Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[Lostforwords]

TEGH,

I usually doesn't follow this forum, but for some strange reason I did today....I was greatly rewarded. Not in that my situations mirrors yours, but I see in you what I might have become. You want experiences of men in your situation...here is one. I met a friends mother a few years ago (about your wife's age)and was taken back by her disregard for her husband. This woman, in front a me... a stranger, bragged about how she had not had sex with her husband (second marriage) for over 10 years and had used sex to get to his money. Then, knowing my situation, preceded to flirt with me the rest of the day. What makes even more interesting, her husband waits on her hand and foot. Does that sound familiar...is that what you want? I can GUARANTEE your wife has no respect for you and is just glowing in the easy life you have made for her. You might think it is not that easy for her....but she does.

You noted how your current wife finally started understanding your relationship with your 1st wife. I think you noted that was about ten years into your relationship or about 12 years ago. It is strange that it lines up with the start of your serious lack of sex. I would say your wife didn't understand...she gave up. Women are much more emotional and a tune to such things. She finally said "enough" to your apparent love for your first wife. I know you will disagree, but it is the obvious truth that you still love your 1st wife and a truth you need to accept. It is in almost all of your posts. You refer to how incredible it was and still apparently get validation from your 1st wife. I would get sick of hearing about an ex-love over and over again...being compared too....just knowing that my spouse was comparing us constantly in their mind.

In my opinion (I am not there to observe...and can only use your posts for a basis) that you are very emotionally closed and that has driven your current wife away. Here are the reasons you so desperately need;

1-I can guarantee you are an INTJ personality type..I won't explain farther because you know what that is
2-You are still in love with wife #1
3-You are a scientist or engineer-Logical interactions are your thing...emotions are illogical=disconnect from female mind
4-You are never wrong...you may say you are, but even when you post here about being wrong it is filled with a smugness that a woman will not forget or miss

You talk about confidence and how you succeed at things, but in the next sentence say your life isn't special, but ordinary. You have built a facade of self-confidence that we can all see through. From the little of YOUR life that you have exposed beyond your marriage, your life is anything but ordinary. You need to REALLY accept your accomplishments...not in a show of words...but in your mirror when you look at yourself.

On changing your relationship with your wife, I have no good advice. I would start by looking within and really determining your feelings for wife #1...I see it, but that doesn't matter. YOU HAVE TO SEE IT! You might have to change your mindset about fixing the problem also. You are attacking the situation like you would a broken power plant. You are expecting a specific outcome to an action....which in the logical world of science and engineering makes sense. The truth is that in the emotional world, most things aren't logical. The results of an action are not always the same. What works for one, might not work for another. You know Einstein's definition of insanity, yet you have been doing the same things for years...time to change!

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

Does that sound familiar...is that what you want? I can GUARANTEE your wife has no respect for you and is just glowing in the easy life you have made for her. You might think it is not that easy for her....but she does.

Thanks for sharing this story and yes, it does have a ring of familiarity, with one big exception. As far as I can tell, she's not advertising the no sex aspect of our marriage.

You noted how your current wife finally started understanding your relationship with your 1st wife.

Actually, you don't have this correct. What I said was she finally understood how I thought. She has never expressed any words about understanding my relationship with my first wife.

I think I can accurately say that she has never understood my relationship with my first wife (or what I ever saw in her to begin with).

The most contentious part of the my current wife's relationship with my ex-wife was over how I interacted with my ex about my son as he was growing up. I had joint custody AND I wasn't happy about my therapist girlfriend/wife deciding what I was doing wrong (or what my ex was doing wrong and why I was not being critical of her, etc., etc., etc.). On that I let her only push me so far (both before and after we got married) before I told her where she could put her opinion. I have been uncharacteristically blunt on this point. I was not going to let her screw that up for me and when it came to my son, I would leave first and ask questions later.

