Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

I think I can say with self-awareness that seeking approval hardly fits who I am.

But I also note that for men I know that act like jerks, it works for them, as an attention getter at least for awhile before that, too, gets old.

The work I've done concerning myself all my life can be summarized by my ongoing awareness and separation about what is happeneing and what I say about it.

If you read this carefully, you can probably see where I present the facts (what is happening) separate that from what I'm feeling about it. What I am feeling about something is just that, a feeling. And in a moment I'll have another and then another, until I don't any longer. But the feelings are just something I say about the situation, it is not the situation itself. But the story I tell is both fact and it is written so that you can get a sense of what I'm experiencing.

What is true, as in factual, is that for my wife this matter is closed and settled. There is nothing more for us to discuss, nothing more to negotiate, nothing more to choose. She made her choice and she's stuck to it and continues to do so. No means no, not yes, not maybe.

There are other factors that complicate the issue that have a physical reality. I hadn't shared them yet.

Obviously, there is a disconnect because for one of us we are going to lose on this. One of us is going to have to give up or give in. "Having sex" just to keep us from going our separate ways does not seem all like a winning situation to me.

So, let me add some of the things that make this even more complex. First, the physical stuff.

My current wife is almost 7 years older than I am and when we met I was 32 and she was 39. And if 39 is the year of a woman's sexual peak, well I think we proved that. But what is also true was that we when our relationship lasted beyond a few months there was a question of more children considering her age. I was always surprised that we lasted another day much less another month because it seemed to be so much "work." (Although I had considered a second child with my first wife, we never got to that. And in this relationship, I simply would not have predicted anything lasting.) So the idea of having a child with her with so much struggle just did not appeal to me and I said so.

The other thing was that at 39 she was not yet menopausal, but that would come a couple of years later with all the hot flashes and everything that goes with that. By the time we were married, six years into our relationship, she was clearly into menopause and those symptoms kept getting worse. The hot flashes, the mood swings, the erratic and sometimes uncontrollable bleeding. We survived the first year of marriage but almost did not survive the first months in a new house a little more than a year after we married. By that time the sexual disconnect was getting pretty serious and I was being vocal about it. And it was swinging back and forth between very intense sexual periods to long periods of nothing but rejection.


By late 1996 and early 1997 we were down to one sexual encounter about every 9 months. But the effects of menopause were getting worse. It was April 6, 1997 that she surprised me. I did not know it at the time, but that was going to be the last time (11 years into our relationship and almost 5 years into our marriage).

In the meantime, she had gotten angry with me over my persistent sexual advances and we started the 8-month negotiation that eventually resulted in my wife telling me that she was no longer willing to commit to ANY sexual intimacy with me then or in the future. That was July 1998 and I sensed what that meant. About that time I started a new job.

I thought she would reconsider after a period of time. She would not and has not.

In the spring of 1999, my wife developed an auto-immune reaction of some kind that resulted in hives and other effects like worsening asthma. Clothes, skin on skin contact made her break out. Not very conducive for close physical contact when you can't even sweat on each other. But we were already two years into our non-sexual phase when this occurred. Although greatly reduced from 10 years ago, she still has these auto-immune reactions which are merly managed. The simple act of taking a shower, or sitting or laying in one position for more than a little while will trigger an outbreak of hives at the point of contact.

Finally, 7 years after we were married, the insurance company decided that it was time to approve the hysterectomy that had been recommended by her doctor. That happened in the summer of 1999.

Now I've read quite a bit about what can happen to women, their hormones and, that for about a third of the women, their sex drives go completely to zero after a a hysterectomy. Although she had chosen not to be sexual with me before the operation, that operation also plays into it.

That's the medical/physical side of this. I cannot say how much of what I'm experiencing is directly associated with the physical/medical issues.

I have considered that my way of being is what has given us the space to survive without this blowing apart. But I will also note this about my love relationships: either I attract and women for whom hormone issues are or become a real problem and I'm beating the odds at expeiencing this or it is far more common than most people would admit.

