Wanting sex is normal. Different women enjoy sex daily, weekly, or monthly. I'm hearing the frequency worked for you for 2.5yrs, you got married, then it dropped off. Immediately? What changed--i.e., your living situation, your expectations for her, or how often you took her out on a romantic date? Sex doesn't usually drop off after 2.5yrs without kids.
Due to religious convictions, we did not have sex before marriage. She was not a virgin before we got married though and we discussed the importance of sex (frequency, expectations, etc). She was also much more flirty, showed sexual interest, and I thought we were on the same page. Then once we got married, almost immediately, she was completely disinterested and said a lot of emasculating things which made me feel rejected and unloved. Even early on, before we started having any kind of "problems", even though I initiated, she rejected me.
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You have no idea what your role was in the marriage's demise?!
This is a standard question when dating.
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You didn't respond to Steve's point about an IC. Especially if you have no idea where you went wrong, an IC would be a great investment. You don't want to repeat what just happened with her or anyone else. (You don't want to ruminate ad infinitum, either. There's a balance to introspection vs. moving forward with your life.) Your story is almost entirely about her faults.
Of course I do, but there is a difference between things I did or didn't do and something completely out of my control that would have led to the marriage's demise regardless. Lets posit that my fatal flaw in the marriage was NGS. Had I done things differently, would the outcome have been the same? I could look at some of my behaviors and say, yes, behavior X certainly didn't help and I can avoid doing that in the future in the next relationship. But was behavior X really the ultimate cause of the downfall of the marriage? Or was the marriage doomed because of something outside of my control. Introspection is useful to a point but there is no way to say with a certainty. I can just take what I've learned and try to do better next time. I know that I've laid out a lot of her faults, because I'm trying to figure out if I could have done differently, or if there was just no way it was ever going to work because fundamentally she was not committed to the marriage working.
For instance, one part of the cause of the marriage failing was that she was still attached at the hip to her parents. Since she lived at home through college, she never went through that period of time everyone usually goes through where you live independently from your family. Even though we lived close to her parents, I think she was homesick throughout the entirety of the marriage and one of the biggest reasons she wanted to leave the marriage is because she didn't want to change her life/routine for me any longer and wanted to go back to how it was before she got married. So when she moved out she moved back to her parents. Something like this is completely out of my control.
Although this part in DR is speaking about infidelity, the principle I think can be applied generally.
"If you suspect that your spouses lack of responsiveness may be due to his/her outside interests...suffice it to say that you are not to blame for the lack of progress in your marriage. It's likely that you are doing everything right but hitting up against a brick wall. If your partner's extramarital interests are secretive, it's especially difficult because it it prevents you from confronting the real issues in your marriage. And it prevents your spouse from seeing things clearly and from putting his/her soul into making your marriage work."
Im not naive enough to believe I did everything right. As part of MC, I did have individual sessions with the counselor. One thing she told me was that she didn't see my wife changing and that I did everything I could when I could but she (my wife) either couldn't, didnt want to, or didn't know how to reciprocate. I worked to meet her needs but she but she didn't want to be a wife.
I definitely do need to get back in IC at some point, mostly to help with the healing, but right now I'm not at a point financially where I can really spend money on a GOOD counselor. It is on my list of things to do though.
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One of thing things our MC said to me when I called her back after the session my then-W finally admitted to the affair and that she wanted a D is "You should think about what it says about you that you'd want someone in your life who betrayed you." I think about that a lot. To me I was trying to save my marriage and family and didn't want my kids to go through a divorced life, but looking back I was almost certainly acting out of fear for myself as well about being a failure in marriage and not finding someone else. Time has given me a lot more perspective there. So I ask you a similar question...in the ways your describe your W not meeting your needs and making everything but you the priority...what about all that makes you want to keep her in your life?
Yea, thinking about this torments me. I vacillate between wanting her back and wanting to move on. I think about the betrayal and if she were to come back, would she betray me again down the road? Why waste the time only to be betrayed again in the future. I know its irrational to hold on to someone who has rejected you.
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Hang in there Joshua and keep posting. There are a lot of folks here who have experienced what you're going through and glad to give their time to help.
Thank you BL42, I appreciate your post. You as well Traveler, LH19, and SteveLW.
