Okay, time for an update on my sitch. Not sure if there's still anyone here who remembers me, but I haven't posted in a while (2006). I was a pretty active poster from about '03 till '06. Just so you don't need to wade through all my old posts, here's my story outline:
Married in '79, we were each others' first and only significant attachment. Courtship ('76-'79) was a heavenly time for both of us. We did do sexual things during courtship, but didn't go "all the way" till after the wedding. Looking back, things started to go south right after the wedding, from what I remember. I know now that she was LD from the beginning, and she started putting up walls almost right away, because as she put it, she felt somewhat overwhelmed at the depth of my desire. Perhaps I was clumsy, also, but I have always made sure I'm an attentive and generous lover, and I always wanted to make sure she was satisfied. She just didn't want it nearly as often as I did. So there were problems from the start.
When we started trying to have kids, we discovered that fertility was an issue, and we ended up having to use fertility drugs for the first 2 kids. That made the sex thing difficult, because for months on end, it was pretty much "on demand" when the "time was right", and not at all at other times. That led to negative feelings about sex on her part. After the second was born, she wouldn't let me near her for over a year, and even after that, things in the bedroom were far from good, and we ML very seldom for a long time. Eventually, we had a heart-to-heart (me instigating), and she agreed to once a week. A month or two of that, and the third was conceived (surprise, surprise!), and immediately after finding out she was pregnant, she would no longer ML with me at all till after (LONG after) the baby was born.
I lost my job 2 months before #3 was born, and the following years were very hard. I was trying to rebuild my career, and she was emotionally dead. After 5 or 6 years, I finally got back on track career-wise, but the bedroom sitch never really recovered.
Over the past 10 years or so, mostly at my insistance, we've been trying to improve our relationship, but it's been a very long and frustrating road. We saw a counselor in 2000 (neither of us was impressed with him), then again in '02 (I liked her a lot, but W felt she was taking my side over her). W saw a counselor alone in '04 (I was posting here a lot at that time), but for the past few years we've been occasionally trying to work on the R with no real progress. In fact, a couple weeks ago, I found and read a journal the '02 counselor had us do, and I could write the very same things right now - nothing has really changed.
So what's been happening with me in the past few years? Well, when I went back and reviewed my last few postings from '06, I was fairly optimistic that change was at last at hand, but alas, I have to report that once again, years have gone by with no progress at all. I've spent the past few years once again pretty much on autopilot, visiting the "palmer twins" on a regular basis.
In '07, I had a colonoscopy, and the doc removed a polyp. A week later, it started bleeding, and I went into emerg at 10:00 pm. Overnight, I lost a lot of blood - they gave me 2 units the following day, and during the night there was a bad spell where I lost consciousness and woke to find a team of worried docs working on me. I was in hospital from Monday night till Thursday evening that time, then the very next week I had an inflamed galbladder, and ended up having emergency surgery. I was off work 2 weeks, and couldn't do any lifting for 3 months (they also fixed a hernia while they had me on the table). All in all an interesting adventure. Since then, I've just been busy at work, and nothing much happening on the home front.
Last October, we spent a weekend in Niagara Falls in a fancy hotel, 39th floor, overlooking the falls, it being my hope we might begin to rekindle things if we were away from the kids/house/hassles for a couple days and nights. No real luck. We did ML, but the sex was lousy.
So, we've ML exactly 3 times in about the past 18 months, and things finally came to a head (again) around New Year's. One thing that came out of that was that we're making one more attempt at counseling, and we've had one session so far (Jan 12). The second session was supposed to be 2 weeks later, but W got a bad cold, so we had to reschedule. The second session is this coming Tues. I'll be posting here how it goes. One assignment we had after Session 1 was to each draw up a list of "We" statements describing the Ideal Relationship - i.e. what we want our R to look like going forward. Then take our individual lists and combine them into a master list, that we both agree on - i.e. a "Mission Statement" for the R. Well, I had 24 statements in my list, mostly things like "We laugh together" and "We go on a date at least once a month", but two of them were "We make love often and joyfully" and "We have make-up sex when we argue". Guess which ones didn't make the master list, lol...
Anyway, that's the story in a nutshell. At this point, I'm thinking that really our issues aren't about sex at all, but perhaps the real issues go very deep, and are perhaps fundamental to our R. Maybe I was actually fooling myself all those years ago, and maybe we were never really meant to marry. Dunno. I'm looking back at a very long history of not having the R I want, although she's mostly seemed satisfied with it, so if past performance predicts future behavior, maybe I've been flogging a dead horse way too long. I'm hoping this next round of counseling will help to clarify things. I do know I can't go on the way we've been going.