The first love of my life was when I was in high school (she was 16 and I was 17) and into my second year of college. We tried to carry off and expand a long-distant relationship from two different schools both in high school and in college. We never had intercourse. Oh, we got quite close and she knew what I wanted. But beyond a certain point she got tentative and beyond that she just "went away." She would back away from me for awahile and then come back. As strongly as we said we felt for each other, there was something just off about all of that. We said, at the time, it was meant to be, we would find a way and eventually parted. Our paths occasionally crossed and I knew she got married and divorced. I had not heard from her for a long time when I received an email and an apology. She said she should have told me that she had discovered her strongest loving feelings were for women, not men, and that since the last time our paths had crossed, she had been in a long-term relationship with another woman.

"Thats what that was" was my immediate reaction. Whatever the source, whatever the cause, it was a huge risk for her to find me and to apologize not knowing how that might turn out (and knowing how I felt about her so many years ago). My message to her was "it's who you are and I'm glad you are happy."

With my ex-wife, I clearly recognized alot of the Debra and Tom story. And my ex-wife has gone back and forth on whether waiting (to get better to use her words) would have been better for us and our relationship. But she made the choices she did and lives with the consequences.

My ex-wife shows a different response to hormones than the first love of my life. About the time my current wife and I were sexually intimate for the very last time, my ex-wife apologized to me. It was obvious to her that her complaints about me as a father were completely unfounded. As a husband and a lover, she still maintains that she had no real complaints. To quote what she said in front of a gathering of about 125 friends of mine "you have become the person I fell in love with when we first met." Her single-mindedness about being mom above all else and then the anger that engendered because I would not feel the same way about our son as she did (looks very much like Tom and Debra from the first chapter) was something she did not expect, either. Our sex life went from absolutely wonderful (two or three lovemaking sessions per week where a "session" might include making love two, three, or four times until we were totally spent) from the time we met to three days before our son was born. It went from that to virtually nothing in a span of two days when she went into labor. It literally went from 16 times per month to 16 times over a apan of 3 and an half years. I did not expect that. Neither did she.

But after she left me, divorced me, remarried and had her second child, the sort of thoughts, feelings and views that she had about her marriage after our son was born were returning and this time being directed at her current husband. There must have been an OMG moment somewhere that triggered her apology because hormone imbalance and the treatment regime they put her on apparently had her realize that it was not me. What she had done and was thinking in that haze was probably a "lightbulb" moment. But it was also a bell that could not be unrung. "If only we had known" was the phrase she used. I reminded her that we had some sense of it and she did not like being told that much of it had to do with her and the biochemistry of motherhood. Besides, would she hae taken medication to rebalance the hormones given the fact that she was breastfeeding?

She was more intent in having the experience of motherhood than in the experience of family and parenting together as a loving couple. And for that, she apologized. I've called it my greatest failure in life. My son, who is now 28, has become more curious about what went on. I talk with him about it when he asks questions but remind him that my side of the story may not match up with his mom's. The unfortunate thing, I tell him, was that he never got to see a time and how we interacted before he was born and just how incredibly in love we seemed to be.

I will also note that my ex-wife displays this pregnancy/walk away pattern. It turned out that there was another time when she did the same thing. She revealed this to me about the same time she apologized: Although I did not know it at the time when we met, she had gotten pregnant before we met (and not by the guy she had been engaged to) and then gotten an abortion. All I knew was that she and her fiance had broken up before we met and, according to her parents, I was "nicer" to her and took better care of her than he did. I knew nothing of the pregnancy or the circumstances (apparently he, her parents, nor anyone else knew either because I later discovered that he was faced with the same question I was: "what happened?"). When she revealed that to me, I asked her why she never told me, particularly at the beginning. She said that she wasn't willing to risk losing me if I reacted badly to the knowledge and later it just didn't seem important enough to mention (besides the guy that got her pregnant was an acquaintance of mine).

But it makes sense to me, she got pregnant, was pregnant for about 4 months before having an abortion and then had whatever combined guilt, loss, and hormone effects that she took out on her fiance. Then she did something similar to me seven years later. Then she was on the same path to do the same thing in her second marriage. Of course, there are lots of psychological implications.

But I am beginning to feel victimized by these women and their hormones. And while a certain level of "nice guy" might play into it, dealing with the biology can be pretty frustrating. So, I am looking for the path to follow and the next steps with the recognition that hormones and chemistry are playing a very powerful role here.

Have a good 4th of July.


My handle, "tea, Earl Grey, hot" is from Star Trek, TNG. Those that know the show and know the line, know that it is associated with the character Captain Piccard.