But I have never told my current wife what my sex-life was like with my ex except for how that went in the last 4 years between the time our son was born and the time we separated and ultimately divorced. Maybe, to my current wife, she sees the 16 times in 4 years as what was "normal for me" and the 2 or 3 times a week we made love at the beginning of this relationship was far more than what I had experience in my first marriage and if that were the case, I would not know better. I don't know because we've never discussed it and never made that comparison. Obviously, here I am making that comparison.

What we have discussed is the way our sex-life could/should look and, when our sex-life started to fall off to nothing, that we make a no-kidding commitment to make the time for each other, to take care of each other and our relationship.

That's the conversation we engaged in for eight months (over 12 years ago) with diligence and rules so that we did not go off on some angry emotional tangent (where we would not speak to each other). Do you want to know which one of us did not really say a word about what they wanted, what could or would make things the best they could be, how they envisioned this marriage and how it could look as it continued to grow? Hint: it was not me.

And after we had gone all around and over this and I had given her a whole wide range of ideas, thoughts, and (my) range of choices (all in context of maintaining the fidelity of the marriage) but had no input whatsoever about what she would choose, I wanted to know whether she was willing to be in any sexual relationship with me and her answer was, and I quote, "No, I'm not willing to do that." Nothing has dislodged her from that view and as time goes on and I turn more and more attention to this I realize that it is unlikely that anything will.

It feels a lot like being with my gay girlfriend.

As for being emotionally closed, I was not always like that and have made a committed effort in the last year to close more and more of my life off from her. She wants the stage, she can have it, all of it. That's what I told her last weekend. That way, when I get off the stage, she'll be used to having it all to herself without me.

Let me go down your points:

1) I can absolutely guarantee that I am not an INTJ.

Sorry, I've taken different versions of the Myers-Brigg and I come up ENTP almost every time. Only occasionally do I show up as ENTJ (and that is because the perceptive and the judgement factors come in almost perfectly balanced) and depending upon which guidance you use, the P/J factors may interchange. Does not matter whether I take the short version (70 questions) or the long version (more than 200). Never, ever, an I. Equally as important, I am married to an ENTP. Maybe two field marshals aren't a good mix.

2) You are correct, I do still love my first wife. I still love my first true girlfriend, too. When I care deeply about someone, I find I don't turn that off or on like a light switch. I still love my current wife and that's probably the only reason I'm still around and even having the sort of conversation I am having here and now. But I'm also starting to consider the next steps, where to move when, how to break the financial arrangements, sell the house, etc.

There is nothing to do or that I've ever done with or about that previous love. Oh, my ex and I have talked from time to time since we separated and divorced, reconciled some long standing misunderstandings, completed conversations and things left unsaid for too long. Almost all of that came after both of us had remarried. But most of the time we've spent together have been associated with activities with our son.

And if there is anything that I'd like in comparison to my first marriage is that I'd like the way that love felt as a starting point before it went so screwy on me.

3) Yes, I am a "recovering engineer." I deal with highly technical data and operations. I like to deal in the concrete facts and data. No surprise there. As for logic, true but not in the way you might think. I am a outside the box thinker (way outside) and my forte is and has always been best described as abstract logic. I'm comfortable with weirdness of quantum mechanics and the multi-dimensional superspace of string theory. For me, they are "hobbies."

Look up synesthesia. That's what I "have" and my form is that I see music in color and images. I thought everyone experienced music in color until I was 14 when I discovered (surprisingly) that no one I knew did. You go to a movie and probably don't much notice the music. I do, very, very vividly.

Its one reason I put music back into my life.

4) I recognize that I can come across as rarely, if ever wrong. I know that it can be preceived as just too knowing or maybe just a "know it all." Whether it comes across as smugness or something else, it begs a question. Which is more genuine being who I am and that comes with it or just faking it so I don't come across as correct much of the time?

And your observation actually proves a point I made a few days ago, what my intuition told me as I came out of my first marriage...that I actually have nothing to offer to a woman. All that stuff I wrote down 25 years about what I thought would be possible with a woman as I came out of that divorce was BS. I chose the wrong path and have wasted 25 years rather than doing what my intuition told me.

