Learning to Trust Myself

[Burgbud]

How many of the LBS's would have been acting like my H~honestly~had their partner immediately ended the A and was remorseful. I think only one person responded to that and she said the same thing as you.

It's interesting. If your spouse is out the door, especially if they're with somebody else, your choices are quite limited. You can stay the same, in which case the sitch will remain the same, or you can change and hope that change eventually gets reflected in the R. But if the spouse wants back then stubborn, prideful people (such as myself not too long ago) get to keeping thinking we're right and you're delusional. It's almost unfortunate. Not that I recommend you follow my wife's example to get H to wake up. But I do think that as you develop your inner strength and self-esteem through this, you're going to leave him if he doesn't come around a bit. My wife would have left me a long time ago if she'd been healthier and more emotionally stable.

H is too stubborn to realize that he's caught his fingers in the door when he slammed it shut. As I said above, he's proud, indignant, judgmental, stubborn and respectful of few. He's a breed of his own. He will not request help nor would he take it if it was offered. HE doesn't need help afterall. It is me who is delusional.

Take out the part about respect (I've always been a helluva nice guy to everybody but W), substitute "rarely" for "not" in the sentence about requesting help, and that was me.

My H's actions in the past are practically proof that I have not been first in his life.

On my last thread for example, I had several posts on pornography. H apparently has a "thing" for it and I find it incredibly disrespectful and think he is quite frankly betraying me by doing whatever it is he does. We've had several conversations on the topic and even more arguments. But recently I said "you've never given a resolution on the pornography issue, never said whether or not you intend to stop". ... To me, there's no two ways to look at that. He simply doesn't care how I feel.

Wow. Just wow. W could have written that. Probably has in a journal somewhere. There were times I tried to stop, at her request. I probably made it six months to a year once or twice. But in truth I never saw a real need to stop. It was what I liked, it wasn't hurting W any, it was just prudery on her part that made her not accept it. I even tried to get her involved, and she tried at least a little bit. But she's said several times, including recently, how bad it made her feel about herself, her attractiveness and her sexuality (though that was one thing I was always full of complements about) that I wouldn't stop. All that is obvious to me now. It wasn't then. I mean, I still loved having sex with her, and she was obviously attractive whether I told her she was or not, so why should she care? The concept that you do things for your spouse just because they want you to, and because you want to show them that what they want is important to you, has only recently penetrated my brick skull. Ironically I've quit the porn cold turkey, now that she's "gone". A book called Wild at Heart really hit home to me on several fronts. It's one guy's perspective on what it means to be a Christian man and it reawakened a lot of spirituality in me to realize I didn't have to become a milk-toast weenie in order to reconnect with faith. There's very little in that book about porn, but at one point he says that pornography is having a woman without having to be a man. That really resonated with me and I haven't looked back. I wouldn't have believed that possible five months ago.

Another thing that's helped on that front as well as many others is the realization that you don't have to indulge in everything you want to try in order to live a complete and satisfying life. I guess that's a bit of growing up I needed to do a long time ago but I'm glad I finally got around to it. I guess my point in all this is that I believe there's more in your husband than he's showing. He does have an awful lot of growing to do before he'll be good for you. And right now I can't think of any good way to pull it out of him short of what finally pulled it out of me. I'd love to see it happen, though. I'll tuck it away in the subconscious and see if any ideas eventually bubble up.

But for now my only advice to you is the same advice you'd get anywhere on this board. Make the changes you need to make for you. Either he'll come around or he won't but you don't have to be tied to his level. At some point in the future, maybe you can get him to honestly look at whether he wants to lose you forever, or if maybe it would be worth while to learn how to keep you. It's not that hard, and I've found it actually feels better than defending selfish interests all the time. I'll hope and pray for that for him.

Meanwhile, good luck! And be good to yourself.