First of all I’m no expert in any of this so all of this is just my own opinion and my own beliefs at the moment. And please believe that for all of the advice I am more than willing to give, I know that I could be completely wrong. And also I don’t have any information about your wife’s issues and where her attitude is in all of this. So after all of that preamble, my opinion…
The most obvious is first of all you can take care of yourself physically and that does take care of testosterone issues. Secondly what about doing the same as you would do if you were single? As a single HD, I certainly hope you wouldn’t be jumping into bed on the first date with every woman you dated. And hopefully you would not be physically pawing every woman you met because that wouldn’t work (at least not with a normal woman). Instead you would be concentrating on being a whole confident happy human being with your own purpose and you would work at wooing the woman that you desired and would watch for the signs that signal she is receptive and desires contact from you. You would engage in the simple flirtation of testing boundaries and retreating if you go too far too fast and pushing forward when your advances are accepted. You would be watching and maybe asking for what things are attractive to her. And if you really desired this woman, you would work as hard as you could at attracting her even if you had to sublimate your needs for awhile (not permanently but just long enough to “prove” her worth to you).
Of course I say all of this hoping that you don’t really mean that sex is the ONLY thing that brings you happiness. After all even with my example of wanting a clean floor, I can certainly say that my happiness does not depend strictly on having clean floors at every second of the day. Sometimes other things have to take priority. Then “thrill” of cleaning up after weeks of mess can be very rewarding. And I know I’m different than many because I believe that periods of unhappiness are actually good for our soul. When we learn that we can live and live fully through moments and times of difficulty, we are able to have an even larger sense of well being.
Cemar, trust me after all of the talks with my friend’s husband; I can hear the seriousness and stress of this in your tone. You are at the point where you feel like there is no hope and you cannot see beyond your own hurt. I really don’t take that lightly. The frustrating part is that I really don’t think it is necessary either. I sense in you the say hardness of soul where you are determined to argue for your unhappiness and want everyone to know how miserable you are. But honestly does that do anything to help the situation? I can understand venting and releasing your frustrations but not in arguing so that you are entrenching yourself further in your pain. But that is my opinion and I doubt that all of my optimism means much to you at the moment.
I’m going to list some quotes and I wonder what your response will be to them. I hope you are truly willing to embrace them. However my guess is that these quotes will only frustrate you and for that I am sorry. At the very least the quotes will give you an idea of my attitude.
"Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak." Thomas Carlyle
"We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are." Tobias Wolff
"As long as we are persistent in our pursuit of our deepest destiny, we will continue to grow. We cannot choose the day or time when we will fully bloom. It happens in its own time." Denis Waitley
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” Dale Carnegie
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” Victor Frankl
I am curious why have you placed yourself in this position of not being able to solve this issue? This is exactly what my friend’s H and for that matter my xH, other friends Ws and Hs have consistently done – they end up arguing that they truly don’t want to leave but that their spouses are responsible for them HAVING to leave the marriage. (My friend cannot even mention to her xH that she is sad about the end of the marriage because he will just go into a rant of how it was all her fault and she was the one who forced him to have to leave. So when he asks her why she is down, she just says she’s okay.) Yet for all of that reasoning very few of them (none that I know if but I'm sure they exist) really have any significant changes in their lives and many are even more unhappy than before. For example my friend’s xH hasn’t dated anyone and from what he’s told my friend (not that she wants to know) he hasn’t had sex with anyone for almost 6 months. So I guess leaving the marriage didn’t guarantee fulfilling that need.
One final thought (Like I haven’t given you enough to think about! Now you probably have an idea of why my H left me:))- Did you notice how you skipped over the issue of trying the Deida approach? An approach that might work versus not trying anything and being guaranteed that nothing will change. Instead you would rather do nothing and be able to blame your wife for the marriage problems. Stop fighting so hard for your unhappiness and use that energy to make some positive changes whatever happens for your marriage.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads? ~Albert Camus
