Dealing With Ambivalence

[Vigilant1]

I would like some ideas on how to deal with my bedroom situation, which currently seems like a really evil Catch-22. W does not like it when I back off to "respect" her ambivalence. She takes that as my withdrawing, and it seems to make her feel bad. On the other hand, if I am affectionate at bed time (even in a non-sexual way) she often seems to feel crowded or smothered. It honestly seems like I can't win.

I have two thoughts here, V.

First, you wife may still be feeling a lot of anger and resentment towards you for the past few years, despite the fact that you've "changed your tune" over the past few months. If the negative feelings are still there in the background, they will combine with any potential positive feelings that she may be having now (over the "new you") to produce...numbness...nothing...ambivilance. In other words, she's not over the hump yet into feeling primarily positive about you, and she may be right that given a little more time (say weeks to months) she'll ccme around. My wife had to walk this path too.

I think this may be what's happening, it's what Mr. Therapist thinks too. Should I put some kind of time limit on this? Greatly exacerbating the problem is that W is so "busy" and preoccupied with to-do lists. I relieved her of housework, dog-walking, etc. to try to help but she just seems to fill up whatever free time she has with endless busy nonsense.

What is she saying in counseling about this? What do the counselors think? What does she say to you in your private R talks?

So far Mr. Therapist has been all about the W. It seems to be all about trying to meet her needs right now, with little to no interest in what I need thus far. On the other hand, last week I sat her down and explained to her how WORRIED I am about our seemingly endless SSM. I told her that I believed that it will be very difficult to turn this around and that one of the things she could do to help is try to say "yes" and participate when the opportunities arise, as recommended by Michele (but I stated this without attribution because she hates that I read therapy books!) To my astonishment, she was basically RECEPTIVE to this, if cranky about it. And, on Monday night she followed through with some actual BEDROOM ACTION (no sex but other stuff). So this avenue is now somewhat open, but I think it won't be for long if I don't use it carefully and lovingly. I'm trying very hard to ensure that I do.

In therapy this week it came out that my bad reactions to rejection are huge problem. For her this is a classic double bind: she feels cornered when I approach, because if she says NO I have in the past become resentful, upset, and unable to sleep. So she has felt like she needs to say YES even if she doesn't want to, just so I will be okay and be able to sleep, and so on. She is a PEACEMAKER and wants everyone be okay, so in the past she has always worked to try to talk me out of feeling bad about being rejected. So every time this happens she ends up feeling manipulated.

Obviously, this just won't do. It's just not good enough, and I had been preparing myself to deal with this very differently anyway, so this week when Therapist brought this up I gave her blanket permission to say NO as she sees fit, along with a promise that I will deal easily/graciously with the feelings of rejection on my own, and not get too bent out of shape about it and try again later.

When writing this down it all sounds so silly. I don't even get why this is such a big deal for me. It must have to do with all of the conditional love and rejection I experienced in my difficult childhood. But it clearly is a big pain in the a$$ for the W to have me acting this way and I am really ready to change this. Coming out of therapy yesterday she was actually GLEEFUL about this "permission to say NO". This is a BIG DEAL, a big part of our problem. I really have to deliver on this.

Explore this a little bit V. Again, what has been said by your wife, privately or in counseling, or by your counselors about her in this regard? That is, (a) what do you think is the kind of man who would turn her on (if you know)? and (b) can you achieve that in yourself?

Is this a matter of her truly wishing that you would be the "pirate" in the bedroom and stop hestitating, waffling, talking, and being overly-considerate and just grab her and f*ck her, for Pete's sake!? This is a much more common feeling among women than you would imagine, given the current Nice Guy way in which boys are raised into men these days. And modern women feel downright ASHAMED about the fact that deep down, a "pirate in the bedroom" is what the dream about and really get turned on by --> it goes against their feminist upbringings and they don't like to bring it up or talk about it. Which, of course, leaves their Nice Guy husbands completely clueless as to what's wrong.

No, I'm not saying that you should drag your wife upstairs, right now. Do some detective work, V. If she reads, take a serious look at her book choices -- what are the men predominately like in those? Look at her favorite male actors and characters in movies and on television. Look at how her father was and other male role-modeles in her life (the ones she admires and loves). And if you find yourself saying "Well, that just her fantasy. She can't possibly want that in real-life...." think again. She may not want things taken to the extreme represented in her fantasy, but the fantasy is still a clue as to what gets her juices flowing.

In my wife's case, BOTH of the above two items I mentioned were contributing factors to her sexual ambivilance towards me (and are still issues that I grapple with). Don't overlook either of them.

This is really hard. My W does not really discuss her feelings very much. I have had a really hard time figuring out her likes and dislikes. She really likes romantic comedies - her favorite movie genre - so there must be something going on in there. I think in many ways she would like to be swept off her feet, but she is a stern intellectual type in many ways, with a lot of defenses up. In the infatuation stage I was able to do some of this, but now her emotional defenses seem to be almost impenetrable. I have in no way given up on this, but I am really having a hard time with it. Asking her about "what she needs to feel loved", which I have done now several times, has produced absolutely nothing.

You are right - this will take the right sort of detective work. She reads literature, not romance novels, so there's not too much to go on there. But she does like romantic comedies an awful lot. I will give that angle some more thought.