Maybe I’m not expressing myself properly. Happiness (IMO) is not something that others can control/dictate in you. I can not make you happy without major contribution from you, you have to decide to be happy. I may help you out by giving you a new car, or paying you a million dollars (yeah right) but if your responses to the events in your life push you toward being unhappy then after a short spike of happiness you’ll be unhappy. All the sudden your tax bill went way up or everyone’s problem become yours etc.
On the other hand I can not make a happy person unhappy. You can come steal everything I own and while I’ll be unhappy on the short term, a week later I’ll be back happy, positive and talking about what I learned from the event and how I’ll have better stuff. I’ve had people close to me taken from me in horrific ways. I could spend life unhappy and many would not chastise me. I instead used their memory and life as inspiration to improve myself and add back to the world. I’m not happy because their gone, rather I’m happy despite their absence and they would be proud of me. The people who created the events taking them did not make me unhappy that was my short term response to those events.
I don’t see how being happy is ever 100% on someone else. Many times how we react to an event (i.e. your spouse’s rejection) has as much to do with the response as the event itself. We all have choices and the ability to alter our responses to our spouse’s actions. This helps to decide/change the outcome.
Now with a spouse the events and responses are ideally positive and have some affirming value for each member. Your not fused rather more balanced, like how I picture the NOPS relations now. Our situation is that our spouses (or sometime us) created events and our responses are inverse to each other. They have the power (or we give it to them through our responses) to control the results in our equation. This may mean we do or do not get sex but it doesn’t control whether we are happy or not.
The problem I’m trying to manage myself is I’ve let the fact that I’m not having sex control my happiness. If my spouse was in an accident and not able to ever have LM again would I simply be destined to unhappiness? Would I leave? My attitude would change suddenly, sex would not be the thing that makes me happy. Having her whole again would be. So it’s not the lack of sex making me unhappy rather something else…
I can relate to empty and sad. But face it, whatever happens in life I guarantee you we will have issues, challenges, problems. If we dictate our happiness around what we don’t have then we’ll never be happy. It’s funny writing this really makes me think about my response to my spousal “events”…no wonder I got the results I have…
Quote: In a relationship the sum is greater than the parts, but how much greater? In a fully functioning relationship, the intimacy, desire, touching, wanting, needing, sexually causes a closeness that to me turns into an overall feeling of ‘wellness’. Call it happiness, call it love, call it what you want, all I know is I WANT THAT, I want to feel it, and I want to think of it during the day and cant wait to be with my W, to feel it some more.
Don’t tell me that you can feel fully satisfied and happy knowing that this is possible but not being able to achieve it.
I would never say you can feel fully satisfied under these conditions. AND if it is important to have this, and if, after exhausting all possibilities, you establish that you cannot have this in your R, then you must leave the R.
It's true that happiness, feeling loved, etc., comes from inside oneself. For example, if someone cannot let themselves feel loved, then no matter how much you love them and show your love, they will always feel unloved. Just like there are some people who give and receive love easily. We say those people are "easy to love." I think that means they easily let themselves feel loved.
This "you are the only one who can make you happy" stuff is true, but it must not be mistaken for "you SHOULD tolerate and be happy under ANY conditions." Yeah, Victor Frankl showed that people could even find moments of contentment and meaning while in Nazi death camps, but that's not to say that when the liberators came, those prisoners were supposed to say, "No, thanks, we can be happy ANYWHERE, so we'll just stay here."
Being responsible for your own happiness sometimes means you have to move on. Would we tell an abused spouse just to suck it up and be happy while being assaulted physically or verbally?
If your spouse refuses to work on the marriage with you, you do have the choice to learn to do without those elements you described above, and there might be conditions under which you would decide to stick around-- if your partner were chronically ill, for example, and you feared for her safety and well-being if you left.
But if you want to be happy and experience the marriage in all its fullness and possibilities, leaving might have to be the choice you make. Bear in mind that if you don't resolve the part of the issues that are yours (the part of your happiness/unhappiness that only YOU are responsible for), you will likely attract them in your next partner.
so basically what everyone seems to be saying is that if you are not "happy" with the sexual aspect of the relationship and the LD spouse isn't willing to do anything about it with you, you either be happy anyway and accept it or leave.
Only you know what you can live with-- or without. It goes without saying that this is not a decision to be made lightly...
When my BF was drinking, I went to alanon. There were people there who had been married to active alcoholics for 10, 20, 30 years. I KNEW that was something I could not do. I was with him for two years and I had enough. I said, "I will not be under the same roof with you and any alcohol. If you want to drink, so be it, but I will not be there." That was a boundary. He still had the choice to drink, IF that was more important to him than having me around. He did stop drinking and next month it will be a year since he stopped. (We did share a bottle of sake at a sushi restaurant on my birthday a few months ago. )
Some spouses don't pull their weight financially or in the areas of child care, house maintenance, and other shared responsibility zones. For one person, any one of these areas might be a deal-breaker. Each person has to decide what the deal-breaker is.
There has been talk of this kind of boundary setting, e.g., "I will not live forever in a sexless marriage. You don't have to have sex, or agree to work on the problem, but I cannot continue to commit to being with you if that is the case." You're telling them to put working on the R higher up on the list than their own discomfort/fear/embarrassment/laziness/anger/resistance.
For some the lack of sex or minimal sex isn't a deal-breaker, or hasn't been up to this time. In fact, I'd say that is the case with everyone on this board who is still partnered but isn't having as much/the kind of sex [as] they want. It's certainly where I am at the moment.
