When H and I started dating, there were unfortunate things that set the stage for the rest of our relationship. I know none of that matters in terms of DB. Most of this post doesn't matter in terms of DB and is just me journaling. But this is some backstory on my situation, and it pertains to DB insofar as it's stuff I have to let go. Things have never really been good. What respect I had for him was eroded very early on, leading to resentment and anger on my part that sent us spiraling further. We should have nipped it in the bud, but instead, we stayed together and got married (first marriage for both, and our child is the only child for both).
He's never apologized for anything, and I've never gotten over anything. Part of my problem is I want an apology that will never come. The price of admission for continuing to be in this marriage and live in the same home as our child every day, as long as admission is available to me, requires that I stop wanting what I can't have. Or at least accept that I can't have it. I don't think I can ever truly have the intimacy and closeness I want with a man who can't own up to hurting me. I am willing to give that up in order to live in the same home as my child every day.
I would love to be able to look up to H, with respect and admiration, rely on him as a protector of me and our family. That's what I've always wanted. That's my ideal. But if I'm honest, I don't think I can have it. He's gossiped about me, offered up personal details of my life and our relationship for others (friends, my in-laws, etc.) to dissect, people-pleased at my expense, and failed to have my back, far too much. I have to say, that doesn't strike me as manly and doesn't inspire respect in me.
But there's an article Michele wrote where she begins by talking about how you can't make a cow sing, and it applies here. I mentioned earlier that when I'm able to look upon H in a motherly compassionate fashion, it seems to help me get along with him, and there might be something to that. He was the apple of his late mother's eye, just as our toddler is the apple of mine. But I never wanted to be H's mother. And I wonder if I'll ever have sex again.
H is the only man I've ever had sexual intercourse with. I was 33 when we started, about 6 months after we started dating. He was 43 and had many "varied" sexual experiences with many women before me. He is good-looking, and female attention comes easy. He was my first real relationship. Out of a combination of me being extremely introverted and shy, socially anxious and awkward, traumatic childhood experiences, bad experiences with men who didn't exactly have my best interest at heart, and wanting to adhere to Catholic precepts on sexuality, that's how it played out for me. But I was always into erotic movies and books - that was my "safe sex."
H has a reputation for being a warm, nurturing, compassionate man, an image bolstered by being a medical professional. He just has this air of someone you can talk to. All manner of folks feel comfortable and free to unload on him their thoughts and feelings about politics and religion and all sorts of personal things. It's funny sometimes in a "Why on earth would someone tell him that?" kind of way. It's hard for me to talk to people, and what drew me to him was I could talk to him, I could confide in him. This man will guard my heart, I thought. We also both experienced being bullied and depression growing up, and we bonded over talking about those experiences. He got bullied a lot worse than I did in his youth, kids beating him with chains and stuff like that.
About 3 months after seeing each other took a romantic turn (we had been acquaintances for a few years, having a mutual circle of friends, before we ever really had a conversation beyond saying hello and goodbye), I was happy with how things were going. I thought he was too. But we were having dinner at his house (now the house we live in), and he suddenly confronted me about the fact that we hadn't had intercourse yet and that he was unhappy about it. He was suddenly agitated and aggressive. This was completely out of character as I knew him.
He had this male friend at the time, and he said this friend had assumed I was "taking care of" (having intercourse with) him and was very disappointed to find out I hadn't been. "He thought you were taking care of me," he whined, a pouty hangdog expression on his face, as if we had to answer to his friend as some kind of authority on our relationship. Now, though we weren't having intercourse, we had been messing around, and he scoffed at what we had been doing like it was something ridiculous and juvenile. I had no idea he felt this way. Using words and gestures, he derided it, said he wasn't used to it. This was our first fight, and it lasted hours into the night. It was 10 years ago, and I still remember it vividly.
