The Bumpy Road to Recovery

[Bagheera]

Greetings all,

We finally pulled up in the driveway late last night after two weeks of gallivanting across the country, from Arizona (where I flew to meet up with family) to Florida, and home to New York. The first week was work, getting our old house in AZ ready for the renter's market (since it won't sell any time soon), and the second week was play, spending more money than I want to think about at the various Disney attractions in Orlando. In a sense, this trip was also a test regarding the new levels of intimacy that we have been working to achieve and maintain over the past several months.

While traveling, my wife has always been the opposite of how NTE describes his wife. My wife has always been more intimate in the comfortable surroundings of own home, and much less so when we are away from it. I think this is a combination of two factors: first, with kids and family about, it's more difficult to find privacy and it simply feels less 'safe' for her outside of our home bedroom; and second, she becomes so wrapped up in the plans, the traveling, the going here, going there, doing this, doing that, that maintaining emotional and physical intimacy with the husband gets dropped by the wayside. Not to mention the exhaustion factor, and the lack of time to herself, such that by the end of the day, all she really wants is to curl up with a book for an hour or two and drift off to sleep. During previous vacations, she could have easily (and happily) gone the entire time without being intimate with me at all.

This vacation, however, we both put forth an effort to avoid the old pattern and keep the level of intimacy as high as possible, despite everything else that was going on. The three-week separation prior to my flying out there gave us a bit of a reunion "jump-start," as I reported earlier, but over the following two weeks my wife's ability to keep enough energy and focus for some "couple-time" at the end of the day rapidly dwindled. Overall though, we did better than on previous trips, and certainly got along better during the day than we have in a very long while on vacation -- I'd give this trip a C, compared to a long string of previous F's.

I also figured out that my wife has a hang-up with regard to making love in her mother's house. This isn't the place she grew up in. In fact, the house was built by my great-grandfather, bought and restored by my wife and I, and is where my in-laws currently live, rent free. However, my MIL has been there for 10 years now, and when we visit there, my wife has a very difficult time being sexual, even in our own, private room. I'd never noticed this previously because she wasn't being sexual anywhere during the trip. I can understand the psychological reasons why, and figure it's something that could be overcome as my wife's sexuality re-awakens over the next year or so. For now, however, I know what house we won't be staying at for very long during the holidays....

The best improvement of all during this trip was the fact that disagreements or even sexual 'rejections' didn't result in huge fights or day-long sulks on anyone's part -- a few minor spats, perhaps some grumpiness in the morning (especially as the trip wore on) but nothing more. In other words, we've healed enough of the long-standing hurts in our marriage to where individual incidents stand much more on their own, rather than triggering a cascade of pent-up hurts and resentments from the past. We could thus resolve the issue and move on, keeping up a high level of mutual respect throughout.

The final thing that was driven home to me while watching my wife day to day over this trip, and without the distraction of my own work to side-track me, was that I still have a long way to go toward understanding my wife and how she 'ticks.' I've made progress, to be sure, but there is still much there that I don't yet grok (to quote Heinlein). Part of it is her nature, part of it is a continued lack of full trust on her part, after all the years of disconnection and resentment, and part of it is a continued desire on her part for me to just 'get' her without her having to tell me, in romance-novel fashion. I'd love to be able to do that for her, but I'm also realistic enough to know that she's also going to have to learn to communicate with me better too -- this is reality, not a fantasy story.

Then again, I'm only a MAN....so how well will I ever be able to understand women? If only I hadn't lost that user's manual that she came with...

Bagheera