Well, we're back in process once again. For the last time, I think, one way or the other. Had another epic 3-hour conversation Saturday night. Lots of it was SSDD, but perhaps we're finally starting to communicate, also. Time will tell.
For starters, the new meds haven't arrived yet - the pharmacist only works 2 days per week, and we're presuming she hasn't managed to contact the doc yet, so we'll see what happens on that front this week. We spent a good part of the day Saturday attending a (very LONG!) show put on by the place where S14 takes guitar lessons - they teach various instruments plus voice, and this was a showcase for all their students. They form various bands with the various students, and S14 is of course in one of those. We got there about 11:30, the show started around noon, and S14's band was up around 2:30. It was good - S14 is VERY good on guitar. Had a good time, but very tiring.
Saturday night, I began the convo with W, basically starting off by talking about my feeling that, along with the new meds etc, it would be good if she could begin re-forming her basic beliefs and attitudes about sex, open her mind to new ideas, explore some erotica with me, and generally just start by catching herself in having negative thoughts on the subject. I offered a recent example - there had been a movie on TV, with the title "Sex and Mrs. X", or something like that, which I had started watching out of curiosity. She came in and asked what the movie was, and when I told her the title, her comment was "Right... anything with 'sex' in the title, and you're all over it...", just a wry comment, which I take as a shining example of what I'm talking about with her negative viewpoint on the subject. My point was that if she can get in the habit of catching these negative thoughts and turning them around, we might make more progress in that area. My intent was to be very low-key with it, and just have a nice conversation about new ideas, but of course she got her back up right away, and the convo became much more broadly-based, and about something else entirely.
Basically, she was retreating to her usual position that she needs to feel relaxed, comfortable, and unthreatened in order for anything to happen, which is fine as far as it goes, but it definitely struck me that this was now completely at odds with her "other" position that the "main problem" is hormonal imbalance. She took my opening to mean that I was saying the problem is "all in her head", and thought that what I was proposing was to "all of a sudden" go from zero to full-tilt, watching porn videos and demanding all sorts of "fancy stuff". I was at great pains to correct this mis-impression, letting her know that what I'm REALLY after is simply finding ways to work on building our EC, and at the same time, building up some positive ways of thinking about sex for her, and exposing her to some new ideas. I stated very clearly that I'm hoping for a nice, long period of re-discovering each other, going slowly and not being goal-oriented about it at all.
Anyway, I won't bore you with all of the gory details, it would make for a much-too-long post (which this is already becoming anyway). A few interesting things came out of it, though. For one thing, she mentioned something from last year when we were working at this stuff, or maybe it was 2 years ago, at any rate it was when we had first discovered Schnarch. She had been saying that her body was unresponsive sexually because of menopause. But when we actually got around to ML, much to my surprise, I found that her body DID respond, the evidence being natural lubrication. At the time, I pointed out to her that perhaps she didn't "need" artificial lubrication, but she interpreted this as me setting up a "rule" that she "wasn't allowed" to use it. She also mentioned that her interpretation of what I'd been trying to say during that time was that there were now all these "rules" about "how we're supposed to do it", whereas what I was trying to get at was that there ARE NO RULES! Hmmm.... very interesting bit of miscommunication/misunderstanding/misapprehension. So it's apparent that when I'm standing up for myself and stating my preferences, she's either misinterpreting what I'm saying, or I'm not being specific enough. Probably a bit of both. One more clue as to the ACTUAL nature of our problems.
Anyway, long story short, our EC is at a very low ebb at the moment, and aside from any possible hormonal imbalance there is also no shortage of deep issues for us to work through, which of course have been there all along, and which we've made a number of attempts to resolve with so far no success. In short, no real progress to report in the past 2 years at least, status quo still very much alive. I think there's probably one more round of MC in our future, this time with a for-pay counsellor (in the past we've used Employee Assistance counsellors, with no real results). Hopefully we can engineer some kind of breakthrough in the not-too-distant future...
