Quote: --------------------------------------- So when I did get her shirt off, I told her I wouldn’t mind paying for her to have a tummy tuck ---------------------------------------
When she exposed her vulnerability to you, her real nakedness, you critiqued it; the physicality, the physical manifestation of her vulnerability. That is bad form, and I think you missed a great opportunity for intimacy.
I do want to commend you on your willingness to be honest with your wife, but you should understand that timing is a very important factor in such matters.
All the best, -NOPkins-
I will ferret out an affair at any opportunity.
-An affair is the embodiment of entitlement, fueled by resentment and lack of respect. -An infidel will remain unreachable so long as their sense of entitlement exceeds their ability to reason.
Quote: Guys who like boob jobs haven't watched enough porn.
(I wink, and yet I'm serious.)
LOL. I must admit I did my part to "ruin" porn for my H by often saying "fake","fake","fake" whenever one of the ladies exposed her breasts on the occasions we watched porn together. I also pointed out the fake orgasms. Of course, I also said things like "this is really not turning me on because she looks like the not too bright girl who sat in front of me in Consumer Econ class in high school doodling pictures of baby animals rather than learning how to balance a checkbook.".
Note to Cobra: I don't think what you told your W was "wrong", I just think it was stupid. You were acting like a Type 5 scientist who thinks he lives in a world that actually works like a perfect scientific model; a world with no friction or fusion, full of perfectly differentiated people with no validation needs. Probably, your W should have replied to your comments by saying something like "Okay, you go out and fetch an extra $50,000 this year and I'll get the tummy AND boob job with the first $25,000 but I want the other $25,000 to spend on a new greenhouse for the garden in recompense for the trouble of having the surgery(or whatever she might really want-not a penis enlargement for you-lol).". Then if you replied "But, I can't make an extra $50,000 this year.", she could say "Well then I guess that you want something that you can't afford. I hope you don't expect me to validate your wounded ego feelings about the matter.".
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Nopkins very good point about when she did take her shirt off he took the opportunity to make a negative comment.
Cobra you can't blame everything on FOO. Your wife is a human with emotions. She isn't a robot and you shouldn't be expecting one. She is entitled to have her feelings. We all have feelings.
Quote: As a little more background, leading up to Christmas, things were going very well too. After Christmas, I took the kids to see my family for an overnight trip. It was after we got back that she seemed a little distant. That distance continued until a few weeks ago when we had the latest argument. I think she was feeling left out, just as she did after we went to Hawaii. But that also had a lot to do with her issues. I will continue to take trips with the kids. I see no reason to make them miss out because W wants to be standoffish. So if she feels left out, and then becomes distant with me, I will confront her on it.
Did you even ask her and say something like, " hey honey I would like for you, the kid's and I to go to Hawaii? Because I am thinking you should be called out for that to. If you are leaving her out and operating as an independent rather then a team. Then she also has every right to feel hurt and left out. She again is human and has emotions. I don't know in our household we always operate as a family unit. Maybe that's why you haven't had much progress.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Sorry for the continuing hijack Hairdog.
I’ve been thinking this over a little before posting. This is how I see it. What I am dealing with is very much like the “Tyranny of the Lowest Common Denominator” that Schnarch mentions. That dynamic also relates to Dr. Laura’s thoughts that men fall into the trap of pleasing the wife and compromising on what they truly want. In the end, neither person expresses their desires for fear of upsetting the other. The relationship slowly settles into boredom and the drive dies out. Both people can also end up walking on eggshells.
If you believe in the various theories discussed on this board, and I do believe in them, then I think it is important that you walk the walk as well as talk the talk. I am doing my best to do this.
The most I can see as an error in my boob job comment is the possibility that maybe the encounter at that time could have been better, so the timing of my comment was poor. But on the other hand, the encounter was about like all others in our relationship so I don’t think anything was lost. We had our regular, mechanical sex.
