Yes still thin. My wife started avoiding kissing during sex a few years into our marriage. At the 10 year mark the average was sex once every 3 months. For the entire 10 years. 15 years in it was closer to 4 months. By time we hit our sitch it was once or twice a year. After I realized she was so sex starved during our sitch, I hinted I would be open to sex. She talked to me one night about how she wanted sex, but specifically requested no kissing.
That persisted into our Ring and piecing. It has only been the last few months that during sex she kisses now. But even then it is the exception, not the rule.
It concerned me about the kissing. I started asking people and was shocked to find that not kissing during sex is a fairly common thing for married couples. I was shocked.
Yeah, I have to say this must be one well kept secret. It is good to know I am not in this boat alone. I just thought that it was kind of a natural part of it. I guess not. As always your advice and feedback are greatly appreciated.
The Texan, in my sitch I found a book. I can't give you the name because it isn't written by MWD. But Google Women's Infidelity. The author shares a first name with MWD. I found the book fascinating. It really gets into the psyche of women that cheat after years of marriage. Why they do, the biological impulses many women go through. The other reason I like it is the author is very supportive of DB principles, but with a bit of sandi's tough love of flair to it.
I think one of the things I learned going through all of this is that there is no such thing as a unique situation. While some of the dynamics may be different, and obviously people's life situations, the fact is that the underlying issues are often the same. As are the struggles of the LBS. Look at your situation, your W has had EAs (no PAs right?) yet is still there. However, the problem with EAs is that we as LBSs have to wonder that if left unchecked would it have progressed to an PA?
In my first sitch back in 2005, the guy was fairly local (just under an hour away), and he was clearly down the path of trying to get my W to have a PA. That was obvious from the messages I intercepted. My W was deep in on the emotional side. She was dreaming of a life with him. And he was feeding that, grooming her to eventually meet in person. My perception is that that was the one thing he was after, and I feel it was confirmed that once I discovered the EA and blew it up, he went NC on my W, cold. When she slipped up afterward, in your withdrawals (watching her be sad and heartbroken over another guy was almost more than I could take), and reached out to him. He ignored her. Finally he sent her a very short message to the effect of "I think it is better for both of us and our marriages to not be in contact".
Him instantly being able to pull the plug, after weeks of them both staying up late at night (my W was slinking to bed ~3 am most nights), and also him IMing with her for hours while he was at work, proved to me that he one goal in mind: PA. And once I popped that bubble he was on to his next victim. But still, my mind for weeks, maybe even months, after was racing about what came next. Should I have just monitored her activities and not blew the thing up? (I kind of got caught the night I confronted because I was reading the chat logs when she came into the office.) In the messages she was talking about meeting and just having one kiss. Her rationale was that if they met, and kissed, then she could realize that he wasn't all the perfection she built up in her head, and she could move past it. (REMEMBER believe nothing she says and only half of what she does!) But in an email to her online friends that the spy software I had installed captured, she wanted to meet and have a kiss because she just wanted to have a really hot kiss one more time in her life. Yeah, we know where that leads!
So at least with a PA you know how far the A would have progressed. In EAs there is always wonder. Your imagination will go wild to how she would have started lying about where she was (remember this was before smartphones and Life360), who she was with, what she was doing. Would she really have gone through with cheating physically with him, or would her conscience and spiritual side (we are both devout Christians, very involved in our congregation, and were back then as well) kick in and nip it in the bud. Blowing it up my mind would torture me because there was no way to know.
In all of my reading and studying of the subject since the most recent situation, I can now see why some people claim that EAs are worse in some ways than PAs. And even though the OM in our most recent sitch was several states away (he was also a loser, living with his elderly father, and a convicted felon, and no job), I had to again watch my W go through withdrawals when he ended the EA. After having received nude photos of my W, and who knows what else they did virtually.
So I really do understand what you are going through. My MR was a SSM leading up to both situations. As you can relate, my W said she was broken in that department. Any discussion of her lack of desire ended up in stonewalling on both our parts. I became a mean, withdrawn, critical jerk. In my head I would tell myself that she just wasn't a sexual person (though when we met she certainly was!). But that would be shattered by the fact that she seem to be pining for other men. I would wrestle with that for years, and even have to discuss it in IC. Why was she so non-sexual with me, yet so sexual with her EAPs?
And then there are a lot of embarrassing things about me as well through these. Installing spy software to catch her. Checking her panties in the dirty clothes for signs of physical arousal. These kinds of things have a way of turning us into crazy people engaging in behaviors that no rational, sane person would ever engage in. ANd the truth is I was no saint. I've opened up in the last year or so on this forum about my own EAs. Obviously something I am not proud of, but it goes to show that none of us are truly innocent in our situations. My handling of our MR problems was atrocious. I can remember her at certain points begging for her to go into IC (she was early on in our marriage and got nothing out of it, and at the time she wanted to go again we were not financially able to afford it), and beggig us to MC. And then after BD in Dec 2017, I was the one begging for her to do IC and us to do MC.
TheTexan, I don't know if you can relate to any of that, but I see you struggling with many of the same things I did. Attaching importance to things where there is none. Taking what she says at face-value. "I just wanted to make-out with him." Not buying it. As you pointed out, she isn't really into making out, and with you guys having a SSM I am sure her urges were for a lot more than making out. One of the things I discovered in the last sitch was that my W had been ordering sex toys, and hiding them. Here was a woman that claimed she didn't even want sex, and she was buying and hiding sex toys.......... More heartbreak. Why not talk to me about her desires? Why not include me in the play? And then the endless wondering if she had used them while talking to OM? What did that mean for how she felt about me? How she ever felt about me?
Sorry for the novel. But your sitch reminds me a lot of my own. All I can tell you is that if you stick it out, keep working on yourself, make sure to have requirements for her to come back to the MR, then in a few months you can have MR 2.0 with her, and realize how much happier in life you are. If you let her back and do not address the issues you both have, then you will be stuck in the misery you had pre-BD.......and setting yourself up for another BD. I can speak to this because I made that mistake after the 2005 sitch. And even though it didn't happen again for 12 years it eventually did happen, and was much worse. (in 2005 she immediately said she wanted to work on the MR and didn't want a D, in 2017 she immediately said she didn't want to be married and wanted a D.)
Keep working for what you want, and make sure she understands what requirements you have of her.
M(53), W(54),D(19) M-23, T-25 Bomb Drop - Dec.23, 2017 Ring and Piecing since March 2018
