I hate seeing myself in the role of the HDW.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Good to see you back and that things are going so much better. Go read my thread on adult attachment disorder and some of the links provided. I think you might find some answers to your issues, at least this theory is answering a lot of questions for me.
Hey Sista, I just returned here myself for a little venting. I think you and I have similar issues; it's hard on some level to accept that our sex lives require a lot of EFFORT on the part of our H's. They are being responsible, they're having some fun, there's more peace...but that confident, easy going desire is just not there to the degree we would like.
I was thinking that when I met my H he was endearing in a boyish kind of way, and I felt safe and in control. Unfortunately I probably became mommy-ized, which stifled my sexuality and his too. I really didn't choose the assertive alpha male type. So now I have to accept my H for who he is and appreciate that he is stepping up, even though it's not what would send me to the moon, if you know what I mean. I am trying to drop expectations and deal with reality.
It's funny that, like you, I still need an anonymous board to deal with all this, but this place has been internalized in my brain as a family of sorts.
I'd get you a drink, but I see you allready have your glass of whine. HAHAHAHA. Im kidding, I am sooo kidding. LMAO. How bout some cheese to go with that? HAHAHAHA <whew>
OK first I wanted to say thanks. For some reason thinking about your post and UD recent comments jogged a bunch of memories loose. I wont bore you with the details, just share the lightbulb.
You are too surrendered too your H. (I am only speaking to Mojo. ) I say this because of the fullness of the picture you have painted of your H and your sitch.
but things have been good enough lately that I had built up a sort of vat of good will towards him that allowed me to believe that he was just in a bad mood for some reason that didn't have to do with sex. So, I didn't react in any sort of bad way. Just indicated that I was sorry he was feeling funky and went about my business the rest of the day
Im gonna talk about this, towards the male perspective for a moment. Many men when they (finally!) receive sex --- they are so ecstatic about it that they are ready and willing to run around doing every little whim of the woman (diamond ring? massage? the world at your feet? thankyou thankyou thankyou for the sex whoo hooo!) That is not showing appreciation. Its giving more value then is appropriate. Its so far out of proportion to what really happened....
back to you, you did not stick to your boundary, of twice a week. You were afraid of his badmood, had good feelings from the previous good weeks, and general state of the M. Understood. Whatever his reason for doing it, your H shows a grump mood and your boundary disapperas. Thats not the mindset, nor the personality that got you to where you were.
Is the sex still good quality? Im guessing it is and suggesting the following.
ex.
mojo> you seem grumpy H> grunt mojo> yeah well its Wed, so-- Mr. grumpy, you better get in there and blank my blank...
I suggest this on the assumption that the throwdown and overall quality of your body bumping is still high.
He stuck to his part of the agreement for a few weeks. Did you meet him on the things he had requested?
I recognized that my H was making an effort to accept responsibility for his behavior and that he was doing this because he values our relationship very good. so my first response was to say "Well, we have been pretty busy.". why are you rescuing him? Dont make excuses for his actions, it undermines your boundary. My H responded to this with "Well, we weren't busy today.". Now, I know that he was only trying to take full responsibility for "not showing up" by saying this but my emotional reaction to this statement was to burst into tears
Do you see how my above suggestion is more along the lines of what he responds to? What he said was truthful. He/You werent busy. He chastised himself and you burst into tears. That would have bewildered me. Im curious what his reaction to your tears was.
I think he was testing you, and personally I want to give him a high five. Im not being indifferant to your frustration, but when you relate stories about your H, I almost always <chuckle> He is an azz. Lucky you.
Blackfoot has it right, you didn't stick to your boundary. When you failed to stick to it he lost some respect for you - losing respect = losing desire.
Read The Passion Trap - by Dean Delius. It will explain everything - promise.
(((Mojo)))
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
Hap- I still feel like I'm doing quite well. I don't even feel like my "burst into tears" was an example of not "holding onto myself". My new (perhaps self-serving) take on "differentiation" is that it's not a matter of keeping yourself in emotional check at all times but rather an ability to maintain or quickly revert to consistent behavior no matter what happens. Thus, after posting here on Friday, though I was not feeling very positive about my relationship, I quickly returned to my resolve of late which is that I want to feel good about myself in relationships even if the particular relationship is s*cking at the moment. I can be a good wife even if I'm not getting what I want from the relationship at the moment in the same way that I can be a good employee even if I'm not getting what I want from my job at the moment.
Quote: Blackfoot has it right, you didn't stick to your boundary. When you failed to stick to it he lost some respect for you - losing respect = losing desire.
