DQ, Oh, I know I have blame in this. It's not clear what all of that blame is, as I can only work off of what she has told me...otherwise, I'm just pissing in the dark and hoping to hit the bowl. I was willing to put forth the effort to make those changes...change what's broken. If you don't know what's broken, how can you change it? I have told her what I felt was broken, and so far I have not seen that same willingness from her to want to change...therefore, the ultimatum WILL come.
As you may recall, over a year ago I brought up the topic of how our marriage had slipped. We had numerous, very open and honest discussions of how we felt and what we felt needed to change in order for us to continue to grow as a loving couple. You said you felt pressured that any physical contact with me had to lead to sex. I backed away from my desires to touch and hold you, letting physical touch be initiated by you but returned by me in a loving way that did not lead to sex in order to give you the space you wanted. You said you felt I still had trust issues from {first wife} and that my phone calls to you during the day were just means for me to check up on you. I ceased all unecessary calls to you to again, give you the space you wanted...to show trust in you.
I spoke of the importance to me of intimacy, that is was more than just sex. Intimacy is what makes me feel validated, loved, of some importance. Without intimacy and the rejection of intimacy, leaves me feeling alone and unwanted. That was a year ago and nothing has changed. The last few months, I've grown tired of trying to 'right' things by myself with little to no effort from you. Am I willing to continue to put forth 100% effort on our marriage? That depends, are you? If you are unable to answer that question, then we are through, because I will not go this alone any longer, it won't work. I'm not going to pressure you into an immediate answer, but it's been a year since this was first brought up. I've set a time limit in my head of when I will know the answer....I will not be in this position a year from now. I WILL continue to seek the emotional intimacy and connection that the physical act of sex provides to me and I hope that it will be with you.
I'm the HD partner in a formerly sex-starved marriage (SSM for about 20 years), which is about 1 year into the recovery process. For a detailed review of my situation, see my current thread (linked in my signature) or right-click on my Avatar to and select View Post to see my (often lengthy) bits of advice to others here.
I've only had time to make one pass through your thread here, and won't be home for another week or so as to reply here regularly, so what I'm going to do is to list the major lessons that my wife and I had to learn in order to fix our broken marriage. Some of these things may already be stuff you understand or are currently doing: if that's the case, check that box and move on to the next item.
(1) Understand basic gender differences
Men and women are inherently different: physically, mentally, and emotionally. One is not superior to the other, but we are so different as to be complementary to each other in many respects. One of the most common mistakes in a marriage is to assume that your spouse (a) has the same needs and desires as you, and therefore (b) should instinctively understand your wants and needs. Wrong answer. Each spouse must be willing to actively learn their spouse's needs and strive to meet them, even if those needs are very different from their own.
For example: women tend to feel loved when they feel supported, cared for, and cherished by their husbands. They are natural care-gives -- it is how they naturally express their love. So your job, as the husband, is to make sure that you aren't just another someone that your wife has to care for, that YOU care for her and express your love for her in the way that she really feels it.
For more on this, see John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
(2) Understand sexual gender differences
When it comes to intimacy, men and women are darn near opposites in how they approach emotional and physical intimacy. It it ABSOLUTELY VITAL that you and especially your wife understand this gender difference. Both of you need to read and discuss The Intimacy Dilemma, described in the SSM on pages 55-62.
Women, in particular, have an extremely hard time understanding that physical intimacy is a man's primary means of expressing his love and feeling loved in return. It is far, far more than just a physical release -- it is his pathway to emotionally intimacy, closeness, and connection. Women, on the other hand need to feel a deep emotional connection first, before they feel a desire for sex: so for them, sex is the icing on the cake. But for their husband, sex IS the cake, with emotional connection as the icing. If you can get your wife to understand this (it took my own wife more that 20 years to finally 'get it'), then you will bring down a major barrier in your SSM.
Here's another example: non-sexual touch is extremely important to most women, and YOU have to initiate it for it to 'count.' You can't wait for her to do it -- you lose points that way. You have to give her physical touch WITHOUT any connection to sex on a regular basis to help maintain a close emotional eonnection.
See The 5 Sex Needs of Men and Women by Gary and Barbara Rosberg for more on this topic.
(3) Learn to communicate properly in your marriage
By this, I mean to learn how to (a) maintain a close friendship between your and your spouse, and (b) discuss problems and issues in a non-destructive manner.
Part (a) involves taking an earnest and active interest in your partner and their dreams, work, play, and daily life -- and participating with them in it. Part (b) means leaning how to keep the "Four horsemen of the Apocalypse" out of your discussions with your spouse (criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling), learning how to solve those problems that can be in your marriage, and to work around those perpetual issues that will never be solved.
See The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver for more on these topics.
