Quote: -------------- Here's the problem. He blamed me for his LD because I was overweight and lacked fashion sense, so he was mean to me because I was overweight and lacked fashion sense. I readily admit that I am more attractive now and I have no intention of gaining back the weight, but I feel sorry for fat me. Also, I have to ask myself why I want to be involved with a man who is only nice to me when I am thin. I know it has a lot to do with his own self-esteem, but sometimes I don't care. I know I'm regressing and being overly simplistic, but I've never seen a single movie or read a single book in which the ugly duckling turns into a swan and then lives happily ever after with the character who called her ugly and shunned her company. --------------
He was blaming you for HIS problem. You are not a fat slob and he knows it. Regardless, the sting of those comments will take a while to go away. They do leave very real scars. The only thing you can do is to spend as little time as possible dwelling on the old hurtful things, not for some mental gymnastic award, but because they have been addressed and hopefully dealt with by your husband, never to return. In time, those scars will not be so painful or obvious.
If he has not addressed those issues, then he needs to, NOW.
On the positive side, the ups and downs, pain, sorrow and joy all mean that your marriage is not only recovering, but getting stronger. With the issues you two have addressed, your marriage is better than it has ever been, and the chances for its long term survival, and your goal of being desired when you are old, are getting better by the day.
I read all of your posts, Jenny, and I find it most pleasant to read of your new life with your husband.
All the best, -NOPkins-
I will ferret out an affair at any opportunity.
-An affair is the embodiment of entitlement, fueled by resentment and lack of respect. -An infidel will remain unreachable so long as their sense of entitlement exceeds their ability to reason.
Quote: Regardless, the sting of those comments will take a while to go away. They do leave very real scars.
This is helpful. I guess I needed validation that it isn't "wrong" for me to still feel hurt even though my H is now acting nice. In a way, the fact that he is being so nice and HD now is part of the problem because I now see that he had a choice in his behavior and made choices that hurt me. It was easier for me to excuse his behavior when I could just assign much of it to a genetic tendency towards LD and crabbiness.
Quote: The only thing you can do is to spend as little time as possible dwelling on the old hurtful things, not for some mental gymnastic award, but because they have been addressed and hopefully dealt with by your husband, never to return. In time, those scars will not be so painful or obvious.
If he has not addressed those issues, then he needs to, NOW.
I am trying to avoid thinking about old hurtful things but maybe that's counter-productive because what seems to be happening is we'll be talking and something that is said that is perhaps completely unrelated will suddenly trigger a bad memory for me and I'm hit with a tidal wave of hurt or anger. For instance, when I hear the word Easter, I remember last Easter when my H wouldn't go to my Mom's house with me and the kids, was crabby and rejecting of me when we returned and I discovered he had crashed my computer with a virus from an internet porn site while I was gone. So, maybe if he's really nice to me next Easter my brain will burn some new associations for me, but until then it's not going to be a good topic to bring up. Unfortunately, there are quite a few topics that currently affect me in this way. I wish there was some way I could gain complete catharsis because ignoring the memories doesn't erase them.
What did you mean by addressing the issues? He has admitted that he was immature and superficial because of lack of self-esteem but he still believes that my weight gain was one of the main reasons for his LD behavior. He feels that his porn addiction was the other main reason. He truly believes that most overweight women don't get laid. When I tell him that he's wrong, he says my sources are unreliable. When I gave him the specific example of my overweight sister and her HDH, he said my BIL was overweight too.
I was at my daughter's band concert this afternoon. The band director is an extremely overweight man. He is also pleasant, socially poised, humorous and confident. If I was his W, I would be worried about his health but I wouldn't be turned off enough by his weight to reject him sexually even though he could probably stand to lose 150 lbs. In fact, if I were given a chance to choose a husband all over again, I would choose a kind, confident HD obese man over a self-involved LDH with a great body and low self-esteem.
Quote: I find it most pleasant to read of your new life with your husband.
Things are good now and they would be better if I could have a bad memory lobotomy. I just keep telling myself that since I am choosing to look forward to a happy future with my H, I am only hurting my own cause by not getting over my resentment. I guess there are just centers of emotion that I can't reach with rational thought.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
I just wanted to say that your Dad sounds like a wonderful man. I wish people would treat overweight as the cultural health problem that it is and not as a sign of lack of self-esteem or sloth. Nobody accuses smokers of lacking self-esteem because they can't resist buying a pack everytime they see them conveniently displayed at the gas station and nobody accuses cocaine addicts of being slothful because they would rather take a drug to feel energized than run a couple miles.
The first "junk food" was consumed by factory workers in Britain during the industrial revolution. In order to deal with the hellish fast-paced grind of factory life, the workers consumed convenience foods that were high in sugar and drank large quantities of tea. It's clear to me as someone who was overweight and overworked that the fact that Americans work too many hours and don't get enough sleep has a lot to do with the obesity epidemic.
When I see an overweight mom, I see someone who is probably giving too much of herself to her family and others and using non-nutritious food as a crutch and a treat to get through her day. Women are told to take care of themselves and maintain a healthy weight, but the subtext is but first go to work, clean the house, care for the children, cook a delicious meal for your husband (don't you dare use tofu), bake some cupcakes for the church bake sale, attend the neighborhood potluck and don't act like a b*tch while doing all these things. If you don't do all these things your children will turn out terribly, your marriage will suffer and all sense of social cohesion and community will cease to exist and it will be your fault. So you eat a donut to help you along until you can collapse from exhaustion in front of the television where you can watch some scary stories about what happens to people who don't work real hard to support society like you do interspersed with ads for even tastier donuts and pills that help you do the work without the donuts as long as you don't mind peeing all the time and passing out in the shower.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Attractiveness is # 3 on the mens list of needs according to "His Needs/Her Needs". So yes, your bady changing could have been a major downer for him. So yes, if he complains about it, then take it very seriously.
