thank you for asking! And yes, I do feel a bit better about it than I did. On balance, I can see how much effort he is making and I do understand why he'd feel so easily criticised and so sensitive about sex. I wish he understood that if he prefers me to be direct, but also experiences me asking for what I want as criticism and responds to what be believes as criticism by lashing out or withdrawing, it leaves me absolutely nowhere to go - but he just can't get there yet. I can't help but feel taking the whole sexual relationship off the table for a while and getting some therapy would help us more than keep trying and getting bruised. I was extremely firm with him the next day - I said something like 'the days when you get to be nasty because you feel hurt are over - you damaged our marriage nearly beyond repair with that behaviour and I won't tolerate it again - find another strategy' and he was more receptive than I thought he'd be to that.
I do find his relentless sensitivity to perceived criticism exhausting though. I really do. I was reading something online last night about how friendship and the way we do friendship has changed over lockdown. I said, just out of the blue 'hey, who is your best friend these days' and he got really weird and evasive with me, refused to engage in the conversation (I was chatting to him about how strange it was to be WhatsApping my friend when she was in hospital with her new baby - that I'd never have expected to talk to her so soon after the birth in normal times...) and got really snappy. Later, he came to me and said I'd hurt his feelings by deliberately mocking, humiliating and teasing him in front of the children about his difficulty in making friends. I guess as I am noting the positive, it is new and positive that he would actually come to me and tell me directly how he felt and what was wrong, rather than just lashing out, or sulking for several days, or going on some random tirade about how often or not I was cleaning the bathroom sink.
I know for a fact I had no such intention at all - I was just idly chit-chatting with him about something I'd been reading. I said 'I understand how you feel, but what you think I was doing, I was not doing and I had no intention of doing - it wasn't even remotely in my mind,' and now I wonder if I should have just validated? I basically made a conscious decision to stop validating that nonsense as it seemed to reinforce all the fictions he had about my feelings views and intentions, and while that might be good as an emergency move during separation, we're in piecing and I refuse to live in a marriage where I am not able to say 'no, you are making assumptions about me and my motivations that are wrong, and come more from your own issues than my behaviour, and I won't adjust my behaviour to make room for your neuroses.'
I don't know what the right thing to do is here. It's less common than it was, but he still seems to have this really deep seated persecution anxiety that must come from a low self esteem, and it comes out as him assuming that every time he feels bad, I must have done something to cause it. It is showing up more regularly in our sex life - if I don't ask for what I want, he presumes I am not interested, and if i do ask for what I want, he presumes his performance is being criticised. But the same dynamic is at play, I think, in the weird conversation we had about friendship and his reaction to it. It is all about his anxiety and sensitivity to criticism. I don't want to pander to that, because it is toxic, involves assumptions about me and my motivations that are totally untrue and for me, just exhausting. It also gets in the way of closeness when he's so suspicious and defensive and, if I am being honest, it makes him very difficult to respect. The victim mentality is massively unattractive, and the occasional nastiness that it seems to result in makes me want to be nowhere near him.
