no hope

[Young at Heart]

...i am doing my best to withdraw, and i have been training myself to withdraw physically and emotionally while trying not to let on to the kids.

i also have become afraid to approach the situation anymore; that's the really sad, emasculating part of it all.

....there is nothing that makes me sexually attractive to her, and she has said time and time again that it has nothing to do with me, yet she has no intentions of changing herself for me...

Last fall, those words could have been mine!

I think that there is the potential for not giving up all hope.

I don't know what will or will not work for you. I do not know whether your wife wants to remain married or if you will be happier getting divorced. I can however, share with you what worked for me.

Last August, I became fed up and decided I could not take it anymore. I told my wife that I was not going to have sex with her because of the emotional pain she inflicted upon me. I told her that if she could prove to me that she wanted to have sex with me and would not emotionally hurt me, I would have sex with her, but I was not going to ever allow myself to be hurt by her again. I figured that sex with my wife, the way we had been interacting, was nothing I wanted anymore and that unless something changed; I was going to divorce my wife. I also decided that if I wanted to find happiness, I needed to make some serious lifestyle changes so that I could be a truly happy person.

I asked her what I could do to make myself more desirable to her. She told me it wasn't me, it was her, but that she loved me. Later I learned it was really her deeply held anger toward me for my "not being there for her" decades earlier in our marriage that was a source of our sexual problems.

I decided to loose weight, get in shape, educate myself on male/female relationships, get active in some hobbies, and start to dress better. I developed some specific weight loss goals and fitness goals (every 3 months) that ended in early 2011, which was a year and half away.

I promised myself that I would be in a healthy sexual relationship by then with or without my wife and that I would be in nearly the best shape I had ever been in my life. I read up on the divorce laws in the state where I lived and figured out when I would need to file divorce papers on my wife to be free and have had 6 months of freedom to heal and find the physical love I needed and deserved. I came up with a plan to become someone that an attractive and sexually desireable woman would want to be with. In short I was going to transform myself and find happiness.

I made some very firm promises to myself that I was going to enjoy happiness and not look back wishing I had done things differently on my death bed.

I also decided to try to save my marriage, if I could, and if I couldn't, to part friends with my wife.

I told her of my plans and I implemented them. She saw how resolved I was and the changes in lifestyle that I was making. I was loosing weight on a regular basis. I changed my eating habits totally. I was exercising regularly. I was reading one relationship book after another. I also did things to make her feel emotionally loved. It took months without sex, before she realized that I was changing and changing rapidly to a life that I wanted to have.

Ultimately, she started to do a few things to reach out to me, such as asking to read some of the relationship books I was reading. But for every step forward she took 3/4 of a step back, fought and inflicted emotional pain on me.

Ultimately, I got her to go to a combination sex therapist and doctor for a medical checkup. I also had convinced her to try counseling. I was very lucky in that the sex therapist/doctor recommended that my wife set up appointments for individual conseling with her (the sex therapist/doctor I had recommended) and then recommended some local sex therapists who could see us as a couple. One of them had a national reputation as a sex therapist and was incredible, so we made an appointment with her.

Ultimately, my wife's individual sex therapist pointed out to my wife (in a way that she heard and understood) that the anger my wife felt toward me was caused by the pain I had inflicted upon her by not providing her with the help she felt she needed as a young mother. That anger simmered over the years until it caused my wife to emotionally and sexually withdraw from me. Her individual sex therapist then pointed out that my wife had withdrawn from me and caused the exact same pain in me that she felt I had inflicted in her. The sex therapist pointed out that most older women who do not have medical problems that make sex painful are just angry at their spouse and as long as they remain angry, it is hard to willingly have sex with someone who makes you feel like that. The sex therapist then said that my wife could either forgive me (let go of the anger) and re-establish love between us or do nothing and wait for me to divorce her in a few months, but the choice on what would happen would be my wife's choice and my wife should start to prepare for the consequences of her choice.

Concurrently, our couple's sex therapist forced my wife to confront her own sexual inhibitions, forced my wife to verbally and mentally acknowledge that if nothing changed we would be divorced, and forced my wife to admit verbally and mentally that she wanted to remain married to me. She also forced me to acknowledge how I had hurt my wife, to apologize for my actions, and to forgive my wife for the pain she had caused me. Our couple's sex therapist also provided us with reading material and exercises to try to get us to touch and be sexual with each other again. Most importantly our sex therapist negotiated what a sastisfactory sex life would entail, pointed out to me wife that it was something she had been willing to do early in our relationship, and helped us visualize what a happy satisfying marriage (that included an active sex life) would entail.

While our couple's sex therapist has pronounced us "cured" and we have been having sex on average two to three times a week since the end of February (with a couple of exceptions) there are still issues we are dealing with and a relationship we are trying to repair.

This is getting long winded on my part, but my Getting a Life (NM Mr NG), providing unconditional love in the primary & secondary languages of love of my spouse (Chapman's 5 languages of love), both of us reading and talking about MWD's SSM, my understanding that my need for touch and physcial love was healthy and normal (Sue Johnson's Hold Me Tight), advice on being patient and lowering my expectations from this forum, two great sex theapists, a John Gottman couples weekend workshop, and luck; helped my wife decide to have sex with me again and helped us both work on regaining closeness we had not had in decades.

Again, I don't know what might or might not work for you and your wife. I do know what worked for me. I do know that the words you have written sound very familiar to me. Good luck to you and your family.

P.S. Last weekend I competed in (and finished) a half-marathon. Compared to a year ago, my wife and I are a totally different couple. I have a hard time believing the change that has happened in less than a year.