This started out as a response to HP saying that her H wants her to somehow know what he wants without having to tell her. But it got way off into other issues, so I decided to start a new thread instead.
That feeling of your spouse wanting you to somehow magically know what they want is something I struggle with all the time. I know I’ve mentioned it before. W absolutely refuses to talk to me or to tell me what she wants or needs from me.
When we first went to MC (almost 15 years ago), one of my major complaints about her was that she would never talk to me about anything that could be considered “serious”. It isn’t just sex and R issues, but anything serious: money, job, buying a new house, final wishes in case of death, family problems with her aging mother (who is being physically and violently abused by her granddaughter), …, anything serious. She’s a very, very little better in some of the other areas, but she still absolutely refuses to discuss sex and R issues.
You also know that I’ve been working on myself. You know that our SL has drastically improved in the past nine months or so and that I don’t understand it. She won’t talk, so I don’t know what’s behind the changes. I’ve stumbled around in the dark, trying to figure out what to change. I’ve tried talking to her as openly and as honestly as I know how, but as always, she just clams up. I get no response at all, either verbal or non-verbal. Nothing. I’ve though that maybe she feels pressured to come up with an immediate response when she would prefer to ruminate a while, so I’ve offered her opportunities to talk later. I’ve even told her on occasion that I don’t want a response, but that I want her to think about something and get back to me. She never does.
I much prefer face to face convos, but letters sometimes help to get my thoughts organized and presented in a straightforward manner. So last week, or I guess now it’s the week before last, I decided that instead of giving sappy V-day cards, I would write letters to everyone in the family and tell them something of how I felt about them.
D13 was adopted from Romania when she was 3, and as she’s entering her teen years, she’s really beginning to struggle with who she is and where she came from. She’s wondering about her biological family and what they tell me are normal feelings of having been unwanted. She’s even asked why her mother didn’t want her. (The truth is that her mother used the orphanage system as alternative birth control and had at least four other kids by four other men somewhere in the system – but we would NEVER tell her that.) Those of you who have been here long enough to have heard my whole story have also heard me mention that W isn’t really the motherly type. It’s so bad with D13 that she’s been asking my mother if W loves her. So I wrote her a letter telling her some of how we got her, acknowledging some of the mistakes we’ve made, and assuring her that we love her. She showed the letter to D17, D19, and my mother, and now has it framed in her room.
D17 commented on her letter, and D19 (the college girl from Moldova now working on her third year with us) wrote me a long email thanking me for her letter and telling me how much she loves us.
The letter to W was somewhat longer and more intimate than the ones for the girls. There was nothing in it that she hadn’t heard before, but I did mention some of the bad stuff. I told her how badly the lack of sex had hurt me over the years. I told her how I felt rejected, not only as a man, but as a person. But it wasn’t a bad letter. I only mentioned the bad things as a contrast to the way things are now. I told her how much better things are, how my attitudes have changed, and how much I’ve appreciated the increase in our SL. I tried to explain what sex means to me and how it makes me feel to ML with her. I told her how much I love her. I quoted some of Proverbs 31 and told her that I think of her as that kind of woman. I told her that I knew that I hadn’t been the ideal H, but that I wanted to be. I asked her again to help me with that.
Predictably enough, I’ve gotten no response. I haven’t even gotten any acknowledgement that she read it. No comments. No actions. No nothing. I know that she had some response/reaction to what I wrote. She’s sad about the wasted years, she’s angry that I brought up the past, she’s happy about the current sitch, she’s unhappy with the realization that sex really does improve the R, … I don’t know,… something. After a couple of days, she said that the girls had showed her their letters. I said, “I hope you didn’t show them yours”, and she told me that she had put it away where they wouldn’t see it. That was the first (and last) acknowledgement that she had even gotten a letter, so I was hoping that maybe she would say something about it. But that was not to be.
So what’s happening here? Does she know that her lack of response drives me crazy? Does she realize that I start questioning everything? That I wonder if I was wrong to write the letter? That I wonder if maybe she just doesn’t care enough to respond? Is this passive/aggressive control?
I don’t want it to sound like I’m viewing this as a big chess game, because I’m not. I’m not looking to win here. I’ve even reached a point where I don’t even want more sex than she’s willing to give, so it’s not like I’m trying to work out some grand strategy to get her all worked up so she’ll f*ck my brains out. What I want is no-secrets, open communication between us. How do you do that when one partner won’t communicate?
