Thanks for the responses and sharing your situations with me. I will try and answer all your questions.
- FocusedFlutist: I don't have many friends where I live. In the progam I am in at college most of the other students are women so its difficult/dangerous to really develop any kind of friendship outside of school I think. Both because my W can get mad about even incidental contact and also because I thought if I had made some friendships with other women the chance of an A would go up. My S is 5 so we do stuff together but he is too young to be doing "guy" stuff, but I really enjoy the time we get to spend together.
I think I moved out of the bedroom for a few reasons: my W had two of these internet relationships (I don't know if people consider this cheating but it made me pretty upset). The first time she felt so guilty that she woke me up at 3 am on my birthday to tell me. I am sure she felt better but that really didn't make me fool good! She said it was just because she was pregnant and wouldn't use the net again. The second time it happened she felt bad and freakin told me on my last day at work when I was switching jobs so that we could make more $. I told her that we needed to go to counseling but she wouldn't go and wouldn't discuss anything (By this time we hadn't had sex for maybe 6 months or so and we definatly weren't sleeping in the same room).
The last straw came when I found some pics of her on our computer, some pics of another guy, and a letter that she had wrote (and I presumed sent out) bascially saying that she was in a terrible marriage and that I beat her and drank and did a bunch of other stuff (which I never even raised a hand to her once, I don't even drink,... you get the picture). It is terrible to be falsely accused of something. It was devestating to have my W be the one doing this to pick up OM. Anyway I was mad as hell and worried that some nut was going to show up at try to off me because my wife was saying that I did all these bad things (I guess thats one way to attract other men). I was also mad as hell because of all the stuff I had put up with so that I could still see my son everyday. So it just went down hill from there. I would like to think that I was as involved as possible when my W was pregant. As far as when things where better in the R it was when we first met. When we got married it went down hill fast.
- Annette: I have the sex starved marriage book. I bought it for myself as a birthday present one year . I definatly see what you are saying about an A and intellectually I know how bad it is. Its just all the aggravating circumstances that make it harder for me.
Hairdog: I definatly know what your saying about setting an example for my S. It's hard to show affection when the other person doesn't seem to want it at all. I would never tell him that reason I got D after 20 years was because of him moving out though. Kids are really smart and it worries me that he might know something is not right. He probably isn't old enough to know exactly what is wrong but still.
- GEL: My W never makes an excuse and to be honest I haven't even tried to make a pass at her in the last 2 1/2 years because its not even a approachable issue with her. She said she would only talk about it with a C but then that didn't work out either. We tried C once before this when we where first having problems (it was one of these troubled marriage encounter weekends) but she refused to do anything and wanted to leave so we left since I didn't see the point of staying if both of us didn't want to be there. As for approaches to be honest I haven't done anything from the SSM book. At this point I don't even know where to start.
I used to think that if I just kept trying and waiting that things would get better but frankly it doesn't seem like that is doing any good. Right now I feel emotionally like we are roommates and we actually are because we don't sleep together. I have also been hesitant to really push the issue because there has been a huge power inbalance between us since we moved and I had to start scbool again. She works and has a good career and made all the $ and I was worried that if it fell apart right now I would be stuck in another state, broke, loose my son, and not have enough $ to finish college to get into a new career. That is the primary reason I went to a C a year ago was that I was afraid that I was getting so desperate that I would have an A. What makes me feel even more desperate is that I not only want to connect with someone physically I am desperate to connect with someone emotionally.
. I definatly see what you are saying about an A and intellectually I know how bad it is. Its just all the aggravating circumstances that make it harder for me.