Jenny said: ----------- What did you mean by addressing the issues? He has admitted that he was immature and superficial because of lack of self-esteem but he still believes that my weight gain was one of the main reasons for his LD behavior. He feels that his porn addiction was the other main reason. He truly believes that most overweight women don't get laid. When I tell him that he's wrong, he says my sources are unreliable. When I gave him the specific example of my overweight sister and her HDH, he said my BIL was overweight too. -----------
When a person says something totally inappropriate and stupid, they leave themselves only two real options. They can excuse the behavior in some way, or they face the mistake and attempt to rectify it.
When I was in the 7th grade, while standing in a lunch line, I saw this girl that I really liked. She hadn't noticed me. I decided that I wanted to get her attention, so I started picking at her. I don't remember exactly what I was doing, but it was very irritating to her. She told me to stop it several times. Finally, she turned around and told me that if I did it again, she was going to slap me. Of course I decided to do it again, after all, I was a guy and I had to save face. Well, she didn't feel the need to save my face at all, and slapped the crap out of me. It hurt, and I deserved it. I also learned not to be that way with girls that day.
I don't care what your husband really thinks about someone's weight, he still doesn't get to be mean and disrespectful. He sure as hell doesn't get to stand in the lunch line and pick at you armed with an attitude about your weight. If he sincerely does have issues with appearance, then he can discuss it with you in a forthright manner befitting an adult.
He needs to know that his weight comments hurt you, and he needs to set that right as best as he can.
If your weight really was the source of his low drive (which I sincerely doubt), then he was being a chicken by not addressing it with you. Since you are not a mind reader, it is still his fault.
As you two work through this stuff, don't forget that he probably has pains and hurts that need to be dealt with too.
All the best, -NOPkins-
I will ferret out an affair at any opportunity.
-An affair is the embodiment of entitlement, fueled by resentment and lack of respect. -An infidel will remain unreachable so long as their sense of entitlement exceeds their ability to reason.
I know you like statistics, so here's one for you. The amount of money a man earns is directly correlated to the thinness of his wife. So, if you want a thin wife all you have to do is go out there and make some more money. All status symbols are expensive.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Jenny, I don't know if this will help or not, but I went thru something similar with my husband. Those old resentments and hurts just came floating up to the surface once things began to improve. Just as you said, I realized that him abandoning me as his wife (in all ways except leaving our home) was a CHOICE. Prior to that, I just thought that it was something beyond his control. When he admitted that it was intentional I was devastated. Mostly because I realized that, where I thought I was irresistable to him, I really wasn't. I was totally RE-sistable and it was actually quite easy for him to cut me out of his life because of a massive confusion on what God wanted him to do. (yeah, dumbarse, God wants you to shun your wife and ignore her..then you'll be REALLY devout)
Anyway, I stayed mad at this for a long time. A very long time, in fact. The only thing that helped me get past it was many many apologies on his part and time. Eventually I stopped feeling pissed off that was capable of such a thing and started to trust that the New and Improved Version of H was the real deal and I could relax and not worry that it would happen again. For a long time, I lived in fear that he would do this again. After all, he is still the same person and is still obssessed with the Cath Church. However, his attitude is much more healthy and..dare I say it..he even seems balanced most days.
So give yourself plenty of time and feel free to ask for the apology if you need it that day. He owes you one, or a thousand.
Quote: If your weight really was the source of his low drive (which I sincerely doubt), then he was being a chicken by not addressing it with you. Since you are not a mind reader, it is still his fault.
Whether or not it really was the cause of his low drive, he had convinced himself this was the case. I know exactly why he was too chicken too address it with me. He was somewhat afraid to find out it wasn't the cause and he knew if he confronted me about losing weight, I would confront him about his drinking and the fact that I was doing more than my share of work and the fact that he whined everytime I tried to cook healthier food and was the opposite of helpful in my dieting efforts.
I'm actually in a very good place in our relationship this morning because we had a long talk last night about how we really need to change a lot of the patterns in our relationship when my H goes back to having a regular 9-5 job(hopefully soon!). My H said he realizes that since he is an irritable person with a high need for order and comfort, he is going to have to make the effort to do more around the house in order to have things the way he likes it, rather than just complaining and hoping that I can make the time to do these things on top of all my other responsibilities. At the very beginning of this convo, he said that he was going to try to fix a sink that has been broken forever. He said he thought the first step in the repair process would be to jar everything loose by having sex on top of it. If he had said this to me 6 mos. ago, I probably would have fainted from shock and delight. I realized that he really did want to do this, he wasn't just saying it to get on my good side. We talked about this and he indicated that he feels like he has matured more in the last 6 mos. than in the last 15 years. He said that the main change is that he now wants to see himself as someone who is capable of doing things to change his environment rather than just a cranky, passive defeatist. He even said that he wants to learn how to cook! I gave up on this probably within the first month of our marriage, so this is huge.
I told him that I'm probably going to occasionally fall prey to old bad habits, so we made a plan to move everything around in our house to defeat old patterns. For instance, we are going to get rid of the sofas in the family room so nobody can fall asleep in front of the TV and we're going to make the living room into the new dining room so it won't seem as weird to eat something my H cooked (LOL).
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
My H still does jerky things which, in the past, would affect me for hours on end...now I state my piece and calm down ( as much as I want to linger in the anger which then leads to thinking about past events).
It's healthier for me when I can do this and have good effects on the relationship. Just warning you that H may not be fully converted to the New and Improved version.
