You asked "don't women understand how this puts men between a rock and a hard place?" I wanted to just tell you...no, they don't understand.
It is so clear to me now in hindsight, but NO at the time my kids were under age 14 I did not know that they were not my entire world. No one could have told me otherwise and if they had tried, I would have scoffed at them.
I'm sorry you've hit a speed bump. I know it will turn itself around. I wish there was a way to get the message through to women about how (I'm sorry, I'm just going to say it) how they are using their own children as an intimacy buffer between themselves and their husbands. I did it too, and I am struggling to try to think if ANYTHING anyone could have said to me to show me this was not the right way. If I think of anything, I will let you know.
Many women (and men too) in SSMs do indeed use children in this way, though perhaps in many cases it is "learned" behaviour from their own parents' marriages. To the average frustrated husband (or wife) - which Bagheera is thankfully not - its an almost unanswerable argument. A powerful guilt trip.
However, the "kids" excuse for not having intimacy and sex in a marriage is ultimately BS - and both spouses need to accept that.
Is there a magic way of getting the point across? Probably not. But there is an analogy that occurred to when me reading DQ's first blog.
Marriage is effectively a cart. Two wheels - a man and a wife held together by an axle - proceeding on life's journey. As the journey progresses, the cart acquires passengers (children - bless 'em) and baggage (house, financial responsibilities, etc). The passengers are of course very important, but if they are to travel in the safety of the cart until they are old enough to jump off and walk their own route, then the cart has to be strong enough to bear their weight.
And what is the most important part of the cart? The axle, which IMHO is nothing more and nothing less than than the force of attraction between the husband and the wife. If that becomes too weak or goes altogether, then the wheels literally come off the marriage. With usually disastrous results.
This image, for me anyway, demonstrates that children and other responsibilities do not strengthen a marriage in and of themselves. If anything, they increase the importance of a strong intimate relationship between the husband and wife, because they will likely suffer most when the wheels eventually come off.
How many spouses out there incessantly fuss over the passengers and the luggage, while unaware (or in denial) that the lack of regular attention being paid to the actual mechanics of the cart means that the whole damn thing is destined to lie in a ditch with the children and finances literally all over the place?
So that is what I would say to any man or woman on the subject, including my own wife if necessary.
I wheely mean it.
(couldn't resist! )
S&A
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated" - from The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
Which I take to mean that every man has within him a spirit of relentlessness and optimism. Its already there; he just has to cultivate it.
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