Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[Bagheera]

I am aware that there are certain listenings here and that what is presented is, in all likelihood, presented through those filters. Well-meaning as that might be, there has not been a "wax on, wax off" moment.

This is a public self-help forum, sponsored by The Divorce Busting Center, and obstensibly focused on the marriage-saving techniques developed and published by Michele Weiner-Davis. In practice, however, the moderators are *generally* flexible when other authors or techniques are recommended, as long as the advice isn't too far afield and remains applicable.

The important thing to keep in mind, TEGH, is that those of us who frequent these forums regularly are NOT professsional therapists or counselors. We're regular folks who (most commonly) found ourselves here looking for help when our OWN marriages were in trouble and we wanted to find help, either through the support offered by others just like us, struggling with failed or failing marriages, or through the wide variety of good books and on-line reading material that others here might recommend. 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:

* If you had come here describing the frustration and 'symptoms' of the marriages likewise described in Michele Weiner-Davis's The Sex-Starved Marriage, then I would have recommended that (or The Sex-Starved Wife for a frustrated high-desire woman).

* If both you and your wife were fully on-board and working to repair and improve your intimate relationship and sex-lives together, then I would have recommended David Schnarch's Passionate Marriage for you.

* If you were describing common male problems with sexuality: lack of knowledge about yoru own sexuality, disconnection with your own feelings, a general lack of sensuality, erectile dysfunction, premature ejacuation, or some other similar male problem, then I would have recommended Bernie Zilbergeld's The New Male Sexuality to you.

* If ignorance of female anatomy/arousal or sexual techniques in general seemed to be the problem then I would have recommended Ian Kerner's She Comes First for the first problem, or D. Paul Joannides and Daerick Gross's The Guide to Getting It On for the second.

* If you and your wife were displaying a severe communication disconnect, and were unable to communicate in a non-destructive fashion, then I would have recommended John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work to you.

* If you and your wife displayed generally male-centric and female-centric views of marriage and male-female relationships, respectively, then I would have recommended John Grey's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to you.

* If you and your wife seemed not to understand the very different ways in which men and women approach intimacy, or were struggling with issues of sexuality and sexual expression within a conservative Christian marriage, then I would have recommended Barbara and Gary Rosberg's The 5 Sex Needs of Men and Women to you.

* And finally, if you displayed 'symptoms' of being a typical Nice Guy, such that you weren't getting what you wanted out of your marriage, and in partcular, if your wife failed to find you sexually attractive because you weren't being "man enough" in the relationship, then I would have recommended Robert Glover's No More Mr. Nice Guy, or perhaps David Deida's The Way of the Superior Man to you. Which is what I did --> this seemed to fit your case the best.

I'm not stuck on any particular author, website, or technique, and pragmatically seek out what works and discard what doesn't. The only filters in place with me are first, I'm not a professional sex therapist or marriage counselor (and don't claim to be), and second, I'm limited (a) to my own personal experiences in saving *my own* marriage and (b) the reading I've done so far in the areas of human sexuality and relationship studies. In other words, with it comes to relationship advice on these forums, TEGH, you get what you pay for.

However, if you don't like my advice, then hopefully someone else will come along who will offer you some better insight into you and your case, and perhaps offer you some better advice --> leading to your desired "wax on, wax off" moments.

Best of luck to you in the future,

-- Bagheera

[Spinaltap13]

With all due respect, I don't believe the OP really wanted any advice, as evidence by his taking of none of it, and not even considering what was offered. You sleep in the bed you make.

My .02, I could be wrong....

[Jayce]

Wow. SSM is not your problem. Why in the world did you marry this demanding, domineering hypochondriac? Butler, heck. You're one of those drone bees that spend their entire lives feeding the queen bee. You bring her coffee in bed while she shops online before work & while she lounges all day Saturday. Your music sports, hobbies all stored away while she takes over the whole house you're paying for, as you say?? So you learned to be agreeable to avoid conflict as a kid. Chronologically, you're not a kid anymore. What do you get out of this marriage? What does she do for you? Promising you won't threaten to leave isn't the same thing as stating it as a fact. Nor is it the same thing as just hauling off and doing it. She may take you to the cleaners financially, but at least you won't be letting her take any more years of your life.

Meanwhile, as they say, if you can't go to counseling together, go by yourself. Learn about yourself. Figure yourself out. Find out how you relly feel inside. Be honest with yourself. Why have you lived with these conditions for so long? Why have you waited until now to seek advice? This woman has no reason whatsoever to change her behavior or meet your needs in any way. After so many years, why would she believe you intend to take anything away, stop pampering her, insist she respect you? You may not be painted into a corner, but you're in one. I know this isn't the comfort or advice you hoped for. I know it sounds heartless, however, the sitch you describe is more complex than most of us can help you with. Certainly you can share your jouney, vent, rant, and you will get support for your struggle here. You are the only one who can search inside yourself.
Wishing you strength and insight,
Jayce

[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.

