Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

NONE of the above has anything to do with your wife going through menopause or a hysterectomy.

Your understanding of what was/is involved in the my wife's medical conditions and what went on is so stunningly superficial that it is almost embarrassing to read what you wrote.

While I am not saying that all of the behaviors that my wife displayed and are entirely the root cause of the basis for the way she "be"'s (as in the way she is being in the moment) and the way I've also responded in each of those moments, it does and has played a role. How much is hard to quantify, but I think I can say with some confidence in my answer that it has magnified some of the least pleasurable aspects of our interpersonal interactions.

It is extremely presumptuous on your part to assert NONE of what I describe has anything to do with menopause of the hysterectomy. It shows a great deal of ignorance on your part. It demonstrates just how entirely clueless you are on these matters.

So, maybe what it takes for you is a more direct description of the actual conditions rather than simply describing it as "bleeding to death." And if you still have no appreciation for what this might be like (for her) and how that can influence interactions between two people, perhaps you can ask your wife what she thinks she would feel like going through the same sort of conditions.

My wife went off birth control pills about a year before we got married. At age 45 with high blood pressure, her gynecologist recommended that she change methods. After playing around with a diaphragm for a while, she went with an IUD. Although the effects were not immediate, the regular menstrual flows and timings that she had with birth control pills gradually started to become more irregular. Sometimes her flows were quite heavy, other relatively light. When were were on our honeymoon in Hawaii, one of these heavy flows started rather unexpectedly and brought a rather quick end to a very pleasant day.

As time went on and she became more irregular (actually moving towards a constant, ever present menstrual flow), we changed contraception again, and went back to a diaphragm or to condoms. Made all of that as part of the foreplay. But four years prior to her hysterectomy and two years after we had married, for all intents and purposes, she was in a constant state of menstrual flow. There were short breaks that lasted from a few days to a couple of weeks. The last time we made love was in one of those breaks. But by the time she told me no more sex, she was also continuously bleeding. She did not use that directly as a reason when she finally said no, but it was a consideration in the previous discussions leading up to her decision. I was a good husband in that I would (fairly routinely) go purchase tampons and pads for her.

She was becoming anemic in the last 8 months before her hysterectomy. The insurance company took the position that this condition would eventually resolve itself. Finally, a few weeks before her surgery was approved and scheduled, something triggered an auto-immune response and caused the surgery to be put off for about a month. It came down to no longer having any choices were the risks from surgery were outweighed by the risk associated with her not having surgery.

What part or percentage of our interactions were being given by this underlying condition? It's hard to say.

But what is your experience with your own wife around those menstrual periods? I knew that in my own case, there was a certain degree of moodiness that had to be dealt with, and that 7-10 days after the period started, there would be wild monkey sex with an extremely horny partner. But that was becoming less and less available. But what is clear (to me at least) is that the 5-year nearly continuous (certainly continual) menstrual flow played some role in producing and magnifying some of the behaviors that I reacted and responded to.

Which brings me back to the Nice Guy Syndrome that you keep trying to apply to me. I actually spent about an hour, when I was in Baltimore last month, sitting and reading through passages of the book. While some of it is sort of common sense, it seemed to me to apply to men who are far less secure about themselves and less knowledgeable about who they are, what they think and how they work, then I am. I've told you "no, it does not apply to me." and it leaves me with an interesting question for you: What part of "no" do you not understand?

Let me contrast what I see the difference is. Do you play chess? If I was a "nice guy" in the way that Glover means it and was playing black and the opening move was P-K4, I would resign (or wouldn't go more than a few moves before resigning). If I was playing white, I might open P-K4 to be met with P-K4, and then resign (or again would not play beyond a few moves before resigning). Metaphorically speaking, that is not me and whatever I've given up has been after a good deal of struggle (say 25-35 moves into a game of chess). I don;t think you get that and that whatever I've given up under dominance, tyranny, or whatever, has not gone down easily. But as I pointed out to her a couple of weeks ago, she is so domineering not just of me but of everyone, everywhere, that she ultimately gets her way regardless of the cost (or the cost has simply not been high enough for it to deter her.

If you actually read through those posts from the link I provided, one thing should be abundantly clear: no amount of "becoming more masculine" will likely change my wife's lack of sexual response to me. I came here to see if, under the guise of an SSM. if there were other experiences that could drawn upon that were outside of the sort of response you find in the hysterectomy blogs and forums. Sadly, the answer is no.

I am left where I started: to choose to stay in a marriage that is devoid of sex or to go outside (which, for me, means ending the marriage) to reopen the possibility of an intimate sexual relationship. It can't be any starker than that.

If you don't have anything to offer, then say you don't have anything to offer and leave it at that rather than the snide little comment like the one you tacked onto the end of your last post. I am not broken. Read that again: I am not broken.

The way that the relationship works might be broken. It certainly, given the benefit of hindsight has not turned out the way that I would have predicted or expected.

It is time for you to stop treating people as broken (and reading MWD's writing it seems pretty apparent that she does not see people as broken), including yourself.