I just have to say that this board is fascinating! I encountered CeMar on the MLC board and engaged him in some conversation about his frustration with his W. I think that for the first time EVER I understood why my marriage ended as a result of talking to him.
I was LD, H was HD. There was not an absence of sex (the usual two point something times a week) but I did not feel DESIRE! I could enjoy sex but I didn't need it the way H did. He complained, it was a constant issue, I never understood, brushed his complaints aside, told him his perceptions were wrong. Then he had an affair and although we tried to recover, we could not. He knew there was someone HD out there to make him happy!
So he left three years ago and now we are getting divorced. He has a new woman who presumably makes him very happy.
What a terrible waste that we couldn't communicate well enough to make each other understand how we felt. I'm not sure it would have made any difference in the end but isn't that what marriage is all about?? -- negotiating, sticking with it, trying to get the other person to understand, respecting each other's feelings, etc. We never got to that point. What I thought was a really good marriage was a kind of crappy marriage. We were like brother and sister, wonderful companions, and it took me a long time to get over missing him. I'm sure there are many things he misses about me too but alas, I'm gone.... I can hardly be in the same room with him anymore. Makes my skin crawl.
So I just wanted to drop in and say that I admire all of you HD people who stick with it and try to make it work. If you can be as explicit with your spouses as you are here, they might get it. Even my H telling me he was in love with another person and wanted to leave us didn't do it for me because we never carried the conversation on to a deeper level. We just tried to patch things up and move on. And I never understood that he needed me to feel PASSION. All the things you say here are things he needed from me and didn't get: more touching, little signs of affection, initiating, not just "going along".
Corri, I have a huge amount of respect for you. You really worked hard to understand your H. You are patient with others and very compassionate. You also asked one of the posters the very question running through my mind as I read this thread: how did you cope as a single person? Were you absolutely miserable when there was no one there to give you affection and passionate sex? How did you manage to self-soothe then?
To all I recommend a pretty amazing book: Passionate Marriage by Schnarch. He has a website too. He takes a different approach than most-- says that the whole point of marriage is to differentiate, not to merge, and that each spouse needs to "hold onto themselves" in the relationship.
Well, just wanted to applaud from the sidelines. I admire how everyone is trying to cope and learn and understand.
I will say one thing -- you cannot imagine the pain that divorce will inflict on ALL concerned. My H has what he so desperately wanted from me and couldn't get -- a loving (doting, smothering, I would say -- but hold it! that's my bias showing) mate. But he has lost much of the attention and care of his children, half his income, etc. Sometimes I wonder if he feels it is worth it. But alas, we talk on only the most superficial level these days and I will probably never know.