Be a father. Be a great father and raise a smart, well-adjusted son. Don't bad-mouth his mother or his step-father (which I haven't). Don't badmouth women. But forget about women altogether and be only a father.

It seems that being a great father (according to him, his girlfriend, and my ex-wife) is my only real accomplishment.

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

I have always related better to males, and often felt like I was the male in my marriage (I know that sounds odd).

Actually, it does not. And reading this just reminded me that my wife's hysterectomy also removed a set of undecended male sex organs that were never reabsorbed into her body.

If you think, as I do, that hormones can have a very large effect on mood I mention my first wife in contrast to my second because both seem to have a lot to deal with with respect to hormones and I end up receiving the brunt of it.

As for loving misery...no, I don't think so. That things have gone on for this time is a testament more to the fact that I just accepted things as being the way the way the are. The question is: is this all there is?

From now until I draw my last breath, is this all there is for me? Or do I just let go?

If I'm in a place where I know what I know, I'm not inclined to give up so easily and admit I'm wrong simply to admit I'm wrong (whether I am or not). But I also can be beat down and like a beat down dog, of that's all I get, it's tough to see another possibility or know something else is available.

As time goes on and I live with this situation occupying my mind more and more of the time, I am thinking I made two very big mistakes.

[Jayce]

TEGH: Have you ever heard of the phenomena of someone who is so smart they think they can't make a mistake? It is not uncommon. The person who does this typically disregards advice, warning signs, even personal past experience. Posessing a high IQ, a particular talent or skill, maybe experience or education in a specific area, they occasionally just blow it because they couldn't conceive of themselves making a mistake. Some of them do it regularly. Some learn from their mistakes. A humbling experience, I assure you.

You are way above average in intelligence. You love teaching, solving problems others see as exceedingly complex and discussing your competency and accomplishments. You love being in demand and traveling, functioning as an expert in your field. You love the sound of your own voice. You love expressing yourself in words, sentences, paragraphs that justify your feeling undeservedly martyred.

You evidently learned nothing about yourself from counseling. Nor from rereading your postings here. You may be "right", you may have "nothing wrong" with you, but to her you're not and you do. You obviously don't want to gain insight since you refuse to read books written for that express purpose. You seem to want someone to yell at your wife, give her a wake-up call, make her change rather than do it yourself. She's obviously accomplished at passive resistance and punishment. Why would she want to do that to you? Are you that big a disappointment to her? In what way? For how long? What signs have you missed? Is it fixable? Is she that angry at you? Why? Is she tired of hearing you exercise your voice?

You have to change yourself before you can change anyone else. Think about that therapy again, reread your posts OBJECTIVELY. Start a journal for your own eyes only. Be truthful with yourself. Read it thru after 3 months or so. Let us know what you figure out. We can't do it for you.
Jayce

[Lostforwords]

Two twins walk into a bar and see a single attractive woman......twins identical in all ways including wealth and careers. The only difference being that one twins is confident that he can be something to women. The second believes he has nothing to offer to women. Who walks out with the single woman? When I started my journey...my wife hit me with the "You are so unattractive". So being a person similar to yourself, I set out on a path the find out why I was so unattractive (I have since learned the truth about her statement, but that is another story). I had a good career, didn't drink, cheat, or cause disharmony in the house. Tried to help out the best I could including serving on my wife hand and foot. I took it to far...women may say they want what I described above, but only to a point. I talked with many females friends and their reply was simple. " We want this, but we also want a man who is confident...not cocky...confident". It was amazing to hear from many women how unimportant looks are in comparison to confidence. You need to change your mindset from "I offer nothing to women" to "I have a lot to offer". I have actually tested this mentality....I have gone into a bar thinking "I can offer any woman in here something" with my head up and chest pumped up and within minutes was talking to new women. I have also walked into the same bar feeling down and only wanting a quiet seat at the bar...and on those nights not a single woman talked to me.

