Wow, there certainly have been a lot of people stepping up to the plate and offering you advice, ideas, hope and encouragement for your sitch, both on this thread and your previous one! I hope you can see this as support and not simply pestering you to “try it my way”. Please consider what I am about to contribute as more of the same, advice, ideas, hope, encouragement, not pestering.
After all, you’re the one to name your current thread, “Never give up; never give up.” So hopefully you will suffer through this post with unwavering patience as well.
We have many R issues in common, HDH vs. LDW, wife doesn’t want to do it, talk about it, think about it, have to admit (even to herself) that she is a human being with urges. You know the drill. So do I!
I have made some progress with my W and my sitch in the last couple of months, so I hope what I have done to realize the progress may help you in your sitch also.
As for asking my W to read SSM, she ignored the book until I wrapped it in a book cover carved out of a brown paper grocery bag. Unwrapped, if she picked it up, someone might see what she was reading. That would open up all sorts of vulnerabilities. Was she into sex? Was she sexually starved? Was she the one who was sexually starving her partner? You get the picture. So I wrapped it up in plain old brown craft paper from a grocery bag, and pleaded with her to please read it with me back in January, ’05. She made it as far as page 48 and then put it down, and hasn’t picked it up again since. The chapter she was reading had to do with legitimate reasons why women lost their desire to ML. Gees, if that was me reading about what was causing me to decline, I’d be riveted to the book, not putting it down. KWIM?
In May of this year, I discovered this BB because our R/M was really getting me down. I remembered how Michelle had mentioned the BB near the end of her SSM book. I found folks like you and “Shortchanged” were in similar sitches. I also found advice from many people to check out David Schnarch’s book titled “Passionate Marriage.” I believe you know of the book since you titled your last thread, “Into the crucible?” which I understood as a reference to his PM book.
I did check it out, both in paperback and via audio CD. The audio CD is where I’m headed with my pitch. I received it in the mail from Ama---.com, and devoured it in two days. After doing so, I decided I needed to find a way to get my W to listen and absorb and assimilate also.
Schnarch did a very neat job of condensing his PM book into a series of four (4) forty minute lectures, each one building upon the previous one. They are perfect for anyone who has a forty minute commute to work. Imagine your W driving to work, multitasking; not only is she driving in to the big city to her big job, she’s listening to a series of lectures that you have asked her to listen to, thus working on her R/M as she committed to doing so, but continues to procrastinate about instead.
Sounds good, but what about the packaging that the CD audio book comes in? Just as my W would not even pick up SSM until I wrapped it up in craft paper for her, I had to reason my way through her fear of all things pertaining to sex mentality and disguise the CD audio book.
My solution was to burn a copy of the two discs that PMcd is packaged in to plain old blank CD-Rs and simply label them PM1 and PM2. That way, anyone could be a passenger in her car without noticing that she was doing something positive for her R, namely listening to the 4 PM lectures.
HD, why do I go into such detail about this recent episode of my R/M? Because it worked!! I asked my W to listen to the 4 lectures on a Sunday afternoon, left her alone for the next 5 weekdays since we work opposite shifts anyways, and the next weekend she was more than willing to talk about US and our R/M.
Why did the Schnarch CDs work when so many other things had failed? First of all, he put everyone at ease by describing his approach to marriage issues as non-pathological. Life is an incredible challenge so having a few hang-ups that you need to work through to relate to your spouse doesn’t make you a case number. It just means you are part of the human race! Next he talks about differentiation. Figure out yourself for yourself and don’t rely on your partner to tell you who you are or how to feel; if you are hurting, sooth yourself! These are not only great relationship topics, but great hooks to get you interested in his style. But the one that really got to me was in lecture 4 where he talks about growing old and reaching gridlock. To paraphrase (poorly at best), it is quite possible that if we don’t hit gridlock and actually feel compelled to communicate with our spouse of all these years, we will go to our grave not really knowing who that person was that we were married to. Gridlock happens when we continue NOT communicating for years of marriage what our own needs are to our spouse and life cannot go on any longer without change.
Sounding like an infomercial here…..all that in 4 easy 40 min. lectures!!
You decide, hairdog. Maybe you’ve BTDT. Like the rest of the responses to your threads, I’m just offering something that might help to unlock the great mystery that is your wife. She IS a great gift and YOU deserve her (in her unlocked state, that is).
