^^^^^^ you're going to need to set some boundaries. She needs to understand where you're coming from/how serious you are. Again, it really took BD for me to "get it".
Your issues go deeper than lack of sex (no pun intended). Your communication needs to improve before your R can. I'm sure you know this, but you gotta figure out how to get through to her on this.
I agree.
We talked last night.
She had been crying for 2 hours before I got home. She swears I have depression and has been reading about depression and coping with living with a depressed person. My therapist says I don’t have depression. I’ve been depressed before, and I don’t feel depressed.
I do feel stuck when it comes to my marriage though, and I’m sure my wife sees that. So I talked. I brought everything up and she listened. She doesn’t really want to participate though. Maybe she will. But she doesn’t want to. She’s lost a lot of respect for me without me knowing or doing anything, well before when I first started to notice our physical relationship had vanished.
She says I used to be driven and that’s what she liked. The trick is that’s also when I was spending so much time in the art studio and not with her, before we got engaged. So it’s a catch 22-----she asks me to spend more time with her and move the studio home, but she’s lost respect for me for doing that?
I don’t get it. We still love each other. But she let her feelings for me get so rotten without me knowing and without me doing anything deliberately to deserve that, plus her natural way of thinking is to be judgmental of people, including her friends. But her friends have the luxury of not being judged every single day.
She says she’s been reading, but when I asked her about the book she had (one of mine) she didn’t know anything about it----she had printed a quiz from the back and circled her answers, but it wasn’t a quiz about marriage or divorce or intimacy; it wasn’t even really a quiz, come to think of it. There were two choices for each number----no question, just two choices, such as, “I like when my husband holds my hand” vs “I like when my husband does chores without me asking.” It was ultimately benign. I can’t help wonder how much she might be able to think differently about both me and our marriage if she would listen to an expert, be it a counselor, therapist, or a doctor in a book, even online experts. Anything, really. I walked the dogs late last night alone, needed the exercise.
I know she understands me better now, I just don’t know where we’re going from here. She still seems to think the problems are all just me and I need to “work on myself.” I made her a CD with some fun music on it this morning and asked her to try to think positive about the things I do and the things I’m trying to do, including me going to therapy. I don’t think she sees it as a marriage problem at all----I think she sees me as the problem instead. Most of the time you wouldn’t know it---again, she’s happy. But the same “you don’t know how tired I am” issue came up again. It’s always about being tired. Too tired for me, never too tired for everyone else past 2 AM even. I didn’t say that to her, but only because I’m not sure what to do, really.
