There's the address for my most recent thread. Anybody still here who remembers me?
Well, I found myself having fewer and fewer things to say, posting less and less often here, and finally got off the board for a while. W and I were getting along better, and, as recently as 3-4 weeks ago, W said ILY again. 2 different times!
But, of course, when she became more a fixture in my life, I began living my life with the assumption of her presence, enjoying and learning to rely on the positive presence that she was in my life. And, slowly, shifted focus from the changes I was making. Not so much changes in my behavior toward her (although I might have been doing that too - I'm not sure), but changes in the extent to which I was relying on myself, focusing on what I should be.
And then, things crashed. Hard. I don't know if my "falling off the DB wagon" contributed to the crash. I do know that my loss of focus on the 180s made me ill equipped to cope with it. I am a mental health prescriber; I, of all people, know about patients who stop taking their medication when they start feeling better. And that's exactly what I did. Lost my focus when things started feeling better. Now I feel devastated and depressed.
You guys have been my lifeline as I have struggled with my M. So, now, here I come. Back again, feeling stupid. I think I need you again.
What happened? Well, I can't really say where it started, but I can say that things had seemed really much better. W had recognized a couple of episodes when she had been irritable and unkind to me, and she actually woke up early (I usually leave for work quite a while before she wakes up) to apologize to me. We even ML at those times, and those were the times she said ILY. So things seemed to be getting MUCH better.
Well, one time when we were ML (a different time - we had gotten to about once a week - yay!), I was a little clumsy. OK, a lot clumsy. Without getting too detailed, there was one point where she told me I was hurting her. I tried to respond by changing how I was doing things, and she told me that I was doing exactly the same. I tried to change several times, and it just kept getting worse. Maybe I was nervous and self-conscious, or maybe I was just stupid, but it didn't occur to me to just stop until she flat out told me, "STOP." We had to do a little discussing after that one, because she was upset - she felt disregarded and ignored because, from her point of view I just kept doing the same thing when she told me it was hurting. I initially tried to explain what had been going through my mind and why I had acted the way I did, but shortly I caught myself and just expressed to her my understanding of the way I had made her feel, and apologized to her. And it seemed to be OK.
Fast forward 2 weeks. The house is a mess and W and I are aware that this needs to change before the "little stranger" arrives. On nights when I have little time, I start going through our endless pile of junk mail that we have been putting off forever. W expressed her appreciation to me for doing this, and says that she can take care of most of the mail, just asking me to go through stuff addressed to me.
2 nights later, I am going through a few of my letters from work, and notice a stack of today's mail out in the middle of the room. Thinking nothing of it, I pick that up, and ask W what to do with something addressed to her in that pile. W reminds me to just go through my mail, and later that night expresses to me (calmly) that she felt disregarded again, as she had clearly told me to just take care of my own mail and she interpreted this as me ignoring what she said. I apologized and, as I was already in bed, we went to sleep.
The next day she was cold to me. Now this was not entirely unexpected, as I know that it always takes W a while to get past something, especially since so many of her problems wtih me are trust issues, and those are only fixed by long term, CONSISTENT change. But this was more than usual. I came to her and asked how her day was, and she responded, "Why do you ask?" Then she informed me that there was no point to her answering any of my questions, as I ignore what she says anyway. I told her that she was generalizing, and she became furious and immediately brought up the two weeks before in bed. Then she informed me that I have always been that insensitive in bed (for 18 years of marriage), and that she has only continued to have sex with me because she felt that, as my wife, she ought to. She also said that she wanted sex often, and would have it every day if she could, but my insensitivity made it so unpleasant that it has led to our sparse sex life. She told me that she had tried to tell me while we were ML in the past, but I would immediately become so self conscious and even more clumsy (which, I seem to recall, did happen several times) that she concluded that this made it only the worse, so she gave up.
The following day, I tried to clarify with her my understanding of what she had said, and she added that my ignoring of what she wanted and what she said for the past 18 years was not limited only to the bedroom, but has been the case in every area of my life.
She no longer feels obligated to have sex with me and, knowing how she feels about it and what an ordeal she says it has been, it wouldn't be any fun for me, anyway. I would be more than willing to learn, but she is filled with so much resentment (judging by the way she talked to me) that I don't think she even really wants to try.
And there is a new baby coming into the middle of all this! Feel sorry for the kid.
And you can guess I am feeling pretty depressed. Since all this stuff exploded we have been talking to each other casually, and since the expectation of sex or affection is not there right now, there is not a HUGE amound of tension between us.
I just don't know where things are going right now.
So, in short, I guess I might have left the board prematurely.
Think about it...if you met a potential mate who was nothing but a bundle of needs, would YOU be attracted to them?
