Wow, this is a really tough situation but Those are really good insights for you. Well done. (As you can see, we all suggested the 5LL's book for a reason. It opened my eyes a lot too.)
I just wish she could understand 3 things about this.
...1) one of YOUR LLs is physical intimacy.
...2nd) she withholds sex, which is using it as a weapon to punish.
... we still can give ourselves to our h's out of love. When my father died, I was too depressed to fully enjoy sex but I still enjoyed the intimacy of ML...
...To hold a grudge all day about laundry or whatever the example is, is simply holding a grudge and not forgiving or cutting slack to your partner. NO MARRIAGE CAN SURVIVE OVER TIME, WITHOUT A LOT OF FORGIVENESS ON BOTH ENDS... I really stand by that.
...3) IMO, sex is not a commodity for a wife to give to a husband in some sort of quid pro quo exchange.
...Maybe you can talk about what sex is to each other, other than the physical part. Maybe someday she'll be willing to see a counselor. Or maybe this will continue on unabated.
....My question for you is this. If she's going to be this way for the forseeable future, is it a deal breaker for you? Do you know what you can live with? (You may not know yet, but you have to figure it out sometime.) And if she doesn't get help, how much change do you think you can expect of her?
If it is a dealbreaker, in fairness to her, you will have to be clear w/her so she knows what you know. Make sense? And fwiw, I think if she's not willing to change, you're going to have a tough road ahead and you'll need all the help and support you can garner....
+1, great insights straight from the heart.
A couple of added thoughts for GB.
I view GB's wife as being mmature in certain ways more so than anything else, but that is what I read and relate to. I see his wife as being confused about her own sexuality, what love means and what marriage (or committed relationships) mean. I see his wife as "acting out" to both get attension from her husband and to get and check reactions from him. This is not to condemn her and my view is based on my experience in my marriage. Let me explain.
In my marriage, one of the things that the sex therapist (who helped my wife and me) said that really resonated with me, was that every so often my wife would take on the role of a rebelious teenager (even though she was a mature woman who had two grown children). When my wife would do that she would try to position me into the role of "her parent" so that she could rebel against me and fight with me. It was a "role" she had learned in her youth and was comfortable with and it became her default role in our relationship when things didn't work out for her.
This was an insight I gained in therapy and sense may be going on in GB's marriage. Once I realized what was happening (and because I had survived being a parent to two strong willed teenagers) I was pretty easy, to not get sucked into the game she was trying to play.
Again, GB needs to be cautious with this advice, as it is me, projecting my experience on his situation. I may be wrong and it may not help him.
Another thing that really helped me in my SSM was some advice I got from John Gottman and his wife at one of their weekend workshops. It was that I cannot successfully and should not try to negotiate with my wife for something until I can explain her reasons for her position as well as or better than she can. That means that I need to invest a lot of time to understand why she feels the way she does about certain things, before I can hope work with her on see if they can be changed.
In GB's case, I see his wife is confused about her basic sexual orientation, she is confused about the kind of committed relationship she wants (marriage, open marriage, lesbian affairs,....). I would be overwhelmed in trying to fully understand such issues with my wife. My heart goes out to GB as he will need to try to understand this to help his wife (which is another good reason for a sex therapist marriage counselor who can translate and put into context for GB).
P.S. I also think that 25yearsmlc has an excellant point about developing some quantifable goals.
One of the things that I did was to set some goals for myself as to how love I would give things until I would end the marriage. I shared those with my wife in counseling and they were "vows" that I had made to myself and would have kept. If we had not been in counseling and I had revealed them, they may have sounded more like threats. In counseling, the sex therapist helped turn them from threats into boundaries that my wife needed to deal with.
Similarly, one of the things that I did was keep (and still do) a private diary. In my diary (which is password encrypted and not susceptible to a keystroke capturing device) I record my feelings, fears and interactions with my wife. It was theraputic when my marriage was in crisis. In reading it, I learned things that I had observed but not understood. For example, one of the things I did was to record all "signs of affection" that my wife showed me once I started my DB and unconditional love to her in her languages of love. I was surprised by all the things she did (in her languages of love and some of mine) that were really her trying to provide me with signs of affection. Before the end of our SSM, they only included small things that a sister might do to a brother as opposed to what a wife and husband should do, but they were still signs of affection on her part that I would have normally missed in my need for being touched and sex.
Good luck GB, you are really figuring things out quickly and making progress. Ultimately, whether your marriage succeeds or fails will be up to your wife's willingness to change (and possibly mature). The good news is that you are doing everything you can to save your marriage and can take that knowledge with you.
I hope that your wife sees the changes you are making in GAL, realizes that she to can make changes because of your example, realizes that you are a good man and a man that she is luckly to have devoted to her, and desides to become a woman worthy of such a man and his love.
Keep up the good work GB....continue with your GAL and personal growth, use visualization and words of self affirmation to feel good about yourself and who you are.
>43 years of marriage--My wife and I are now closer than we have been in decades. I believe that my SSM is over.