LL --- No, not at all. I’m responding to Cemars line “And the worst part is that there is nothing I can do to make me happy” not true IMHumbleO.
I’m not being oblivious to the impact the LD can have on an HD. We, HDs, seem to take the lack of sex and magnify it. The fact that it’s missing makes us want it even more. To us it’s the tangible result of our relationship and if it’s missing then the relationship is missing.
We are mostly in similar situations in that we are not getting what we want. And the thing we’re not getting is very important, in fact it’s vital to our well being. It’s not to be dismissed. But the LD’s lack of interest (or even cases of extreme outburst) doesn’t relieve us of responsibility for our own happiness or in some cases unhappiness.
We are unhappy because of the circumstance we find ourselves in, but we are still responsible for and control what we feel. In Cemars case I’m guessing (since I think it true in all our cases) he is as responsible for the results he is experiencing as his wife. So I would consider his statement is not true. I think he expresses extreme side of what we all as HDs feel. BTW - I tend to relate very closely with his statements when it comes to the frustration and emotion of our situations. I’m not picking on you Cemar just using your statement to try and prove a point.
Yes, my wife is totally aware of the pain her distance has caused me. We have cried over it, prayed about it, and I've poured my heart out to her on more than one occasion. The most recent was four years ago, when I told her I would rather get a separation than continue to live in a sexless marriage. Like others' experiences on this board, that threat of leaving was the catalyst for some real heartfelt change in her, but they were short-lived (less than two months) and soon the old, LD wife reappeared.
I have also poured my very soul and innermost self out to her in long e-mails and IM exchanges over the years. So while I KNOW this isn't easy for her (and this Board has really helped me to empathize with the LDW mindset), she CAN'T write it off to "Oh my gosh, I never knew!"
She knows.
Choc.
Choc.
This is such a heartfelt post and something in it makes me want to reach out to you. You say that your wife at one point made some heartfelt changes, but reverted back to being LD. I would guess that she was LD all along, and reverted back to not trying anymore. That being said – what was the reason she stopped trying?
Did she slip back into old behaviors because she got more comfortable and forgot about the changes she was trying to make? Or did she hope that the issue would go away? If that is the case, it is your responsibility to keep the issue in the forefront. Or to redraw a boundary.
Was it because she was resentful that there were issues of hers not being addressed in return?
Was it because, having given it her best, you let her know that it wasn’t enough or that you didn’t want what she had to offer?
Sure, she feels pressure. Only she can rise above the pressure. However, something has to motivate her to rise above the pressure, and there must be clues to her motivations in the conversations you have had over the years.
Chocolate, I'm curious why you did nothing about your "separation" boundary. That was a pretty strong thing to throw down and I'm sure she had a healthy dose of fear about your words. Then came anger and a strong desire to find out if you were for real or not. So she started slacking a bit and you didn't enforce your boundary, she realized you were bluffing, she slacked some more, you did nothing, she lost respect for you. And here you are.
I think that when our spouse is trying to break a bad habit (cause, imo, I think that chronic "No" saying is as much a bad habit with some people as anything else--I realized I might get flamed for that but I believe it to be true) there will be times when we need to be supportive and encouraging in different ways. Right now, I am supportive of my H in positive and affirming ways and he responds well to that. In the beginning he would have taken this encouragement and sat back on his laurels and said, Well that's enough of THAT, and not tried any further. So in the beginning I had to really be on guard with the boundary firmly in place. I personally took this firmness too far and then had to spend time un-doing that damage but that's another story. I was just so paranoid about him not listening to me and, well, I do love the guy and felt sorry for him and was afraid that I'd shoot myself in the foot and accept less than I could live with, in the name of compassion.
Anyway, I think that at that critical moment, you BOTH gave up on the process. She did what's natural to a person trying to break a habit and form a new one..she did it for a while and then fudged back to her old, comfy behavior. You shoulda called her on it and enforced your boundary--or created a lesser boundary if you didn't truly want the separation. It is sad that we have to threaten our partners into meeting a fundamental marital need but look at it this way: You could have spent the last 4 years getting to enjoy her new hot body and sexy wardrobe. Instead you've let your own pride prevent you from saying, Wife what the heck happened? How can we get back to that place where we were both trying?
I had many, many, many setbacks with my H. I know that you have been around long enough to watch some of my more spectacular train wrecks. There may even be more in the future, who knows, I'm not a fortune teller, but I will tell you this: I wouldn't go back to the civil-but-sexless days for all the money in the world.
Boy, this thread is hopping all over the place. Mrs NOP, your steak post had me in stitches, but there is much truth to it.
I used to be guilty of this one:
Quote:
4. You yelled at her, withdrew from her or spent a grand total of 5 minutes during the day actually conversing with her - now where the hell is your steak?
I see this from his perspective now, but when I would do this, I would feel bad about the way I had behaved, and then offer to share some steak with him as a way of reaching out and reconnecting. He saw it as a further imposition, obviously. So things are not quite so black-and-white.
And an additional one:
11. I believed his reasons for eating steak should be the same as mine, and that he should enjoy it prepared and served the same way that I did.
Again, this was not done out of blatant disrespect for his POV, I just had tunnel vision and couldn’t see that his motives and approach were just as valid as mine.
The sexual motives article that you linked was excellent, btw…fed right into what I had come to realize myself…see #11 above! I will try to post on that thread when I get a chance.
) 
I will try to post on that thread when I get a chance.