Happy Effin' Birthday to Me.

[cinemanymph]

MM,
I do have a great thing going, but a good, fully rounded life is a good thing to have. I'd love to meet for a grapefruit/Absolute (I'll save the screaming orgasms for my H) .

[NOPkins]

HD.

I don't want to kick a 'dog' when he is down, but I think what a lot of people have tried to tell you, is that you have to change your FOCUS.

I realize that is counter-intuitive, but it is what changed my marriage and others here.

In order to 'fix' your relationship, there are a number of tools you will need. The first part of any repair is to round up your tools, make sure they are in good working order, organize them, then proceed with the repair.

What you can't do, is just open the hood for a cursory look, while having no idea what you are looking for, and no tools to fix it if you actually happened upon the issue.

Many of us have tried to point cemar in the right direction. While I have given up on helping him at this time, I do believe that he will figure it out at some point in time.

You, on the other hand, are smarter than that. No offense intended toward cemar, that is just the way it is.

I think you have an idea that a bigger picture exists than the one you like to look at. That bigger picture contains all the clues you need to effect repair of your relationship. I am willing to help, as are others. You have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone and learn to do some work that you haven't done before.

I am not picking on you. I am sure that posters here probably see chinks in my armor as well, I just happen to be a bit further along in the process.

I don't want to embarrass you either. When any of us participate on this forum, we are throwing our ugly selves out here for others to have a look at. That is a gutsy thing to do (and that certainly DOES include you, cemar).

You have taken the first and usually the hardest step by being here.

When are you going to take the next one?

All the best,
-NOPkins-

[Penthesilea]

Good point. Sorry about the quick generalization - I have become rather bitter about women in the past few years, and I am trying real hard to not become another Sacha Guitry (very obscure french theatrical reference... ten points and a candy bar for the first one who gets it )

"Je suis contre les femmes ... tout contre ..."

-Sacha Guitry, French filmmaker, dramatist and actor (1885 - 1957)

Next time, I want something hard.

Pen

[sat567]

Nopkins:
(avoiding any easy set-ups about my "tool")

I took the step of being here many moons ago. I have taken further steps, thanks in part to the encouragement of my fellow SSMers:
1. trial period of several months of "no pressure" on W for sex. It ended up having no effect, except her telling me that she felt under pressure because she knew I was thinking about it.
2. Me telling her that I want sex one time a week. No response.
3. Me giving her a letter telling her that we need to work on this relationship. Led to big blow up.

So I have taken some steps. They have just not been very productive. Maybe all I've done is just peeked under the hood and rattled some cables and belts and bolts. Maybe it would be nice if there was a friggin' manual for this ol' heap. But there isn't.

Crud...I have to get out of here, and probably won't get to check in until Monday.

Until then, thanks everyone for the help, encouragement, kicks in the pants, etc.

Hairdog - make it a great day!

[MadFrog]

Good job Pen. send me your address and the candy bar is yours! Guitry was married 5 times and wrote a lot of very funny plays. He is also famous for writing a lot of one-liners about women and marriage (I find them hilarious, but not kind!).

I am trying to not become quite that cynical about male/female relations.

[Corri]

Frog:

Corri: I understand what you are saying, but I still think that the bottom line is that someone, or both, has to change in order to find the "third" solution (not divorce, and not celibacy)

Correct. And since you cannot 'make' your spouse do anything, that leaves you.

By that I mean that people's expectations have to change. HD needs to expect less sex, and his wife should expect more. That sums it up? Or did I miss the point again?

Many things can change. Certainly this is a possibility. If you look back through HD's posts, you will see he attempted this, and it didn't really work... and the reason it did not work was because it was only a surface change, a mask, for this was only a pretention in order to 'get' what he really wanted.

Now if HD really wanted to become celibate because this is what he wanted for himself, sex, or lack thereof, is no longer an issue. But this was not the case.

I have no idea what his wife should do, because I don't know how important her marriage is to her. If her not having sex is more important to her than creating a happy marriage, the only way HD is going to know that is by drawing his line in the sand. She has two choices at this point. She can either change, or she can watch the marriage fall apart.

What I am saying is figure out the non-negotiables in what you need to make you happy and OWN it. One possible way to present this to your spouse is as follows:

I need x,y,z in my life in order to be happy. In the context of our marriage it means q,r,s. I very much want to work with you to arrive at that place. If you are unwilling to do so, so be it, I don't want to force you. If this is the case, however, then I will go as long as I can in honoring our marriage vows, but I cannot say how long that might be.

Yes, I believe at some point you have to ask yourself if your marriage is worth more than your happiness. But there is no way to know this until you decide and OWN what it is you need to be happy. You cannot BE happy until you know what it is you NEED to be happy, and STATE it. Likewise, your spouse cannot possibly DO ANYTHING whatsoever in assisting in this process, or not, until you make such a declaration.

Perhaps NOPkins can explain in better in a guy way. But I think you will find that for those who have navigated their way through this labrynth, it has boiled down to this as THE crucible.

Corri

[Penthesilea]

<thread hijack>

Good job Pen. send me your address and the candy bar is yours!

Thanks, but I can't accept - I'm half French, so it was easy.

