Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

....Many of us are having success in repairing our marriages, and have stuck around both for the support, and for the opportunity to help others in similar situations. None of us are on anyone's payroll, and none of us are beholden to any particular author's techniques or books. For example:....

Thank you the wonderful demonstration of one's listening as this nicely demonstrates what I was saying (though you may be unable to see it).

You saw yourself in my words, you did not like it, you got defensive and then you demonstrated exactly what I was speaking about when I wrote about one's "listening."

And how does your listening occur for me? (Read that question again, the words are written in a specific order to convey a specific intent).

How your listening occurs for me is this:

Let me see if I can find the problem and recommend a good book to (start to) fix the problem AND work on yourself

As justification of your listening, whether for me or anyone else, you proceeded to give a list of conditional recommendations (for books) based upon various situations.

This is the "advice" you've given. I recognize it as well-meaning and well-intentioned AND I'm requiring something greater than that.

If you or others see that requirement as being resistant to advice or not wanting advice, so be it.

For if it were just a matter of finding the "right book," reading it and doing X, Y, and Z (by the book) in a certain sequence, then it would just be a matter of lacking education and practice because the collective "we" just had not found and read the "right book."

As I acknowledged above, I see your words as well-meaning and well-intentioned. What is missing is what works.

It is okay, as some have said, to have no suggestion or a considered path to follow. It is okay to say, it looks like I've given due consideration to all the alternatives and now all there is to do is to choose.

It's okay to say (as one mental health professional has said to me, though no one here has), "you will not be able to 'out-therapist' the therapist you a married to on your own. The reason you felt it was two against one the last time you went to joint couseling was because it was two against one. Your wife has all the training, experience, and the jargon to elicit the professional courtesy of any mental-health professional."

There has only been one person, as far as I've seen, who stepped up and essentially said: "I encountered a similar situation and the way I/we resolved it is...." You started another thread on the basis of that response to me. I have not accepted nor rejected that advice, it is still a consideration though, for me, a much less likely one. However, it also illustrates one person's sharing of experience for me to consider.

It would be different, for me, if what you or others had said was given from recoognition of their own circumstances and then said, that something from some book (as I related from Gail Sheehy's books) rang true and "I found the following (something) helpful and here is how I/we used that...."

As an personal example from my professional life; I have more than 30 years evaluating and diagnosing the operations of energy processes and their associated polution control devices. More than once the following has occurred: I'm called up about a problem (usually more than one) and to see if I have any suggestions as to what the cause is and how to fix it. Sometimes it is an easy fix, but usually it is something a bit more complex. When we finally get into the equipment and I've been crawling around in it and make my suggestions as to what to do next, it is something that comes from experience. As more than one plant engineer and maintenance manage has said to me, "you didn't learn that from some book." It's the recognition (and appreciation) that what is being suggested is coming from experience.


If you and others don't have the sort of experience that I've encountered, that's okay.

On other forums that deal with hysterectomy and the loss of sex life, it really gets divided up into one of four camps: 1) the angry/frustrated husbands whose sex lives have gone away, 2) the angry wives who don't want sex anymore and wish their husbands would leave them alone, 3) the sad wives who love their husbands and wish they had some (or more) sex drive knowing what they had sometime before the operation, 4) the ones who know or suspect that their husbands are cheating on them because their sex-life within the context of the marriage has come to an end.

Re-ignition of sexual passion and intimacy seems a relative rarity under these physical limitations without hormone treatment. Her doctors have already ruled that out as an option.

Apparently it was a mistake to come over here, share what I've dealt with and see what others are thinking and experiencing.

Thank you for listening anyway.