As a man, he needs sex, he said, vigorous sex. Not the fluff we'd been doing. He told me I needed to come up with a "game plan" and soon because he was losing interest. He suggested I buy a set of probes of increasing size on the Internet that were made to address the issue medically (I did not end up doing that). He went down the list of ways I didn't measure up to his ex-girlfriends, ways he wished I did, and not just sexually. (Yet somehow, I'm the one he would eventually marry.) Towards the end of the night, I think he felt a little bad about how upset I was because he tried to pin it on his friend, said confronting me was his friend's idea.
I'm an extremely private person, and the fact that he was telling his friend - someone I had to face - about the intimate details of our relationship...was extremely mortifying and hurtful to me, let alone the humiliating rest of it. But at 33, I felt flawed for my inexperience, like I was in the wrong, as he was saying. I thought maybe that's just what men do - they talk to each other about their sexual exploits or lack thereof, and this man whom I had thought would guard my heart was no exception after all.
In time, I would realize I couldn't view such a gossipy man as a strong man, and I wanted so much to view him as a strong man. All of a sudden, he was saying things and acting in ways I never suspected he would towards me, and I thought if he of all people couldn't be patient with me, no man could. I thought maybe it was unfair of me to expect a 43-year-old bachelor, accustomed to women having sex with him right away, to hold out.
It wasn't that I was uninterested in sex. I think I'm actually a very sexual person. I just needed a little more romance, a little more warmth and comfort - it takes a lot for me to really get close to anyone, and 3 months into dating, I thought we were getting there, but I still wasn't quite ready. When I was single, I was accustomed to being celibate and relatively content with it. I think when you're single, it's not that big a deal. But in the present day, being married and condemned to celibacy by my husband is something I can't wrap my head around. We have gone without sex for almost 2 years in our marriage, and I'm supposed to accept that I'm starving, yet it was completely unacceptable to him to refrain from intercourse in our first 3 months of dating.
And his friend was disappointed that I wasn't "taking care of" him. He couldn't bear to disappoint his friend. You know that "honeymoon period" that typically starts off a relationship? I was looking forward to blossoming and growing with him, being accepted and embraced for who I am by him. That process of a relationship organically and sweetly unfolding was completely stunted 3 months in, once he put me in a position where I was like "Oh, your friend is disappointed! And you're losing interest! Well, then I better hop to it! Probes, you say?!" Thus ended our honeymoon period, which really wasn't much of one.
It's a little weird how his friend factored into this, no? H has always had a tendency to invoke third parties in our relationship. That's what killed us before we could even get off the ground. That's been very distressing. The thing about H is he's a pathological people-pleaser, desperate for validation from others. Where normally a man would prioritize protecting and defending his wife (or girlfriend), he will throw me and our marriage under the bus in order to please or appease others. He hates to say no to people, disappoint them or hurt their feelings, and then I find myself in stressful needless situations I never asked for.
(Like that one time we hosted a complimentary wine tasting and wedding shower for strangers in our home, a couple years after we were married. That was hard for me, considering my own troubled nuptial state, and not something I've ever even done for someone I know and love. But H agreed to do it for strangers without asking me first. I think that was the only time people with tattooed faces have ever been in our home, not that there's anything inherently wrong with that. I have many tattooed family members myself, but not in the face. It was like a dark comedy. I think it took a long time for H to realize that even though our home was his alone first, maybe I'm supposed to have a say in what goes on in it. )
H is extremely soft and unassertive when it comes to people other than myself. Outside of our marriage, he is the nicest guy ever, widely recognized as such, eager to please and non-confrontational and won’t argue. That has been very problematic for our marriage, especially when his family (my in-laws) would overstep the bounds.
When it comes to fighting me, though, he’s so very brave. He will fly into a rage rather than admit fault for things that are clearly his fault. He will pull off contortions in logic that make it all my fault. He only blame-shifts with me. When I call him out on his mistakes, he will fight me until he’s saying crazy things and acting crazy and making me crazy for hours. It's like he has this image of being good and nice and capable and competent, and he can't stand anything that deviates from that image if I'm the one pointing it out.