In you, I see an unconfident man, who has no reason to be. In your wife I see a controlling woman and though you have set boundaries (raising your son)...she sets the rules that you have to obey. Even worse...you set the rules that limit your ability to live your life (been there...lol). I really think your SSM is not the problem...only a symptom. Your wife is content in the situation because she has set her boundaries and will not bend them. You can't control, fix, or change that....only she can and she doesn't have a reason to. When was the last time you did something for yourself? Not work related, helping others, or for your wife. I mean just for you...playing music, walking a beach, or working out. Why not try a simple experiment....today is Friday..go out to dinner and movie this evening by yourself. Don't invite your wife...just do it for you. If she asks...tell her you went out for dinner and a movie by yourself. Be honest and tell her the truth....on your pseudo escape commit to two things;
1)-Commit to making your waitress smile 5 times
2)-Say hello to 5 strangers while maintaining eye contact...even if it just a hello as you walk past each other.

Tell us all how you feel tomorrow.....I CHALLENGE you to do this...Honestly I don't think you can, but maybe you can surprise me with some spontaneity.

[Bagheera]

Good grief, TEGH: no wonder we end up circling each other like dogs, playing a game of point & counter-point and never getting anywhere constructive. Ours is a case of the rare "Rational" Inventor (ENTP) vs. the rare "Idealist" Counselor (INFJ}. To quote Wikipedia's "Inventor" entry:

"In arguments they [ENTP's] may use debating skills, often to the significant disadvantage of their opponent. This strategy can backfire, however, by alienating those seeking a cooperative relationship rather than a combative one—a typical source of conflict between Rationals and Idealists, for example."

While I don't feel particularly "disadvantaged," I DO feel very ineffective in being able to give you a hand. The biggest mistake that I made was in offering you an admittedly amateur "diagnosis" and self-help book "treatment program," early on, only to find out later that you are married to an (assumedly) accomplished therapist who utilizes her training as ammunition in marital disagreements with you, trying to diagnose you and treat you as a client, *rather* than her husband, and who has also turned your previous Marriage Counseling sessions into a two-on-one exercise in treating *you* and avoiding anything to do with HER. As a highly-trained psychological professional, she obviously considers herself to be *above* any of the common maladies and conditions afflicting her clients.

Were I in your shoes, I'd be pretty averse to further diagnosis and "treatment" recommendations also.

So let's turn this around and diagnose HER for a change. You wrote:

...she and her siblings all tell me that I am so much like their father. Laid back, even keeled most of the time, dry, punny humor, and flashes of insight and knowing that seemed to come out of nowhere (how did he know that?). We all jokingly say that she married her father when she married me.

Start there. Many, if not most of us, have a natural tendency to recreate the relationship conditions of our childhood in marriage, even if those conditions were not good ones (a form of "transference," to use the jargon). It's intrinsically familiar to us, a slot that we know automatically how to fall in to, and (here's the important point) has its roots in an unconscious desire to make "the story turn out right" -- to find someone who will finally come through and love us the way that we've always dreamed of.

Often, this natural tendency can make your marriage just as frustrating or miserable as your childhood. Example: I know that I did the above with my own marriage. I married a woman who had the same intimacy-avoidant traits as my mother, whilst being an intimacy-craving individual myself. It was frustrating as hell, for 20+ years, until we entered counseling and figured it out.

If you will then, describe your wife's childhood and teenage years, focusing on her relationship with her father? How did this develop into adulthood? What patterns (good or bad) is she potentially repeating in her relationship with you?

-- B.

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

I've read all the recent posts and to all of you, thank you.

I am packing stuff up, organizing papers, throwing stuff away I no longer need. I have the house to myself this weekend, so it's relatively quiet.

As I was going through the books to throw out and the books to keep, I was sorting through the ones on my sex, love and intimacy bookshelf, there was a book that I had not seen in a while: Divorce Busting. In hardcover, bought back in 1993, the jacket long since worn off.

I knew this all had a familiar ring to it. Now I know why.