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

Wow. SSM is not your problem. Why in the world did you marry this demanding, domineering hypochondriac?

First, I question the classification of her as a hypochondriac. And I point to what I did as a child to indicate that I am VERY self-aware on these issues, probably moreso than most people.

As for the rest, the simple answer is that twenty-three years ago, this is not what I would have predicted as the path we would be on. Eighteen years ago, when we decided to get married, despite the difficulties we encountered, it seemed like a good idea. Unlike my two previous love relationships, this one (as I've mentioned previously) always had a degree of challenge to it. Maybe that's what happens when an ENTP (me) is in relationship to an ENTJ (her). But at the time and with the information I had available, I made the choice that I did.

Ten years ago this month (August 1999), when asked, I said I would have made the same choice even though we had already gone two years without any sex. She was still in post-operative recovery and we were dealing with various post-operative side effects. But the football-sized fibroid on her uterus and the softball-sized cyst on her right ovary were gone. You want to talk to me about health care reform, I'll tell you about the insurance bureacrats over the seven-year stretch that seemed more intent on profit than health-care. At that time, however, my hope was that when we revisited this, that she would have a change of heart and the part of her reasoning that was tied to the gynecological issues could change.

Quite simply, I was wrong about that.

None of this happened overnight. Unlike my previous marriage where my sex-life and my whole relationship changed, literally, overnight with the birth of my son, this was (and is) a slow, gradual process.

Now, given the benefit of 23 years of hindsight, I would not have made the same choice. Ultimately, I would have been better off never getting involved with anyone else after my first marriage ended, concentrated on being the great father that I did become and just left it at that.

[Walking]

Ultimately, I would have been better off never getting involved with anyone else after my first marriage ended, concentrated on being the great father that I did become and just left it at that.

But you still wouldn't have been having sex in that scenario. Does that mean there are circumstances in which you would consider being celebate?

I don't think I read about the extent of your wife's medical issues before your last post - that is certainly a lot to deal with - for both of you.

I also don't think you told us that your wife was literate in healthy-industry speak ... that's important too.

People can only listen to what's said - when I read your posts I feel like you want me to guess all the stuff that's unsaid. I wonder if your wife feels that too?

Just a question. FWIW.

[Walking]

It's been about "fixing" (as if I'm broken).

Mate - you may not be broken - but your marriage is.

I get that you're into Tolle and I get that you perceive yourself as very self aware and I respect that you've told the board you are interested in concrete examples of things that worked, rather than advice on liturature etc - but if that's the case, what do you want?

Do you love your wife? (whatever love is?)
Are you prepared to have an affair - and if you do will you tell your wife - or deceive her?
If you are in life transition and you plan to leave your wife, on the basis of a conversation about sex you had several years ago is that really fair to her in the here and now? (acknowledging it wasn't really fair for her to ask you for the no sex rule to start with)

There are very few people who will be able to give you their personal experience based on that set of circumstances.

I can give you my experience, based on not nearly as extreme, but some similar circumstances ...

When I was 33, I was married to a devoted, loving, 50 year old man. We'd been married for 10 years. I loved him with all my heart, but the sex wasn't as hot as it had been, he prefered to play golf or lawn bowls to tennis or bush walking. He liked to take our holiday's in New Zeland where we could fish and golf and I wanted to vacation in South East Asia and Africa where we could adventure and explore. My career was just taking off and I was ambitious as all get out. He was winding down from a very very successful career. I think we were both in life transition - but probably mostly because of the age gap our transitions were taking us in different places.

I left him.

It was the most stupid thing I've ever done.

4 years later, I'm still really sad about it.

I have great adventures now, my whole life is an adventure and I have a great sex life whenever I want it, my career has just gone from strength to strength ... but it's lonely being free my friend.

I miss my husband, my friend, my mentor, my (at times infrequent) lover.

If you love your wife - don't just leave her because you feel as though you get NO...thing from the relationship. Talk to her about where you are at. This is a different place than you were when you made the no sex agreement and she can't read your mind - she doesn't know you've changed, or are considering changing, it.

If you love your wife you should think very seriously about the implications of leaving the marriage. You'll be free - but it's not all it's cracked up to be.

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

People can only listen to what's said - when I read your posts I feel like you want me to guess all the stuff that's unsaid. I wonder if your wife feels that too?

A couple of great messages. Thank you. I have only a few minutes this AM to address any of this, so let me address a couple of brief items.

I think I included my wife's hysterectomy in the first post. This ultimately was not elective surgery as her passage through menopause did not "resolve" the fibroid or the cycst.

I did write that my wife is a therapist (though I wonder if I edited it out in my posts where I included her diagnosis of being "passive agressive" and the first post where I discussed our counselling). As I mentioned, stories are like maps, they provide you a general layout, but not necessarily the fine detail.

Finally, my comment where I say: "Ultimately, I would have been better off never getting involved with anyone else after my first marriage ended, concentrated on being the great father that I did become and just left it at that."