(4) Get away from the 'Child-centered' marriage
Motherhood changes women permanently, some more than others. And many modern women try to make the children the center of the marriage, around which the parents orbit, providing love and support for their offspring -- and often sacrificing their own relationship and level of intimacy. This is a big MISTAKE, and leads to divorce, affairs, or at the least, an emotionally strained, unhappy environment for the children to grow up in. The BEST environment for a child to grow up in is a family in which the relationship between Mom and Dad comes first, where husband and wife are at the center of the family, and the children orbit around them.
The SSM covers this topic in part, but it is often a third party, such as a marriage counselor, who has to get this point across, especially to the wife. She's generally not going to take the husband's word for it here.
(5) Establish clear masculine and feminine roles in your marriage (and in your approach to sex)
The modern, fully egalitarian marriage is the result of the last 50 years of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. However, men and women are the result of a few millions years of evolution, and what we find sexually attractive in a partner is primarily a result of those millions of years. In short, men are sexually attracted to feminine women, and women are attractive to masculine men, regardless of the modern beliefs that we spout.
So, if your marriage is currently one of nearly androgynous, equal roles; if you have stopped courting, seducing, and approaching your wife as a sexually confident MAN; or if your wife has taken on the dominant role in your household and you have retreated into your own career and interests and left everything else up to her, then you are likely NOT being the man who can turn her on sexually.
For an ad naseum discussion on this topic, see my posts over the last few months here -- it's an issue I've been actively addressing within my own marriage of late.
(6) Recognize and change YOURSELF
It's far, far too easy to blame your spouse for the problems in your marriage and sex life. This is especially true in a long-term SSM, with years of anger, frustration, and resentment built up on both sides. However, the basic truth is: (a) YOU have caused at least 50% of the problem, and (b) the only person you can change in your marriage is YOURSELF.
You mentioned that if you told your wife today to either help you fix your marriage or get a divorce, she would likely opt for the later. This says to me that she has lost hope that YOU will ever be able to meet HER needs and fix those issues that she has become angry, frustrated, or resentful over.
My advice to Cinco and others in your situation is: before making such an ultimatum, take a few MONTHS to really make an effort to change yourself with regard to how you treat your spouse and work to meet HER needs. Be the bigger person, and work past your own frustration and resentment FIRST, before asking her do to so. Once you've demonstrated your own resolve to make the relationship work, then you can honestly ask her to step up to the plate with you.
This is a hard thing to do. Bloody hard. Believe me, I know from experience. But it's what woke up my wife up to the fact that I really meant to forge a better marriage from the train-wreck that we had built previously. I did the manly thing, and took the lead: and she followed -- thankfully, willingly, and lovingly. This is not a guaranteed approach, but it worked in my case.
See Part III of the SSM for some ideas that YOU can start implementing today.
Best regards,
Bagheera
Me 50, W 45, M for 26 yrs S25, D23, S13, S10 20+ year SSM; recovery began Oct 2007
Be the bigger person, and work past your own frustration and resentment FIRST, before asking her do to so. Once you've demonstrated your own resolve to make the relationship work, then you can honestly ask her to step up to the plate with you.
This is a hard thing to do. Bloody hard. Believe me, I know from experience. But it's what woke up my wife up to the fact that I really meant to forge a better marriage from the train-wreck that we had built previously. I did the manly thing, and took the lead: and she followed -- thankfully, willingly, and lovingly.
Brilliant~ and neccessary for real change...
Everything else he said is brilliant (as always). I would recommend printing out his post and re~ reading it often for motivation to change YOU first!
Lost - 1st paragraph is good maybe drop the opening "As you may recall".
Originally Posted By: Lost's Ultimatum, 1st draft
I've grown tired of trying to 'right' things by myself with little to no effort from you. Am I willing to continue to put forth 100% effort on our marriage? That depends, are you?
You might be able to make this sound a little more encouraging to her. Like the studious Bagheera suggests, if you show a solid 3 months or so of work on yourself you can skip the "tired of trying" and say "I am trying my best and hope that you will join me in making this marriage the best it can be. We need to both put 100% into this."
Originally Posted By: Lost's Ultimatum, 1st draft
I WILL continue to seek the emotional intimacy and connection that the physical act of sex provides to me and I hope that it will be with you.?
See Bagheera's list item (2), this could be worded so that you and she are both seeking connection, it's sounds one sided the way you present it.
I hope I didn't shred too harshly. Read your letter again to yourself in a couple of days. If you do as Baggy suggests and work hard on yourself for a while and then write another letter after putting in that work, it will be totally different from this 1st one you wrote. I know my letters evolved from anger to loving as I worked on myself.
I know I had some pretty dark days a few months ago myself and now, with work, have seen the light of day once more.