I really don't think this was the case because I wasn't feeling afraid to confront my H about the lack of sex on Wednesdays (at least not consciously). I was actually kind of regretting setting such rigid boundaries because due to circumstances beyond our control Wednesdays have been very busy lately and though I am psychologically unwilling to accept the fact that my H simply doesn't want to have sex with me, I am willing to accept the fact that he is someone who needs a space of free time in which he can relax himself into sexuality. Really, there was some poor communication on my part. The first Wednesday that I looked at the calendar and saw that my H had a lunch date, my daughter had a concert and I had business commitments, I should have said something like "Hey, it looks like we're really busy today. Do you want to wait until the weekend to get together sexually?". I guess that I thought that I was communicating this in an indirect way that was why I was "shocked" into tears by my H's comments. It was like he was shoving me back into some wretched "HD wife" role when I wasn't even feeling or acting like a HD wife. I think the reason why I wasn't "feeling" like a HD wife was due to the fact that I realized that I am just fine with sex twice a week. I'm really not an insatiable sex addict or desperate for attention/affection which I seek through sex or whatever. I'm pretty normal or just high normal for a woman. My sex drive is probably just the equivalent of my height (5'9"). Tall, but not freakishly or even "stand out in the post office line" tall. So, by analogy, I was kind of feeling like the kind-of tall girl who is trying to be nice by pretending not to notice that the kind-of-short guy she is dancing with is wearing boots with heels in order to equalize their heights because she is otherwise enjoying his company as a dance partner. Then the guy comes up to her one evening and says "I wanted to tell you that I haven't been asking you to dance as much lately because I don't want to go to the trouble of putting on those boots.". Suddenly, I saw myself as "freakishly tall" from his POV even though I still knew that I was just a normal height. So my immediate reaction was a mix of hurt vanity and "Don't do me any favors.".
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Well, what happened next? You burst into tears and that was the end of the conversation?
I mean, he started the convo, he obviously was trying to tell you something...why didn't you let him finish? Are you unconsciously discouraging him from finishing his thought because you think you can't handle the answer? Or that you already know the answer?
I say let him speak. Now that the moment is over, you will have to approach him and say, Hey you were going to tell me what's up with you not showing up on Wednesdays and I had a little freakout and started crying--what were you going to say?
He'll reply that he was going to say nothing other than he was aware he was letting you down but that will be your opportunity to force him to come up with somethin different. Ask him to think about it and let you know why he thinks he's testing you.
He's so frigging rebellious that he will stop doing something that he *likes* just to prove that he can. Dumba$$.
Anyway, this is a bump on the road. You two are doing well; keep it up.
Quote: You are too surrendered too your H. (I am only speaking to Mojo. )
Yes and No. Remember, overall things are going quite well in my situation. My tears on Wednesday were really an aberration, signs of an old mood that I really haven't been in much lately. I would say that 90% of the time lately my H has been behaving like a man who is very much committed to his marriage. He has been doing many of the types of things you mentioned that a man might do for a woman to whom he was grateful for sex but he does those things because he wants to be married to me for reasons other than sex, I guess, though given his nature he will never be the "offer a massage" type guy. He has mostly been doing things along the line of "manly acts of service" which he knows that I would appreciate.
I think that lately I'm more "surrendered" to the notion of being a "wife" than I am "surrendered" to my H. It's kind of like I'm taking pride in the fact that if I were to participate in a "Wife Swap" type show, the guy that ended up at my house might never want to go home (LOL). I realized that there was somethig illogical and perverse about my thinking. Let's say I felt like I was unhappy in my marriage because my H was cranky and LD. When I asked him why he was cranky and LD he would tell me the reason was because I didn't dust enough and I didn't fix my hair attractively. Now it might be the case that I am an adequate duster and my hair is reasonably attractive, so my natural response would be to bounce the ball back into his court. But what if instead I were to ask myself "Am I capable of doing a better job of dusting and fixing my hair?". If I answer "No" what does that say about my own self-esteem? If I answer "Yes" then I need to think about the scenario in which I am married to a man who is naturally good-natured and high drive. If I was married to this guy would I let my dusting and hair care go all to hell because I know that it won't make a difference in his good-nature and high drive? If I react negatively to my H's complaints because I think I shouldn't "have to" be super-dust-and-curl woman in order to get laid then I am likely to also be the type of woman who become the type of woman who slacks off on "dust and curl" if I was with an easy-going man. Thus, I would be the type of woman who rewards a man for bad behavior and punishes a man for good behavior. OTOH, if I punish my H for bad behavior by passive-aggressively neglecting my dusting and hair care then I am going to end up damaging my own self-esteem and contributing to the downward spiral of my marriage.