But if, say, a friend called him out on the exact same thing, he would readily agree with them. He'll admit fault or take the blame if they want him to, he'll say and do anything they want so they will like him. He has to please and appease and be liked by others at all costs, even if it means he says “My bad” when in fact he is not in the wrong. Even if it means negatively impacting me and our marriage.
He would continue to name-drop the friend in a "My friend disapproves of you" manner until after we were married. Ultimately, he told me in an "I should have listened to my friend" manner that the friend absolutely hated my guts and had tried to get him to break up with me, warned him that I had a "darkness" about me and told him not to marry me. That explained so much about the friend's cold demeanor towards me when we'd hang out with him and his wife, his rude comments alluding to my history of depression, which H had apparently been discussing with him. I had always attributed the friend's demeanor towards me to his bipolar disorder, but apparently it wasn't just that - he also really despised me, based largely on H badmouthing me to him.
Before we were married, H went on a trip overseas with his friend for a week, and before he left, he told me I would hear from him once he got there. I didn't hear from him the whole time he was away. That was confusing. When he got back, he said his friend wouldn't allow him to call me and blamed it on the friend's bipolar, said his friend was flipping out with rage the whole time. H has never held his friend's bipolar against him - he's had a lot of compassion for him having an illness. Sometime after we were married, they booked a flight to go on a fishing expedition, and H didn't tell me until the night before the flight, quite some time after they booked it. I was hurt that H didn't think he owed it to me to talk to me about booking a flight for a trip without me before doing so.
H has had a tendency to glom onto certain people, yearning for their approval, often not very nice people. The friend would call his wife a b*tch and scream and throw shoes at his dogs in front of their guests if the guests were people he didn't respect (e.g., H and myself), that kind of guy. It would just roll off his wife's back, though - she didn't seem to mind. I get really uncomfortable around people like that. The friend was unable to hold a job due to his bipolar being not under control, and smoking marijuana was his way of managing it. His wife, a medical professional same as H (she and H met at work, and that's how H met her husband) and college professor, was the breadwinner. He and H both had artistic sensibilities, a great love of the outdoors, cooking, growing vegetables and that sort of thing. But I don't understand why H held him in such high regard, looked up to him as an authority on us. It still disgusts me.
Yesterday, we received a Christmas card in the mail that the wife had written, and it only mentioned the names of H and our child. Something about that really upsets me, something about including my child's name while omitting mine. If they had addressed H alone, it would have bothered me less. I started shaking when I saw that. I've been agitated all day because of it. I threw the card out. H doesn't know about it. I was going to show it to him and talk to him about how it upsets me, but I decided against it. I would have wanted some kind of understanding of my feelings about it from my husband and to be comforted by him, but that's probably not what I would have gotten. He probably would have gotten defensive and told me I deserve it. It would have been the kind of "relationship talk" that would be no good for us right now. It took some effort to not say anything about it and not look sour when he got home from work yesterday, and I think he may have picked up on it, but not too much.
I mean, what was her goal there in leaving my name out and knowing I would see that? But people treat me like this, like I shouldn't matter, because H has invited them to do so. That's where my focus goes instead of our friends who actually seem to like me and are nice to me. My God, we got 3 other Christmas cards from friends in the mail yesterday, and they do acknowledge me, but of course I'm focusing on the one that didn't.
Anyway, it wasn't until about 3 months after H (my boyfriend at the time) confronted me about the lack of penetrative sex that we started having it. I went through some physical pain that was an obstacle leading up to that point, and also a little while afterwards, but I started to enjoy it eventually, even prefer it. It was a hurdle I was glad to overcome, but almost as soon as it started happening, I glimpsed an odd text message on his phone. What struck me as odd was the word "sex" in it. Later, I picked up his phone behind his back and saw that the text said "No sex really s*cks" and was sent from a woman. It seemed to me that she was commiserating with him over us having "no sex." I had no idea who she was. He had never mentioned her to me before.
