showed no sign of being unhappy or feeling "violated". I believe her, thus calling into question the simple blanket statement that a woman can't give sex purely as a favor to someone else without feeling violated.
I think that is a good way to look at the situation CE. It would help others here like Cemar and possibly teeshann. Two different situations but with some things in common. Doing it or appreciating it just because.
Have you thought about times when the idea gift sex from your W's POV, becomes duty sex or gift sex with some resentment thrown in? I am not looking for problems for you, just indicating people with good intentions (your W) often go through up and down cycles.
Oh yeah, I'm not about to let this sort of thing happen all the time. A gift that's given as a matter of routine becomes a duty. On the other hand, I'm not going to feel like a failure if it happens sometimes... it's really sweet of her, and I see how it really makes her day when she pleasures me really well.
After that conversation, I let a few extra days go by and then started teasing her and slowly upped the ante until I was sure she was nicely warmed up. (Thanks to too many board members to count for ideas...) That went a lot better for both of us.
Originally Posted By: DIY
Anyway ^5 on appreciating gift sex. BTDT.
Lou
An enthusiastic heart-felt "thank you" is the correct answer to any gift of this magnitude.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
A gift that's given as a matter of routine becomes a duty.
Exactly.
Gift sex has to NOT be the norm. If a woman can not regain desire at times, and can at best only give gift sex, then sex for her will eventually become DUTY sex.
Gift sex has to NOT be the norm. If a woman can not regain desire at times, and can at best only give gift sex, then sex for her will eventually become DUTY sex. I tend to agree with you Cemar, but when the situation calls for gift sex, and the general trend is for something better, I say acknowledge the improvements. That is why I gave CE a ^5.
I gotta say, this confident playfulness stuff works great.
Here's how it went down...
Me: (Kissing her neck) Her: What do YOU want? (she's kind of in a blah mood and a bit cranky) Me (smiling in exaggerated false innocence): What makes you think I want anything? (blatantly looking her up and down and undressing her with my eyes) Her: I can just tell. Me: Well, mayyybe I do. Is that a bad thing? Her: I thought I was getting a week off! (she's just barely started spotting. I like going down on her but I don't like tasting blood, so I told her the previous night we'd get together after her period). Me: I guess we can wait a week. (I'm being perfectly truthful here, NOT placating. See above.) Her: Well, maybe I want to wait a year. Me: OK, you'll just need to find me a girlfriend. Her: What?!? Me: Yeah, I'm not going to hold out that long. So go get me a girlfriend. Chop chop! (smiles and leaves the room)
I got laid VERY enthusiastically a few hours later (with my wife and no girlfriend).
This kind of playfulness cannot be faked. In the past, I wouldn't have even tried to approach her when she seemed down and cranky, or else I'd take her mood way too personally and get all defensive and cranky or placating in return and we'd be miserable together. I certainly wouldn't have tried to get her into bed, or even particularly wanted to go there, and she probably wouldn't have felt like letting go of her own cares and stresses to try to be sexual with me. So there wasn't all that much sex to be had overall, certainly not enough to keep either one of us happy.
So what changed? I lost most of my paralyzing self-consciousness around her, allowed myself to get really close to her, and showed her my own thicker skin that made her feel able to get close to me and bring out her own playful side while showing her my own. No one wants to play with anything or anyone made of glass, you know. And no one can really let loose and play while they're busy trying to forget or hide from their own insecurities or miseries, or trying to figure out How To Please Her.
Last edited by Crazy Eddie; 04/06/0707:50 PM.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
Sex life and interaction is good for now. Work is so-so, but I'm not letting that ruin everything else. I think I'll ask the doc to up my Concerta dosage... when I was on Ritalin, I tried 30 mg and kept waking up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, so I've been hesitant to go that route again (Concerta is a slow-release form of Ritalin), but nothing else is yielding the results I ultimately need to succeed. Time to be proactive and manly and all that good stuff. Maybe a higher dose of a stimulant that reliably stays in my system most of the day and reliably wears off before bedtime will actually get me there.
