My suggestion is to get a game plan for having another talk with your wife. I don't believe that she REALLY feels and understands how important this issue is and will become unless you have a heart to heart. Maybe you will have to write her a letter first. That is something we have to figure out.
We need to get you some type of game plan for communicating this to your wife. The game plan needs to make sure the way you express it is correct, the timing as good as possible, and a plan for your replies for each and every possible reaction we can think of that she may or could have.
This, to me, is the outlier. I can't talk to her about any important issue, lease of all this one.
I tried to again last night. Just talk. We had a great weekend, both of us did some chores and some cleaning, we went out all over town Friday night with her friends, took the dogs to the park together Sunday, it was a great weekend. I thought Sunday night would be a good time to talk, not about our sexless marriage, but about what I can do better.
“Nothing.” I asked a question from a book, she has mentioned she wanted to read one of my books but never did, so I try “hints” at getting her to try to work on this marriage with me, like asking a question from a book every now and then (in truth, it’s only been four questions come to think of it).
But that’ just it------just trying to talk, it becomes something she doesn’t want to do. And she doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do. She thinks it’s all me, that’s what she says anyway. She says, “you just need to focus on you,” of course she’s yelling by this point and I can’t get her to stop (we don’t have a “safe word” or technique to stop a disagreement before it becomes a fight because she hasn’t read about anything like that and I tried to talk to her about having a safe word or “time out” once and she got more upset).
So I go to therapy on my own and my therapist doesn’t understand why I’m there. My wife thinks my therapist is going to tell me why I shouldn’t feel so rejected and alone and will convince me to be happy in a sexless marriage.
I haven’t tried a letter. I kept quiet and followed the best advice I thought and tried to talk about us again (everyone seems to agree that talking about issues and being 100% honest is crucial). I’m not 100% honest, at least for now---I explicitly don’t talk about my desire for sex or her lack thereof, just for the record. So I’m lying. That’s what it feels like. I’m lying to my wife.
And in the meantime, she’s happy…UNTIL I try to talk about marriage. If I never brought it up again, she’d be happy. She IS happy----me asking what I can do better, that makes her unhappy. It makes her shut down, then she yells, then she gets angry and stays angry at me, even overnight.
Meanwhile, I can’t sleep. It’s one thing to not think or talk about your problems, but not sleeping makes almost everything else impossible. It’s not that I’m up all night thinking about ways to get my wife to have sex with me. I’m not. But when my wife is angry with me just for trying to talk (the one thing I keep being told I need to do), I can’t just turn it off and be ok and sleep right next to her right away. So now I’m sleep-deprived but still expected to be perfect all the time AND not talk about it? It’s impossible for me, but at the very least, it HURTS. That’s what makes me feel alone.
I feel frustrated and alone. Yes, I feel like I’m meeting her needs and she is unwilling to talk about meeting mine no matter what they were, but what if it’s not just me feeling that way? What if that’s the reality? She said she wants marriage counseling, only she wants to set it up. She hasn’t done that, so when I try to, she gets upset again. When I asked last, she was waiting on a psychiatrist friend to give her recommendations of a few counselors on her insurance. Unfortunately, she didn’t know any of those counselors so she didn’t have any advice about which one to pick. Then my wife asked me to ask my therapist, who also didn’t know any of them. So nothing happened.
I’ve heard advice about writing a note before, but I’m afraid to do that. Any and every time I try to talk with my wife about improving our marriage she shuts down and reaches a point almost immediately where anything said will do more harm than good----at that point, she simply can’t think or communicate clearly. She never changed her name----it’s still her creep ex-husband’s name, for example. And I never bring that up. I never have. But it helps reinforce this lonely feeling I have.
So GAL, right? I do that. But when I do “too much” of that she feels alone and needy so I go meet her needs and spend more time. It’s not that I don’t spend enough time with her (I have been keeping a calendar to ensure I spend at least 14 hours a week listening to her, either just talking or walking with the dogs or eating, etc., anything without TV or other people involved), so I don’t get it. I spent Saturday afternoon with a good friend recovering from a divorce. He’s actually doing great, super happy right now, I hadn’t seen him in months. My wife was fine with me spending time with him. I have a life, I’m organizing an art show for September, I have my own friends, I take her out with her friends, I read, paint, train the dogs in the morning while she sleeps, etc. If I get too much “GAL,” then SHE feels rejected. It’s like she wants me to be there all the time, but she doesn’t want to love me? I get such conflicting signals…but I can’t talk to her about them.
And here we are again. I tried to talk, she got upset, now I have to wait a week to try again, and in the meantime I have to be happy about taking her to her friend’s house for the holiday so she can get drunk and meet all the rest of her needs all week long and I’m supposed to not just be ok with it, I’m supposed to be happy with it? I’m not happy. I don’t even know what to do when I get home tonight----I feel like I’m supposed to act like nothing happened, like we (I?) didn’t try to talk last night, like I’m supposed to lie and fake it. I’m not supposed to buy her flowers because that’s needy, I’m not supposed to cook dinner because then it feels contrived, I’m not supposed to text her all day (I’m working 18 hours) because that’s clingy, what kind of a relationship is that? She’s not cheating, but I’m almost to the point I wish she was just so I’d have some reason to sincerely be upset. I don’t know what to do.