Let me state this briefly. For all intents and purposes, my life became celibate after September 1980. I've attempted to avoid comparisons of my sex life with my first wife (which was wonderful right up to the time our son was born) and the sex life that developed between my second wife and I up to 12 years ago. Although the two were "adventuresome" in different ways, simply put, the sex life with my second wife (in aggregate) never matched up with the experiences with my first. I know they are different people, different ages, with different experiences, and with different physical limitations and that this comparison is fraught with danger, but that is my experience.

My statement that you quoted, however, comes from this: for a period of about 15 years, I went away from my "trust" of my own intuition. I really can't say why. In retrospect, that intuition proved correct (or at least mostly so) and I ignored it at some great cost to myself.

So, my intuition told me (and I wrote it down at the time as I can read it in my own journals) that I probably should not have gotten involved with anyone else. I was a father and focused on that, a good one. To think that beyond being a sperm donor (and a name on a piece of paper to give "legitimacy" to offspring), that there was anything else I had to offer to some other woman was a "fool's hope."

At this stage of my life I realize that certain experiences would not have occurred (or occurred the way they unfolded) had I kept with my intuition. But I also recognize that I had I followed my intuition in my first marriage, I would not have told myself "you are just being paranoid." That marriage may have still crashed and she might still have been a WAW, but I would not have had to deal with the wondering for almost a year and a half before she revealed her affair.

There is an observation I have made (about myself) about when my life goes the smoothest, but I wan't to reconsider it before I share that here. I just note it in this message so I don't forget it in the future.

[Spinaltap13]

I'm not sure about your "occurring" in regards to listening and advice, too cerebral for me perhaps. My question...

How is it that recommending a book lessens the value of what's in that book? Does the content existing in book form make it not valid? Surely you realize the concept existed before it was put in to a book, no?

I hope it is not the case, but you seem beyond help because you do not accept what many of have found to be good sources of help in this arena. Certainly any advice is debatable, but you're not sitting at the neighborhood bar talking to Joe Sixpack; these are people who have studied, and lived this material. I'm not sure you've read Michele Weiner-Davis' books at all.

[quote]......
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...

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

How is it that recommending a book lessens the value of what's in that book? Does the content existing in book form make it not valid? Surely you realize the concept existed before it was put in to a book, no?

First, an occurring world, the way the world occurs for you and to you (including the people in it), occurs only through words, only through language. No language, no occurring. That does not mean nothing happens. It just means that without language you have no way to relate to (and to catalog) the world. One reason you can't remember your extremely early childhood...you did not have langauge or enough mastery of it to create your personal catalog of memories. Anything before that is just what someone told you as a story, even if it seems consistent with your memories and experiences.

To paraphrase Rorty (from a book), the fact that the physics of Newton provides a better explanation of the world than that of Aristotle does not mean the world speaks Newtonian. The world does not speak, only we do.

Conversely, the language you use gives you the world you see. A reason, the nearly 12.5 years of a sexless marriage has not torn us apart is because the language I use around it and these related issues does not (by intent) tear the marriage apart. How many people actually grasp that? What I can say, at a personal level, is something has changed for me that has had the nature of my conversation change. Now what does any of this have to do with books?

Books are just a conversation in written form, just as this posting is. In and of themselves, the idea that books can and do contain useful information is not a problem. I have a whole library of books that I've read and given away. I have access to three university libraries as well as our own local library to do nothing but read on this and related topics.

At this stage in my life (I'm 56), I'm less open to the idea that the fix will be found in the pages of some book. As I said elsewhere, to procure fixing through the pages of a book is to suggest that the problem is really a lack of knowledge. Given the volume of information written on and available on relationships alone, you'd think there should be no reason for any complaints ever about people's sex-lives, marriages, communication, etc. Yet, there is. Is that because people just have not found the right book?


If someone wants to share that the were in a similar situation as mine and that some book really does a good job of addressing the situation I've addressed here, because they, too, found that useful by looking at A, B, C, D, in sequence as recommended by a book, I am willing to listen. But to tell me to go buy and read a book does not cut it. Bagheera went a little farther by tryingto tell me that my problem is I'm a nice guy and that is worth some credit. But given what was said about me being a nice guy, would a nice guy be standing his ground and evermore emphatically stating "Wrong diagnosis?"

For example, in SSM I could identify the characteristics of what happened in my first marriage after our son was born. Not only that, but I knew that at the time. It did not keep my wife from taking the position that I had left the marriage and it was just a matter of time before I left her. She "pre-emptively" found herself some college boy 7 years younger than either of us and started her affair. Nothing made a difference (and if you asked her today, as I have recently, nothing would have or could have made any difference at the time). Even if we did it "by the book."

To twist a joke about management into this topic of reading:

The more time you spend reading about the problems of (and cures for) your life, the less time you actually have to tskr the actions to action do something. Stability is achived when you spend all your time reading about the cures for the nothing that you are doing.