I keep seeing news blurbs about a gizmo that reads your brainwaves and shows you when you're in the "concentrating" state of mind through a video game. I've looked over some websites, but I don't know how much stock to put into it... I'll ask the doc next week what he knows about it. But if it works, it may be just what I'm looking for. I can see when I've been "in the zone" for a while, but it's hard to know how to get into it or recognize right away that I've gotten into it or out of it, and if I can learn how to get into it reliably, I can spend the workday "in the zone" and play at other times and have a much happier life overall.
God, please let something work. I need be able to think straight and to act consistently to change several aspects of my life that I'm still not happy with, and she's not going to be happy forever to watch me spinning my wheels.
Now the part the rest of y'all are especially interested in... how did things get so bad in the past and how'd they get better?
The sexual part... it was a couple of times a month, pretty boring and mechanical. She seemed to like it, as far as I could tell... she usually reached her orgasm and never seemed to want to change things around. I'd worried that if I tried changing things up it would (a) be a sign of desperation, i.e. that our sex life Wasn't Working and Our Relationship Was Doomed and (b) fail to satisfy her (i.e., give her that orgasm) and leave her cranky and frustrated. If she was happy, I was happy, and that's all that counted, right? I mean, I was lucky she was even willing (and wanting) to sleep with me.
Except I wasn't happy. And she wasn't really happy either. She hated her body, I wasn't too crazy about it either but knew I couldn't do a thing to change it for her or get her changing it, and even thinking along those lines could make her think I didn't love her so I stayed away from that thought as much as I could. And I wasn't happy with the rest of my life either, and thought in the back of my mind that if she dropped dead (not that I would EVER commit or even consider such a disgusting act against her or anyone... I'm talking about if she got in a wreck or something in her vehicle that had NOT been tampered with in any way!) and I found a better woman, life would become peachy and I'd get all fired up and happy and be able to finish things and go places have lots of fun and wild sex and smarter, better behaved kids, and so on, and I'd be able to bury my past failures and mistakes with the person who knew the most about them. And I didn't let on any of those thoughts either, for obvious reasons.
Of course even the best woman in the world can't fix you, but I didn't really get that. And there's no law that says you can't Get A Life while staying married to and actively loving the same person, but I didn't really get that either. I mean, if I can't make her slim down even if she wants to be slimmer, how in the hell is she going to make me concentrate and finish things and have fun and be happy? Good question; too bad I didn't ask it a few years ago.
And I'd spend more time at the computer making up for all the time that kind of disappeared while I kept getting distracted, burning myself out and neglecting everyone. And even when I was off, all I could think about was how much was left undone and how dare I have fun while I hadn't done X, Y, and Z, and there's really no point in doing Z since it's been undone too long so I'm just screwed no matter what I do, and I'm really going to catch hell when she asks about some W that I don't even remember I was supposed to do. So I wasn't too much fun to be around at any time, and I wasn't interested in letting loose and having fun. Too self-conscious, too, and not interested in anything "silly" and "stupid" (which of course is the very thing that kids and their mothers can't get enough of). And I knew on some level I was being a "stuffed shirt" but didn't know how to get into the right mindset. (Still have trouble with it, but it's easier when you let go of things)
Having fun while I had failed at anything seemed like adding insult to injury... I'd failed her, and now I was presuming to want to sleep with her or go places with her or even talk to her like a decent human being? She'd be outraged when she caught on to just what a loser she had allowed to talk to her and, worse yet, to touch her and sleep with her. So I never really allowed myself to be happy and have fun, and I looked at time with her as yet another thing on my to-do list that I was always falling short on and another source of stress, which had to have made me a source of stress to her.
Haphazard's husband, from the way she described him, seems to be in that same place.
Last edited by Crazy Eddie; 05/09/0706:56 PM.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
I'm 11 years old. My dad moves to take a new job. I go with him. Mom stays behind to sell the house.
My reaction? Thank you, Jesus! Glory hallelujia! Life without my mom will be almost unbearably sweet!
It doesn't quite work out that way. I don't have the slightest clue how to make myself get anything done without mom there to put the fear of God into me every day. My grades drop. My dad gets frustrated, threatens to send me to live with my mom a few times (about the worst threat he can come up with, and it gets temporary results better than anything else), and we eventually wind up talking to the school counselor, who gets it into her head that I'm doing poorly because I'm sad because I miss my mommy!