Regarding Mojo’s comment that it was stupid… well may not. I actually think it was rather helpful. Did it bother my wife and make her upset? Yes. And that is why it was good. Remember, this is the woman who said “Don’t mix sex with emotions.” She is the one who lives in denial that she has any feeling toward me. She was also in denial of why she got upset in the first place, justifying it as my lack of respect toward women and feminism, when her reaction really had nothing to do with that. She was upset because I hurt her feelings, plain and simple. That means she has feelings toward me. There are times when she has to face this. This was one of those times.
We are patching our relationship back together. We still have fights and arguments. I have no illusion that we are in a position to build any real intimacy on the still shaky foundation we have. It is simply not possible with all the baggage we carry. I am see us still in the early stages of relationship building, trying to stabilize that foundation, but to me that means identifying the real issues and how we really feel about them (not to mention why we feel that way). Trying to build on an unstable foundation is pointless. I’ve been down that road and we actually end up taking two steps back for every step forward. So at this point in our relationship, my purpose is not to even worry about building great intimacy between us. I do not believe it can be done. For now, intimacy can only go so far before she will back peddle.
However some intimacy is becoming more comfortable to her, which is why I said the marriage has improved greatly. Compared to where we were a year ago, it is like night and day. We can talk and argue over issues, but things settle down the next day and she is usually willing to talk. Before she would use the silent treatment for a couple of weeks. So there is improvement.
None of this happened by my cuddling her, giving her hugs, flirting with her, or any of that confident, sexual male stuff. It all happen by my finding the resolve to end the marriage if need be, and fight tooth and nail for my kids, my rights and my property. I mentioned before that when dealing with a bully (and at one time she was a bully) you must never blink. That has been a slow and hard lesson for me, one that Rigley and Hairdog are now trying to learn. To succeed, I have had to become a bully in my own way. I had to focus on myself only, not her (I don’t mean to imply I was ignoring the kids). I had to show her that I was willing and able to sink all the way down to the power level and throw out all respect for rights and laws if need be and do what I want to do in order to show her that I could, and that she could not do the same to me. I could protect myself. I had the means and the will to do it. I think she has finally came to accept this.
I truly believe that when we were discussing divorce and she heard the kids say they wanted to stay in the house regardless of who owned the house, she came to a turning point and realized she had to start negotiating in good faith. (I do not know where my kids had the great insight to take the position they did. Possibly the counselor told them to respond in this way should it ever came up. Possibly they saw it as the best way to stay neutral. But I greatly admire them for doing this! It took guts on their part! More guts than I sometimes see on this board.)
Mrs Nop laid it out plain and simple in her comment on “The Superior Man” thread:
There were two things that worked in our relationship - conflict and resolution.
Amen to that for it is the ONLY way to move forward. It is the same idea that Schnarch puts forth with the crucible. It is the same formula used by all successful couples on this board. Go check the threads of those who have turned their relationship around. Conflict and resolution. If you are stuck and not moving forward, ask yourself if you have truly used conflict to clear the core, bottom line issues that are bothering you and that you know are bothering your spouse. Or do you just try to sidestep it?
My boob job comment did nothing to build intimacy. But it did help bring down some of that wall preventing intimacy. Since our argument, and her realizing her own deflections, and then hearing from me that I want closeness and intimacy in our relationship, she has been much more open, talkative and cooperative. I can tell she is trying to do her part, she has said so a few times.
So do I regret my statement? No, I do not. There may have been a better time to bring it up, but then again, I could argue that my timing could not have been more perfect. You can decide as you like. I know that we stepped forward, not backwards because of it (and the associated conflict and resolution that followed).
As for those of you who think I should be called out for not taking my wife to Hawaii, well my Dad did ask that she come, I did invite her, and she declined. I was perfectly content to accept this as I feared we would end up in nothing but fights once we got there. I suspect she feared the same. I also do not like her going on trips and preventing the kids from playing and having fun like kids. We were in the ocean. She is terrified of the ocean. When she gets anxious she cracks down on the kids. When they protest, she cracks down harder. At some point I lose it because of the injustice of her “bullying.” Better she does not go on trips with us until she can either resolve some of her own anxiety or the kids are old enough to dampen her protective feelings.
