Response to Cemar2

[Kettricken]

What I get confused at is why people think I want EVERYTHING. What I have on my list is what I consider to be NORMAL. There is noting on that list that should be difficult for a NORMAL person to achieve.

Ummmmmmmmm......

Your wife is the "normal person" about who you said, "My wife grew up as a neglected child. Around the age of 9, her parents split when BOTH were cheating. Her mother was a drunk and did little for the children. She had many boyfriends in the house. My wife essentially had to run the household at the age of 9. Often the mother was gone for several days. My wife had to raise her siblings. THe house was a mess, they often slept on sheets the dogs had peed on. Often my wife had to call realatives to bring food over when there was no food in the house. My wife has scars on her body from childhood falls that should have been stiched up, but the mom never took her to get fixed up. The mom eventually remarried and the stepdad may have tried to sexually assault my wife, although she now says that he was to drunk to do anything and passed out (but this story has been toned down over the years). At 16, she moved out and went to live with an ex boyfriends family. Her natural mother had a digust for men in general, they were the cause of her problems in life, and her adopted mother at 16, is possible the most fridgid women I have ever seen, she has slept on the couch for like 50 years. So obviously there are no good female roel models in my wife life. In addition, many of the men if my wifes life have LEFT her."

Granted, everbody has crap in their childhood or somewhere in their past. We all have baggage and yet many of us can achieve some sort of half-assed "normality". But, dude, your wife's childhood experiences were WAAAAAYYYYYYYY outside any norm. How could that not leave serious scar tissue?

So bemoaning the fact that she doesn't do what a "normal" person (by your definition) might find easy to do seems to invite the response, "Well, DUH!!!!!!"

It is quite sad (no sarcasm intended) that the potent chemical cocktail of being in love seems to have masked her difficulties with intimacy and sexuality when you were dating/engaged/newly married. Trust me, I have some experience in this area too ... and I didn't see it coming either, and felt cheated too. I can't count how many times I wanted to say "It happened 10-20-30-however many years ago; GET OVER IT!!!" If only it were that easy. Even people that are highly motivated to change childhood patterns find it very difficult; those programs pop up and grab you when you least expect it. Psych 101, right?

I guess my point is, expecting "normality" in the form of your whole wonderful wish list from a woman who is likely "abnormal" and/or stunted emotionally in many ways (quite understandable given her history) seems tantamount to banging your head against a cement wall. Embedded with glass.

That's not going to change until she does some real hard, deep work (hopefully with a professional). If I am remembering correctly, she is quite resistant to that, is she not?

Have you ever REALLY told her ... in words of one syllable, no soft-pedaling, no trying to be a "nice guy" or "good christian" or whatever ... how much pain and resentment and frustration and anger and regret and hopelessness you feel about the state of your physical relationship?

There have been some mindblowingly terrible painful discussions about this in my house. So I get it. But in order to heal and come out on the other side of this, you are asking her to volunteer to go through a lot of terrible painful hard emotional work. How can you expect her to commit to that if she doesn't fully understand not only why you feel the way you do, but exactly how serious this is for you, how much unhappiness you feel? Tact is a beautiful thing, but it will get you nowhere except the same deadend street you've been on.

On a slightly different (but related) note -- are you aware of how much you generalize when speaking of men and women? Over and over in your posts, I have seen "men do/want this" or "women do/want this". Occasionally you will throw a "most men" or "most women" in there, but often not. These blanket catagorizations -- in addtion to being mildly offensive to those of us who don't fit into your "women do this" definitions -- serve only to cloud the issue. And subtly introduce a confrontational, mutually-exclusionary dynamic between husband and wife.

All that matters in your life at this point is what YOU want, YOU think, YOU do, and what YOUR WIFE wants, thinks and does.