Cinco
Me49 W49 D17 M23 Sep01 Me PA 1 Jan02 filed D Mar02 ended A 1 reconcile Apr08 Me PA 2 May08 ended A 2 Aug09 A's revealed My latest thread Drive
Along the lines of what Bagheera's saying, this is something that really helped me. It's hard for a man not to pull up all the things his wife has said that hurt. I talked about a few things in my thread--things my wife did and said over the years that really hurt me--and I was just as angry about them then as when they'd happened, years before.
But I've done a lot of reading since I started here. One thing that really made an impression on me in an otherwise so-so book was this idea:
Men often think women are dishonest, because a woman will say things she "doesn't really mean" or "can't really mean." Men also tend to think women are overly emotional, while men are logical. But that difference is mostly a difference of expression--women express truth based on emotions, and men express truth based on facts and reason. Not exclusively, of course, but that's how it's weighted. So the man thinks his wife was dishonest when she said "I will always love you no matter what!" last year, because this year she's decided there will be a unilateral freeze on lovemaking.
From the woman's point of view, what she said then was an expression of her feelings at that time, not objective fact. She was only expressing that she felt like she loved you so much that it would last forever. So, from her point of view, it was the truth, because she indisputably did feel that way at the time. The man heard a promise about the future because of her choice of words and because he would probably not have said anything about forever unless he meant "forever" in the objective sense.
From this viewpoint, when your wife said "I don't enjoy sex and I never will" what she was trying to do was to express her despair about sex at that moment. Saying she didn't enjoy sex wasn't a strong enough expression of her unhappiness, so she increased the intensity of the expression--and, she was probably also feeling worried that she really wouldn't ever enjoy sex again, so she expressed that fear. The fact that she expressed her fear as a factual statement is unfortunate because you, with a man's brain, evaluated it as a factual statement of objective truth--something that could be proven in a lab.
The point of all this psychobabble is that as soon as her feelings changed, those words no longer applied. The flux is constant. She meant it when she said it (probably) and would have sworn it was true. It was. But if things have changed between you, it need not be true now.
Don't do what I would do, which is to use these hurts as an excuse to believe she'll never change. If you can change, then she can change. It doesn't mean she will, but it proves that she can.
"Am I willing to continue to put forth 100% effort on our marriage? That depends, are you? If you are unable to answer that question, then we are through, because I will not go this alone any longer, it won't work. I'm not going to pressure you into an immediate answer, but it's been a year since this was first brought up. I've set a time limit in my head of when I will know the answer....I will not be in this position a year from now. I WILL continue to seek the emotional intimacy and connection that the physical act of sex provides to me and I hope that it will be with you."
I don't know how to do that fancy "line over" feature, so I will just re-type my suggestion of how to say it a bit better...
"I am willing to continue to put forth 100% effort on our marriage. But I do want your agreement to put in 100% effort as well. I'm not going to pressure you into an immediate answer, but it's been a year since this was first brought up. I feel I have been patient since that time, but I will not be in this position a year from now. I do not want to threaten you, but the bottom line is that I will not remain in a sexless marriage. I want a fully intimate and happy marriage, and I want it with you. Please join me in the effort to get us to that place together."
There is really no reason to sort of threaten her with you finding someone else to be intimate with. That is implied when you say that you won't remain in a sexless marriage, right? It is implied because you are implying divorce, and divorce would then free you to find another partner. So no need to say it out loud. She will hear it loud and clear!
I am glad you've gotten a lot of other imput as well. I hope all the words will break through to you and reach past your anger. You are justified in having your anger, but only to a point. After a certain point (and you should be there now) you have a responsibility to put your own anger in CHECK, work through it, and then head into negotiations with your wife from a loving and grounded place.
This is a good place to write about your anger, but that can also make it look like:
A. You're an angry neanderthal boiling over with rage, or B. Your wife is an evil bitch you can't get away from fast enough, depending on how people here read what you write. Keep it clear in your mind when you're venting, because venting doesn't have to make perfect sense and usually isn't fair to the other person.
I don't know about you, but if I just start writing all my anger out, I often catch myself contradicting parts of it in my mind before I finish.
Lost? Still there? I have this sinking feeling that you got into a fight and you ended up telling her everything in an angry way...?? Let us know.
DQ
Yea, I'm still here. I just haven't had much time to post and still don't. No fight, no nothing....except a lot of pent up frustration. In fact, I've probably been too much of a 'nice guy.' I'm reading everyone's posts and taking it all in, just not a lot of time to respond. I will.
Read your letter again to yourself in a couple of days. If you do as Baggy suggests and work hard on yourself for a while and then write another letter after putting in that work, it will be totally different from this 1st one you wrote. I know my letters evolved from anger to loving as I worked on myself.