Not sure what to do

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

"Conventional wisdom" says that marriage involves compromise.

Unless, of course, it does not.

Although I can give you a series of very plausible medical "reasons" for why my situation developed the way it did, it never has fully or completely explained the situation.

Moreover, with my W there is a psychological pathology that I am dealing with that remains elusive, though it shows up in other areas of our lives and in other relationships not dependent upon sexual intimacy. It looks a lot like an OCD. Compromise, I assert, is something that my W does not do well.

Somehow I've ended up with two different ends of the pendulum swing. My ex-wife still says (and I have no reason to doubt this) that many times what she offered was a 'compromise' between what she really wanted and what she thought I'd accept. Then she would compomise the compromise (unknown to me, of course) and have the accumulated anger of rarely getting what she really 'wanted.'

I actually understand what my ex means because I found myself doing the same thing (trying to find the acceptable compromise) and then finding myself 'shot-down.' Might as well ask for my uncompromised preference and get shot down for that. In my case, I was very, very clear about what I preferred and what my acceptable ranges looked like with regard to sexual intimacy.

They were, ultimately, dismissed.

You asked, previously, why 13 years? Because time passes, life happens, and "changes" become the new, normal routine.

I've written on this in some detail over in the dozen years thread, but long story short: a fairly dramatic drop off in our sex life, I'm diagnosed and then treated for cancer, I finally get very persistent on her 51st birthday (1997, I'm 44 at that time) and she gives me the "no means no" speech as well as the threat of an attempted rape charge, starts six-months of very explicit negotiation over sexual intimacy in our marriage, she finally says no to any more sex or any future commitment to it (April 1998).

About two weeks later her mother suffers a stroke and thus begins my journey into treatment and caretaking of parents. Five and half years later my mother falls critically ill (August 2003). My mom is intensive care for almost a month and just as my mom begins her rehab, my W's mom dies (October 2003). My mom's health physical never returns and she is moved into a nursing home. It takes me a couple of months to process all of my mom's belongings while dealing w/ my W's mother's estate issues in an indirect way.

My mom died in 2009.

In the meantime, life happened and time passed. I knew what my W's decision meant in 1998, though she was dismissive of what I said a couple of months earlier in frustratio over our missing sex life ("if we had wait until you wanted to be sexually intimate, it would never happen!"). But I delayed in an immediate departure when she said no and then, caught up in all the medical drama, could not see myself walking away in the middle of the crisis with her mom. Of course, I was also hopeful she would change her mind and take my request seriously, since my request was about as unambiguous as I could make it.


A question I ask myself is this: would my situation be any different if my W had ALS or MS, or a whole host of other neuro-muscular diseases? Maybe not.

But the difference, even with my wife's various medical situations and reasons, is that I was plain and direct about what I was looking for at the beginning of this relationship in 1986 and I was equally plain, soft spoken, and direct as the sexual intimacy fell apart in 1996 and 1997. (It also took her that long to grasp, for the first time, how I "thought" and processed information to see and relate to the world. But that is another story). She made her decision in full knowledge of what I was requesting even as a "need."

What is has devolved to is courteous housemates where I have more physical capacity to take care of her and its a convenience (for her) to know that I am around and accessible for things other than intimacy.

The Captain

It's time for my evening walk