Anyway, while taking a break to make some coffee this morning I got came to see what's new. There on the AOL entry page was the following article.

http://www.aolhealth.com/healthy-living/relationships/having-one-baby

Some have wondered why my first marriage keeps coming up for me. It was a sudden, unexpected loss for me. It's part of a pattern where thing go unexpectedly off track and don't turn out anything like I envisionsed it.

Read this article and it largely tracks my first marriage. The biggest difference was when my wife and I went out on those dates...she got angry at me for focusing on her and not on our son (and by accusation, not loving our son as much as she did).

But here is the kicker in the last paragraph on the first page of the article:

For a time, I wondered if I wasn't a modern day Demeter -- one of those women who, upon having a child, find their men to be superfluous. Rather than focusing on their husbands and affectionately tolerating children underfoot, they adore their children and value men for the security they provide, but little else.


Exactly!

And the thing about that paragraph...my ex-wife uses "Demeter" in her email address as her "call sign"

Well back to work.

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

In you, I see an unconfident man, who has no reason to be.

I only have a few minutes this morning before I have to go and teach a class, so I will make this short.

You completely miss the point.

Confidence has nothing to do with this and my easy going style made your challenge far too easy. Now, if the challenge was make my waitress orgasm five times (while still doing her job) that might have been more of a challenge.

The only person who really decides whether you have anything to offer is not you, it is only the person that accepts you whom decides that.

But much more relevant is the thought that had I followed my intuition 25 years ago and held to it, I might or might not have had a sexless life, but I certainly would not have had a sexless marriage because that would not/could not have happened.

And that is the point you miss.

I have two journals that are filled with the musings of a discarded husband (That's what I titled them in 1984-1986: The Journals and Journey of a Discarded Husband, with the tagline subtitle: "At Least I Had a Sense of Humor About It."

What is interesting as a retrospective is that I went from the serious job of examining my life and putting it back together, to what I thought I learned and what I had to offer. It was confifent, it was insightful, and it reflected an exciting life I had rebuilt. I am exceptionally clear about what I wnat in and why. I am also clear about what I had to offer at the time. I can reproduce that here but looking at it now, it is utter male bovine excrement.

The point is that there is something completely different about being confident and self-assured and the act of trying to sell the idea that you have something to offer. Very often what others see in you as being the your qualities are things we know about but can't see what others see. Why? Because we are immersed in who we are and all the experiences that we use to distiguish ourselves in relationship to the world around us. It is simply the air we breathe and we are largely unaware of it.

So, don't confuse the view of and a way of being of "I have nothing to offer" with lack of confidence. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. What it does relate to is that had I maintained that POV and gone on with my life, intentionally uninvolved with ANY long-term relationship and (certainly not marriage), I would not be here "complaining about" my sexless marriage. In fact I would not be here at all.

And if my life had remained sexless for the past 25 years after my first marriage, I would have known why...it would have been on my own terms and my own choice, not necessarily someone else's.

And reflecting back over how the past 25 years have gone for me at a sexual level, I made a huge mistake when I thought that I might once again have something to offer and thought I was ready to go meet the world and so who else was out there.

I would have been far better off just being the father and the man I was being 25 years ago and leaving it at that.

Th only redeeming factor in this situation is this: I have brought this to myself and brought myself to this life to learn to remind myslef of something about the way life is.

If only I could remember what that is....

[Lostforwords]

ROFLMAO...That was awesome TEGH....Making the waitress orgasm 5 times (while still doing her job). I saw this movie once were the girl was using her cell phone as a vibrator and had it gone off during a business meeting....you just made my day...:)

So then if we accept the notion that you are confident, but have nothing to offer the other sex...were are we? The only reasonable conclusion I can come up with is you have put your needs in your wife's control. I don't know your wife, but it seems like she is almost tyrannical in dealing with your needs and you accept that. Not that I think what you have done is a bad thing...I think it shows respect, trust, and integrity. The problem in our society that it is often those ideals that many proclaim and few live by that can be used against us. I just see a no-win situation for you. Your wife has closed the door on the conversation and as you have said before, there really is no reason to push it any more...since she is completely unresponsive to the conversation.

