He's Just Not That Into You

[mamabird]

I still can't get over how alike our Hs are. My H has all the same complaints about me. I wonder what other traits they share. What's your H's background?

Wendy, I'm not exactly sure how to answer but I will try. H has a little bit of a troubled background. His parents divorced when he was a teenager and it was a lot of on and off before they finally broke up for good. At that point his mother left CA and moved to Colorado, basically abandoning H and his sister to live with their father.

His mother is, in my opinion, completely nuts. Very selfish as well, everything is always about what she wants. I have never seen so much wavering from one person. She's Jewish, she's Christian. She's straight, she's gay, she's straight again. She's now accusing her own mother of molesting her. She lives 1 1/2 hours away, and would come down here for a haircut 10 minutes from our house and not call. She is highly medicated and has a host of physical ailments as well. She was not much of a mother, suffice it to say.

I have always been the opposite of that - pretty much rock solid - and I realized much too late that H was looking for a mommy. I have known him since the 7th grade and we were always friends, on again, off again. Finally we got together when we were 28. H was always kind of a goof-off and always pretty immature but I thought that he'd finally grown up. But he did have bad credit when we started dating. A red flag I should have paid more attention to.

On the flip side, he's very loyal and loving and funny and smart. I do think though, that he never really learned how to deal with his emotions. He's a big time stuffer and started the withdrawing nonsense very early on in our R. In addition we had a terrible sex life at the start, and it only got worse from there, until OM1 came along, and then it improved a lot. H finally let go of something in that domain.

I have said this before but I'm convinced that he's never dealt with his mommy issues and is hurting more than ever from her abandonment. Of course as a teen he took a lot of that personally and grew up with an internal "self-deprecating" dialogue that I didn't realize until I got here (Mr. Bond actually pointed out to me how insecure he is). The self-deprecation then gets turned around and comes out as an attack on me. He just doesn't think he's good enough, another thing which we never dealt with.

No alcohol or drug abuse but as I have said before he also takes a whole host of medications to cope. He goes through Xanax like nobody's business. He is the kind of person who is very reluctant to ask anyone for help and as far as I am concerned he is doing more stuffing with regards to our R. I haven't seen any evidence that he understands that his repeated withdrawal and stonewalling had a direct effect on my behavior in the M.

Any of that sound familiar?