Need support! Conflicted H

[Junsui]

Accuray, thank you so much for replying! I will do my best to give more details, but let me know if I’m still not being specific enough.

The reason I referred to myself as the “pursuer” and the “fixer” is because of the section in DR where it says “Some people are fix-it addicts. Fixing their marriages has become the main focus of their lives.” That totally resonated with me. However, I do agree there is definitely a parent/child dynamic going on in my M as well. I mentioned we are in graduate school and H failed some of his classes. Also his particular field is one where an internship is absolutely essential to getting a decent job. Because he was having trouble, I tried to help him find internships and did things (like move in with his parents) that he said would help him finish. However, my help was ignored or rejected. At this stage in his program, he is taking too long to finish and as a result is no longer receiving funding, so I’ve been solely paying our bills for months. As part of my 180, I decided I needed to cut his access to the credit card, which was only in my name (all of our debt is in my name).

I’m not really sure what else to say about all of my accommodating that I’ve been doing. I suppose this has something to do with H insisting that I’m abusive. Having formerly been in an abusive relationship myself, this truly freaked me out, and that was my motivation for going to IC to try to learn how to not be abusive. However, my IC eventually decided after over a year of trying different approach strategies that it’s just that H sees me so negatively. Like you described, I say X, he hears Y, and Y is always critical and abusive towards H even though my thoughts and intent are nowhere near meaning to come across that way. I know I’m not perfect and I could improve, but it really got to the point where I felt like it was impossible.

The original sexual problems were actually due to some health problems that I was experiencing that just happened to start right around the same time that we moved in with the in-laws – double whammy! However, even after I started feeling better, our sex life has essentially dwindled to nothing (once a year – really depressing for relative newlyweds!). H’s love language is physical touch (with words of affirmation as a close second), but despite that, he has consistently rejected my offers to be intimate. I think one of the problems is that he gets too awkward about us having conversations about sex (he was a virgin before we married) – another case where I say X, but he hears Y (such as I say X turns me on, please do more of that, but he hears that he’s inadequate and [censored] at ML). Another problem is that the only time he tries to initiate is in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep for work or school the next day – I always say let’s pick this up tomorrow evening when we get home, but he feels rejected and won’t. So I used to sacrifice sleep in order to meet his needs, but it didn’t seem to help the M situation. He used to say that he wanted us to ML more frequently, but that has stopped. I really think that the fact we could never have good communication about sex has impacted the M in a negative way because of his love language being physical touch. If I could have figured out how to fix this, maybe he could have seen me more positively and not so negatively all the time. Since we’re separated now though, I am at a loss how to fix this until we fix some of the other issues first.

There is indeed a history of cycling through unproductive arguments w/D threats from H and begging/apologies from me. The equilibrium comes when H relents, and for a long time (due to the way things worked in my family growing up) I thought that if H said things were good, that meant we had made up. However, I have noticed that part of the cycle is that H doesn’t really accept my apology or forgive me, but just holds on to it until he explodes and rehashes the past. Usually it’s weeks or months later, when I can’t remember anymore what exactly I did or said, but I usually feel like the person he’s describing isn’t me. This sparks another unproductive argument, so on and so forth. We have never developed a healthy way to disagree. And even though our arguments actually aren’t that frequent, to H I think it seems like we fight all the time because he’s constantly having past incidents festering and replaying (mind reading probably?).

I ordered “Passion Trap” and put the other book you recommended on hold at the library. Thanks again for responding to my sitch!