I just recently finished piecing together a movie from the trip. We watched it just this week. When she saw some of the fun the kids had, the wrestling, teasing, skin diving, swimming, jumping off rocks into the water, she said “I see why you guys say you have more fun on your own.” That was not a comment I ever made to her. It had to come from one of the kids. I hope she listened to herself. I do not regret my comment, and for the time being I will not apologize for it. I might sometime in the future, when she is comfortable enough to accept it.
TTHO, as for the idea that I am “operating as an independent rather then a team” know that the team concept is my idea of family. The independent is her idea. She did not grow up in a family that took trips or did things together. Everyone did their own thing. You felt that you were a part of group of you could be more independent, tougher, stronger, meaner, just like the boys. To her, being more independent makes her feel closer. My coming to accept the fact that the kids and I would have to take trips on our own and miss out on her creating those memories was a very hard thing for me to do. I felt guilty, I turned down some trips, and when we did go somewhere, it has been small trips, usually to visit my parents. But I have learned that I can go with my kids and have a good time without her. It is not as fulfilling as I wish it could be, but I have come to accept it. So just what is it you want to call me out on?
I would not have replied but for this snotty comment Cobra. That's just it-no one can call you out on anything because you have an answer for everything. As frustrating as that can be on this board, I can only begin to imagine how it makes your wife feel. I'm just gonna say this, borrowing from Corri's signature line "You don't see what you don't see. Until you do."
Good luck with that.
"Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
Cobra, I don't see this as a game, you put out the bait and wait to see who bites. If that's how you see it, great, you won. I took the bait. But it doesn't change the fact that while you're busy justifying and analyzing, you're missing some of the commone sense stuff that we're trying to point out. Being humble is the least of your worries my friend, it's the blindness I would be concerned about. I'm not trying to be harsh on purpose man, but it seems to come natural when I'm speaking with you
"Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
The Enneagram shows us our blind spots-- and we ALL have them; they're just different. As long as we act without awareness of the blind spots, we're not really free. It's like having something stuck to your back that you can't see, but EVERYONE ELSE SEES IT.
Key Motivations: Want to possess knowledge, to understand the environment, to have everything figured out as a way of defending the self from threats from the environment.
Healthy Levels Level 1(At Their Best): Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.
Level 2: Observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Most mentally alert, curious, searching intelligence: nothing escapes their notice. Foresight and prediction. Able to concentrate: become engrossed in what has caught their attention.
Level 3: Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical.
Average Levels Level 4: Begin conceptualizing and fine-tuning everything before acting—working things out in their minds: model building, preparing, practicing, and gathering more resources. Studious, acquiring technique. Become specialized, and often "intellectual," often challenging accepted ways of doing things.
Level 5: Increasingly detached as they become involved with complicated ideas or imaginary worlds. Become preoccupied with their visions and interpretations rather than reality. Are fascinated by off-beat, esoteric subjects, even those involving dark and disturbing elements. Detached from the practical world, a "disembodied mind," although high-strung and intense.
Level 6: Begin to take an antagonistic stance toward anything which would interfere with their inner world and personal vision. Become provocative and abrasive, with intentionally extreme and radical views. Cynical and argumentative.
Unhealthy Levels Level 7: Become reclusive and isolated from reality, eccentric and nihilistic. Highly unstable and fearful of aggressions: they reject and repulse others and all social attachments.
Level 8: Get obsessed yet frightened by their threatening ideas, becoming horrified, delirious, and prey to gross distortions and phobias.
Level 9: Seeking oblivion, they may commit suicide or have a psychotic break with reality. Deranged, explosively self-destructive, with schizophrenic overtones. Generally corresponds to the Schizoid Avoidant and Schizotypal personality disorders.