Guitry was married 5 times and wrote a lot of very funny plays. He is also famous for writing a lot of one-liners about women and marriage (I find them hilarious, but not kind!). I am trying to not become quite that cynical about male/female relations.

Yeah, his one-liners are pretty funny, but if you take one look around this board, this isn't really about man= HD & woman=LD. There are plenty of women working extremely hard at their marriage & their sex life, while their H's are essentially clueless (and vice versa). Good luck to you.

Pen

</thread hijack>

[MJontheMend]

I need x,y,z in my life in order to be happy. In the context of our marriage it means q,r,s. I very much want to work with you to arrive at that place. If you are unwilling to do so, so be it, I don't want to force you. If this is the case, however, then I will go as long as I can in honoring our marriage vows, but I cannot say how long that might be.

The tricky thing about this IMO is that you can't fake it. You really have to decide that having a sex life is more important than staying in your marriage (literally as in my case or emotionally as in HP's case). When you get to that point you will have changed because you will no longer be someone who is wishy-washy about what they want or wimpy about achieving it. Your sex drive is not the thing you need to change, that would be an impossible task for most HD folk. It's not necessarily a one-step process. I've gone a long way down that road, but I know I still have a quite a way to go. Your spouse will never understand how important your sexual needs are until you are able to seriously express their importance.

The other thing that changes is your viewpoint on you marriage. As I experience success, my marriage is becoming more rewarding yet less necessary to my overall happiness. If my H were to leave me because he decided the freedom to lead a LD life was more important than our marriage, I would think that was a shame but it wouldn't be a tragedy.

[NOPkins]

HD wrote:
-------------------
Maybe it would be nice if there was a friggin' manual for this ol' heap. But there isn't.
-------------------

Well, why don't we apply some basic troubleshooting techniques then.

First we have to recognize a simple fact. The sex issue is a secondary issue caused by the core problem.

I can play 20 questions to find out the core issue in your relationship, but I bet you already know what it is.

So, if you know what it is, come clean so we can proceed.

Just to help it along, from what I understand, this is your second marriage and your wife's first.

How did your relationship start? Was it born out of an affair? Were you already divorced when you met? You mentioned finances as a cause for problems early in your relationship. Has that been settled? What about issues with your ex?

In my relationship, my wife had tremendous hurts due to my focus on career. I did a lot of things with my family, but my priorities were pretty screwed up. She needed to do things as a family - travel, vacations, outings, all things recreational.

Even as a young man, I had been damn near everywhere and done many, many things. What I gave my wife in recreation was the equivalent of sex once a month. She did indeed get to have recreation with me, but it was woefully inadequate.

This sounds like such a small deal, and it would have been, *IF* I had addressed it back then. She actually begged and pleaded with me to address the issue many times. I would listen, then basically ignore what she had said. Her recreational needs were simply dumb and unimportant to me.

Over the years, this little wound became a gangrenous festering appendage. She began to withdraw, I was busy and ignored her. The sex along with our emotional connection began to disappear until it was almost completely gone. Flame out.

On the outside, we still looked like a perfect couple. I will say that while we were having problems, our daughter never suffered as a result. We at least got that right.

When we finally addressed the sex issue, I damn near fell over when the same old issue - albeit one that I hadn't heard in a long while, poured out of my wife. The shock and realization for me, that I could have so easily fixed this decades ago, just floored me.

My wife had a need that I had not meet, in fact ignored to the point that she had given up on me. I thought *I* was the one that had given up. She had long ago given up and was still determined to stick with me.

The unfortunate side affect was that our sex and emotional connection, basically our entire relationship, had gone south.

HD, I don't know what has soured your relationship with your wife. It may be simple or possibly complex. There is a very small chance that your wife is an abuser and a user. That is very unlikely however. Chances are, that in her mind, there is a simple root to her inability to meet you half way on your issues (sex).

As others have said, since you are here, you get to change first.

So, lets figure out the core problem and firmly identify it first. Then round up the parts and tools needed to fix it, and get to it.

There is an extremely good chance that taking care of the core problem will put your wife in a more favorable mode to deal with your issue. In fact, since the lack of sex is a symptom of a larger problem, it may spontaneously remit when the source cause is removed.

Let me know what you think.

-NOPkins-

[SolidMechanic]

Dear Hairdog,

Looks like I missed the party and all of the festivities. The only thing left is some crumbs for me to pick up.

Here is a 180 that you can do. Tell your wife that you don't want to have sex with her anymore. Why would you want to ML with someone who you have so many angry feelings about? I'm sure you see the contradictions.

You can take a stand by saying that you want to have sex with her but you are through begging. If you want to do things to be a better husband, please do those things, but don't expect sex. If you feel you should speak to W in one of her "love languages", do that, but don't look for a quid pro quo. Being a good husband is an end in itself. It is its own reward.

It is about you and what you want. But your only good way of articulating that is by taking your stand: that you are a sexual person and you want a love life with your wife, but you don't expect it, you are not going to nag, and you're not going to take it with attitude.

Be prepared to love, but don't look for sex. If you don't love her, you have no chance. Even if you do, well, you know what the odds are.

Enough lame advice from yet another blue-balled ignoramus.

Sincerely,

SM, who hasn't gotten layed in 2054 days and is slightly jealous that HD got some mercy sex a couple of weeks ago.