I guess I kind of disappeared . . . but something made me check in today, and one of the first posts I read was someone wondering where I am. From a year ago. Oops.
I'm still out here,and I'm doing OK. I'm losing weight, getting my master's degree, and continuing to fix up my old fixer-upper of a house. Taking some advice here, I've begun renovating the bedroom with new windows so I can get the wiring done and get new walls finished. I've also gotten a bathtub installed in the new upstairs bathroom so my wife can take her long baths. Unfortunately, I lost my job over a stupid licensing issue that would have been easy to take care of back when I was so depressed--but which I didn't take care of back then. It was a lousy job in some ways, but I wanted to leave it on my own terms, and I didn't. That was a failure. But the licensing has been resolved, and next month I take a test to make my new licensing permanent. After that I can apply for full-time work at the place where I'm filling in now, and I should end up making more money with more options than I had before. This time I'm doing things on my own terms, which doesn't always make my wife happy, but hey, she wanted it and now it's happening. We have quite a bit saved, and with the fill-in work, money's not too tight.
She's working very hard on the marriage with me. Last year I thought I'd had a great idea when ballroom dancing lessons were offered in our town; she loves to dance. She didn't want to do it then, and I was crushed, but I didn't sulk. I just told her I was taking her at her word that she wanted to do it another time, and when she was ready she should let me know. She found a class this fall, so we've been doing that together once a week. We make a date out of it. My parents take the kids and we go with another couple, then have dinner. The boys are doing better at school, and we've started seeing a family counselor for adoption preservation again, as well as a monthly visit with a psychiatrist for one of the twins who was having problems with anger and self-hurting earlier (we were talked into stopping our therapy sessions because the boys were doing so well, but that was just as they hit puberty--it was a mistake.) The baby is . . . well, he's two-and-a-half now, actually, and he's absolutely fantastic.
Sex has been much better lately. I'm still experimenting with what she likes best and what I like best, and it's complicated because she still feels guilty about some of her favorite things, but she long ago accepted that sex is important to me and she has to make some kind of effort. Now it's more about details and about not stopping our forward progress.
One thing that has driven me to think more about these forums lately is that my wife's best friend is going through the classic "Sex Starved Marriage." In their case, the husband is the low-desire person, but it otherwise mirrors our experience in a lot of ways. He takes anti-depressants (actually, he's off them now, which has its own drawbacks) and both are overweight, but she resorted to surgery and lost a lot of weight, which made him feel insecure. She wants sex, he wants to be left alone. They've begun talking about divorce in a passive-aggressive way, with each asking the other if he wants a divorce. My wife would like to help them.
Here's the thing; we gave the wife our copy of The Sex-Starved Marriage. Beyond that, I don't know how much help we can be. We have our own struggle, and to me this is like the alcoholic who's been sober for a year and now wants to help everyone else dry out. The impulse is admirable, but to me it seems predictable that all this would do is draw us into their conflict and draw their conflicts into our marriage, where we have enough of our own. It feels good that we're dealing with these issues, but they're not gone.
We've already seen a little of that. My wife works with "the wife" all day, so we get her side of every story. My wife told me the other day that she thinks the other couple should definitely be seeing a counselor, but that husband just won't agree to it. I couldn't help but chuckle at her; in our marriage, she was the one who just wouldn't agree to that idea no matter what I said. I wonder now if she was right or wrong, of course, since we seem to be making it work without the counselor.
Anyway, we still have our problems, but we're working on them and life is better than it was. I don't know if most of the people I remember from these forums are still here, but I've been thinking it would be good to get involved again and not get complacent.