If only she knew! What makes me sad and afraid is that (a) my mom will eventually sell the house and move back in with us and (b) my dad might be convinced that I need my mom to keep me from failing and send me back to live with her. What makes me unbearably frustrated and profoundly disappointed in myself is the knowledge that the counselor has a point, even if she erroneously thinks I miss her... the bottom line is I can either be miserable with my mom living with me, or I can be a complete failure because I can't do anything without her there to keep me in line.
After a year of this, I barely avoid repeating the year, the house is sold, a new house is purchased, mom moves back in with us, and life returns to normal. My grades go up. They were right. I can't be happy and relaxed and away from people screaming at me or else I will fail. Once I'm on my own, I've got to somehow threaten or punish myself to stay out on my own and keep my family afloat and keep from going back to my parents' house with my tail between my legs.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
Hmmmm the old "I can never do anything right in their eyes syndrome" huh?
Yes, I know that one well - however, the only advantage (if you want to call it that) I have over you is, my mother is no longer on this planet but her words haunt me quite regularly
Heywyre
M - 57 H - 65 1st A-bomb - Nov 27/02 2nd A-bomb - Dec 13/06 together 21 years *************************** Insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results (Albert Einstein)
During that year, I couldn't seem to do anything right, period... she wasn't there. And I managed to prove to myself and everyone else that I needed her there because relaxing and enjoying life and feeling good about myself only causes me to goof off and fail miserably.
Good Lord, it's been ages since I thought about that year. What a disappointment.
The last time I really thought about it was when my dad told me, shortly before I got married, that she really stayed behind because he was seriously contemplating divorce. I never knew that, although I don't blame him one bit; he must have been just as miserable living with her as I was. And now I wonder if he decided to reconcile because I was floundering without her influence. God, I hope not! I needed to find other ways to succeed without her, and he needed to find an attractive woman that knew how to treat people. I guess I'll never know for sure... he died a couple of years after that conversation.
She did make some changes when I was in high school... lost a lot of weight, treated him more nicely, went places with him, and so on. Thinking back, I would guess that even she was able to figure out that the way she was going, he wasn't going to have a reason in the world to stick around once I graduated. So I guess he did have a happy marraige in his last years, and she's a lot more pleasant to be around these days. Most of the time.
Last edited by Crazy Eddie; 05/09/0709:22 PM.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
Once I'm on my own, I've got to somehow threaten or punish myself to stay out on my own and keep my family afloat and keep from going back to my parents' house with my tail between my legs.
Of course this was a horrible strategy. A positive mental attitude and appropriate medication yields much better results. Too bad it took me more than a decade of being free to even start to figure that out.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
Now I'm wondering just how much that Primal Wound stuff holds water.
Normal kids, even ones who have it much worse than I did, love their moms and desperately miss them when they're gone, from what I hear.
I never missed her. When she was gone, I felt relief. When she was coming back, I felt sadness, anxiety, and a sense of failure. Never did I long for her presence.
I still maintain occasional contact with her mostly out of a sense of obligation and the knowledge that I don't really have a good excuse to cut her out of my life. She has changed, and I shouldn't hold on to the past. But I still don't miss her like normal people do.
As for She Who Cannot Be Named (for the simple reason that I don't know her name), I can't miss her in the usual sense because I don't remember ever meeting her. But not a day goes by that I don't wonder where she is.
This doesn't seem right to me. My mom put a lot of work into raising me and, given my problems and what was known at the time, didn't do all that badly at it. That's got to count for something, right? But deep inside, it's just not the same, even though I wish it could be.
I think she sensed that distance from her own child throughout my childhood and it drove her crazy. She always seemed to want to maintain a deathgrip on me, and I was always trying to hold her at arms length. This had to have been heartbreaking for her and poisoned every interaction we ever had.
Or maybe I'm just making events fit a flawed theory. I wish I knew for sure.
Well, time to go work out. Does wonders for the mental attitude, at least for a day or two. Life goes on, and it can be very sweet when you do it right.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