I went down the rabbit hole of snooping. I found out that they had met on Match dot com and dated briefly just before he started dating me. They were already having sex by the second date. But they supposedly were just really good friends now, by his decision. She even invited him to bring me to her family picnic at the park. She liked to remind him that she was his friend and that she was always there for him. She was awfully flirty, though. She clearly wanted him as more than a friend.
And she seemed to know everything about me. She would refer to things I said to him that were supposed to be just between me and him. She would talk about me like I was some kind of frigid b*tchy weirdo - there was kind of a mocking tone. Eventually, she texted him, "Is she having sex with you yet?" He replied yes, which I don't think was the reply she was expecting. I hated that she felt so comfortable just asking him that question, and he replied to her like it was really any of her business. But I was hoping his affirmative reply would at least make her back off. My feeling was that she thought she still had a chance at a serious romantic relationship with him as long as we weren't having sex. But she didn't back off.
I didn't want to be that girlfriend, the kind to snoop. But that's what I turned out to be. And I didn't want to be the kind of girlfriend to demand he cut contact with a "friend." I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for him to do it on his own. The hope was that he would realize their interactions were no good for us and naturally distance himself from her. I continued secretly monitoring his phone contact with her. The texts continued, and they would spend hours at a time on calls. It just kept on going. She kept alluding to things that were supposed to be private between us, yet I wasn't even supposed to know she existed.
I think I waited until 6 months after finding out about her to confront him about her. Then he made it all about me invading his privacy and was angry about that. (He never acknowledged any invasion of my privacy.) He deleted all their texts so I couldn't look at them anymore. He told me he wasn't interested in a romantic relationship with her, but he justified their interactions by saying that unlike me, she was "so loving," a "jolly woman," full of compliments for him and interest in him. That's his take to this day. They seemed to cease contact sometime after I confronted him about her, but not immediately. He didn't want to be impolite to her, and he didn't know how to cut ties with her without being impolite. She continued texting him for a while, and he would delete her texts before I could read them.
I never got over that whole thing, which wreaked havoc on our relationship for years. It is still a trigger for me. Everything I'm talking about in this post is. In the first couple years of our marriage, he was still telling me things like "My ex-girlfriends were never like you" (meaning he traded down with me) in frustration.
Another instance of inappropriate texting with a woman, a co-worker of his, would come to my attention in 2016, when I saw a text to the effect of "I miss you" with heart/kiss emojis flash on his phone. I didn't see what they had between them on his phone beyond that - he wouldn't let me. But when I questioned him about it, he gave me the impression that it was far less involved than the prior instance. I asked him if they were screwing, and he said it was nothing like that. He said she was a co-worker who had a crush on him. His justification for letting it get to the point where she was sending him texts like the one I glimpsed was basically the same as before - unlike me, she was fawning, complimentary, cared about him and his life, cared about his mother. I remember how he said "She cares about my mother" (the timbre of his voice and everything) and finding it odd, considering she never met his mother, yet it made me feel bad that I was never close with his mother, who was 92 at the time and had dementia. Once again, he made it my fault.
Painful sex would become an issue for me again within a couple years after we were married (we were married in 2014), namely when ED became an issue, and he would rush things for fear of losing his erection. Rushing things tended to result in pain for me.
In 2016, a series of events pertaining to my in-laws (his older siblings and nieces, who are only slightly younger than me) taking liberties in our home and on the property, and his inability to stand up to them on my behalf - he threw me under the bus - made divorce seem like the next logical step, the most sensible thing from a logical standpoint. Things had never been good, but we really took a downturn with what happened with my in-laws in 2016. But I still abhorred the idea of divorce to my core, which led me to Michele's DR book and this message board that year. The following year, I happened to get pregnant.