Hope you had a good class and it is time for a jeep ride with my kids.

P.S. When I was first reading your posts my first thought was "He is living with a very closeted lesbian"...so I did get a chuckle out the comment in an earlier post.

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

If you will then, describe your wife's childhood and teenage years, focusing on her relationship with her father? How did this develop into adulthood? What patterns (good or bad) is she potentially repeating in her relationship with you?

In considering your request, I was struck by how little I really know about that. Just snippets, really. Her father died before I met her (I'm not sure he got to see his granddaughter). However, you will likely see a pattern here as I do.

Her mom and dad were both from Kansas but moved to the coastal Carolinas after college. That is where my wife was born. But according to what i heard and observed with her mom was that there was this very flat, practical, dry-witted man that was her father. From what I can tell he was a "tinkerer" (you know, he tinkered with this, he tinkered with that) and was pretty handy for some things.

A story that is told with some amusement is the story about this travel trailer that they bought to (eventually) put into a future resort site near the coast (we stayed in that trailer a number of times before we sold the trailer and the property). They bought the trailer used and towed it home and put it in the driveway of their house. Anyway, when they bought it, apparently no one had thought to check or to empty the bilge tank on the trailer and one afternoon shortly after this trailer was in their driveway, he opened the valve.

Now, I don't know whether it was accidental or whether he was woeking on something else, or what. But the contents of the tank spilled out onto the driveway and it was an awful, smelly mess. By the time my wife's mom got home from her job, it was mostly cleaned up.

When she asked what he had been doing that afternoon, he said flatly, and matter of factly, "Shovelling sh*t." Apparently, my rather matter of fact dry-witted observations remind her siblings of her dad.

From what I can tell, the relationship between her and her father was a good one and fairly tight. At one level she saw him as somewhat "spacey" (something she would also say about me). But from everything I've heard, he adored his oldest daughter (my wife). There is another family story about a portait of my wife that hangs in our dining room, how hers is in color (when they would colorize black and white photos) and hers was bigger than the ones for her siblings.

Her father was not, from what I can tell, a stern disciplinarian. I know what that is like and there is every indication that an authoritarian dictatorship would not be the term you would to describe him. Slow to anger is what I think you might use to describe him because I can't recall any example that any of the siblings have used to described as him "raising his voice." My wife was one of the "hot girls" in her high school. I already described the marching band majorette with the flaming baton. Her dad made that up for her and was there to light the baton as she got ready to perform. She, apparently, got more than one indecent proposition from that to which she could respond "Go ask my dad and see if that's okay with him."

What I can say is that as far as most rules were concerned, if he laid down the rules, my wife broke them. She'd sneak out of the house with her friends or they simply would go places where they had no reason for being there (simply because it was against the rules). An anti-authoritarian streak emerged and has run throughout her life (don't tell her what she can and can't do). Her second husband found that out the hard way as he was fairly definite about what she should and should not do.

That did not work out so well.

In an era and area of racial segregation, my wife grew up in a family that was very progressive for it's time and is another living example of going against the social grain of the time.

My impression, however, is that when her dad told her not to do something or would not give his permission, she would either do it anyway or find some way around the obstacle he had put before her. I can't say I'm aware of any particular consequence (like taking her car away) that had real teeth to it.

In remembering this, there is also this sentiment that she has stated more than once to other people: No man controls her and she has said directly to other men "Better men than you have tried." I don't recall her ever saying that to me (but she's probably said it to her friends about me).

After all, she does have a tee-shirt that proclaims "I AM the QUEEN of the UNIVERSE! Any Questions?"

Since she came home last night, she's spoken all of six words to me. I'm going to let her go on like this for about the next week and then sit her down and say: "see what this is like, see what effort and what anger there is for you in knowing that you are intentionally not going to speak to me because of what might be going on on the other side? That's what it is like for me most of the time. If you did this everyday of the remainder of your marriage to me, you'd still be almost 23 years behind me in experience. And I'm hardly a tryrant compared to many other people."