One great bit of wisdom that I picked up on the FlyLady site is that when somebody says something critical to you, you can either react or respond. She uses the analogy that if you take a medication and you "react" to it that has a negative connotation but if you "respond" to it there is a positive connotation. I think that maybe the more differentiated you are, the more likely you are to "respond" than "react" in any situation. So, if my H says "Wow, this place is really dusty!", I might "react" by saying angrily "Well, nobody ever dusts around here but me." or "I might have more time to dust if I didn't have to do the mowing for you this week." etc. or I might "respond" by saying "It is pretty dusty, maybe we should have a family meeting to figure out who should take on this responsibility" or "You're right. I've been neglecting that responsibility. I need to add it to my written weekly schedule so that I don't let it slide." etc.. Because I've taken on this attitude, my H has pretty much run out of complaints. When he was being cranky Wednesday morning it was about something that could not be construed as "my fault" in any rational fashion. His complaint was that he hates his job. My "response" to this was to say a few things along the lines of "I'm sorry you feel that way. Let me know if I can help in any way in terms of brain-storming or internet searching for something new." which is pretty much all I can/could do for anybody in that situation. I think I was hurt/angry when he copped to avoiding sex later because it was demoralizing to me to think that maybe he was acting all depressed about his job in order to avoid having sex with me, like a kid who fakes a belly-ache to avoid going to school. Also, he did find an irrational way to blame me in this scenario. He said " I don't understand how two people can live in the same situation and one can be so much more unhappy.". Thus, the fact that I like my job is why I am HD but if I felt his pain about his cr*ppy job more keenly than I would be more LD. Totally fused thinking IMO and therefore the best I can do is ignore it.
Quote: mojo> you seem grumpy H> grunt mojo> yeah well its Wed, so-- Mr. grumpy, you better get in there and blank my blank..
Perhaps I have managed to thoroughly confuse myself or I'm just in a very different mental state than when I set this bounday but I have very little desire to enforce the boundary in this manner. The quality of our sex has been fine, so it's not a reduction in drive on my part, more like a reduction in my desire to play the role of the HDW. I don't think I'm wrong to go with this feeling either. My H's response to my not pushing the issue was actually positive, even though I reacted in a negative fashion. When I started crying he said "What's wrong? This is a good thing. When have you known me to call myself on this type of thing?" and he attempted to comfort me. This is unusual, new type behavior for him.
Quote: He stuck to his part of the agreement for a few weeks. Did you meet him on the things he had requested?
I am on my way to being the perfect wife in every way possible (LOL). (With the possible exception of my tendency to b*tch about my marriage on the internet )
Quote: I think he was testing you, and personally I want to give him a high five. Im not being indifferant to your frustration, but when you relate stories about your H, I almost always <chuckle> He is an azz. Lucky you.
You may be right, but this was mitigated by the fact that I was unaware that I was being tested. Kind of like when a kid doesn't eat his peas and you don't even notice because you're involved in a phone conversation while you're scraping the plates and you're happy because he did his chores that morning. Then the kid comes up to you later and says "I feel guilty because I didn't eat my peas at lunch. I just wanted you to know.". My reaction was bad because all I heard was "Your peas are yucky!". I guess the reason that I don't want to enforce the boundary in the manner you suggested is that I believe that ignoring temper tantrums is more productive in my situation at the moment than enforcing rules about eating vegetables or maybe I just don't care if the kid dies of vitamin deprivation anymore since he's not actually a kid and I'm not actually his mother. Minor bursts of tears aside, my dependency on this relationship is truly on the decline.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Postscript to my last post: What I'm trying to communicate is that it is easy to have the POV of "Why should I invest more in a relationship from which I am unlikely to get the return that I desire?". The answer is that by investing more in the relationship you are really investing more in yourself because anything that improves the way that you function in any relationship improves you as a person. Therefore, by investing more in the relationship you are actually reducing your dependency within the relationship. When we HDFolk attempt to GAL, I think we often make the mistake of trying to compensate for a lame marriage by improving our life outside of the marriage. This is like being an employee who compensates for a cr*ppy job by concentrating on his social life or his hobbies. His overall happiness may improve but he is doing nothing to improve his prospects of being happy at any job in the future. This is true even in a relationship to which you have a lifetime commitment. People and circumstances change within a relationship just like things change within a business. Maybe things might change for the better and you won't be prepared because you were concentrating and reacting to the negative or maybe things will change irretrievably for the worse and you won't be prepared because you let your own boat sink in unison with someone else's.
After, I let myself whine a bit here on Friday, here's what I did . I decided to behave just as I would in a relationship in which I had my brains cheerfully f*cked out on Wednesday. I bought some beer and snacks for my H to drink with the game and I bought myself an attractive new outfit and looked forward to a fun Friday evening. The evening went alright and I did get f*cked quite nicely the next morning. So, there you go.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
) if I actually do get laid about twice a week,I'm good. I feel very little urge to have more sex or MB, I don't fantasize much or even think much about sex. It becomes a non-issue. So, this makes me happy because it makes me feel more normal. 
