Ex-fatty and probably future fatty here....
Nov 26, 2020 21:17:20 GMT -5
lwoetin, itme, and 5 more like this
Post by gladifoundthisforum on Nov 26, 2020 21:17:20 GMT -5
Hello iliasm people,
Having finally written all this out, I wouldn't be suprised if you all think I'm in the wrong place and actually need a therapist instead! But I'll post it anyway
I've been married for 26 years. I'm 53 now and my H is 63. We had only known each other for 6 months (and only 2 of those were spent living together) before we married.
(By the way I'm in England. Having read a lot of posts on here, I can see most of the members are in the USA and several speak of Church/Religion related bits of marriage; it's not quite like that in the UK! We do an awful lot of 'living-in-sin' and I only know ONE person who regularly goes to Church, and he's Italian . We Brits are basically a bunch of atheists...)
So.
Our married sex-life followed a perfectly normal trajectory to begin with- pretty active for the first 2 years then tailing off slowly.
Then I started putting on weight (I've always been prone to being a chubby - genetically [thanks dad] and my own bloody fault for being a lazy git), as such I considered myself to be getting less attractive the fatter I got, so less sex was to be expected. I didn't have the world's highest sex drive anyway, so I was not too worried.
[Somewhere in the first couple of years of our marriage (whilst everything was still hunkydory), H was starting to do work in Europe etc, and I thought it would be a good idea to give him 'permission' not to feel guilty about going 'off piste' whilst he was away. So I said I didn't mind what he did while he was away/if he slept with somebody else etc. I just didn't want to know the details and so on. Kind of a 'don't ask/don't tell' sorta thing! (so that has been running in the background for about 25yrs- he's done a lot of work in Europe and a lot of holidays-alone-in America in that time)]
Then in the year 2000, I gave up smoking holy crap. That made any previous weight gain issues look like a walk in the park... (year 2000 was also the time of broadband internet roll-out in the UK; more of which shortly...! ) and sex stopped. More or less dead.
I tried to get him interested occasionally, but most humans can only take so much rejection before they give up trying. I gave up.
I wasn't so upset by the actual lack of sex (as I found *myself* so horribly un-attractive, I could never imagine anybody wanting to touch me, and my own libido had died a death anyway). I was more freaked out by the thought that this 'no-sex' marriage was really weird, not normal, and everybody else had sex at the very least once every few weeks.... which was rubbish I know, now...)
The next few years were pretty grim. (and also for reasons unconnected with sex, more connected with him being a shouty grumpy bastard) I ended up on anti-depressants, which kill libido even further than mine had died by itself.
During which time, the Internet Thing made it's presence felt.
My H and I only had the one computer, in the office. (um, yeah... we work together. This really doesn't make life easy....)
And he wasn't always very careful about 'tidying-up' after himself on the computer.
NO! I wasn't 'spying', or 'checking up on him' etc. He'd leave stuff open.. 'in the dock', task bar, or whatever: if he'd been disturbed, maybe someone at the door, or the phone rang, or whatever......
So the next time I went into the computer for email/invoice/read the news/ebay/blah blah... whatever he'd been looking at, and the 'searches' for it, were right in my face.
OK, I knew men *reasonably* well by then. Men like to look at sex (and, um... 'get off' to it) And the internet is full of sex, so the two are going to meet. A lot
His search terms were for 'sex' (fine) usually preceded by 'anal' (really? hmmm... from a personal point of view; slightly queasy, painful and not at all pleasurable, but I know some people like it.)
But that was often preceded by the word 'brutal'.
oh crap. that just made me feel sick.
I was married to and living with a man who liked to get off on watching women being brutalised in the most degrading fashion.
(Now I do understand that the more 'drug' one takes (whatever the addiction is) more and more- or more and more extreme- is needed to get the same effect. This knowledge does not make it any the less horrible, though)
By this point I was finding my H as un-attractive as I was finding myself (and he was finding me), so lack of sex was a good thing.
BUT, but, but....... when he's in a good mood he can make me laugh like a drain. There has to be a reason we got married in the first place So I stayed. (and for practical reasons: we work together, it's his house, his expertise in the work, I'm financially stuffed on my own)
Then when I hit about 46 years old I got a MASSIVE kick up the arse from menopausal hormones. Realised I didn't want to die without ever having had sex again!
Oh blimey I worked hard on this. Stopped drinking/eating crap for about a year, discovered the gym (I still LOVE the place and am going mad in 'no-gym' lockdown...) and lost about 6 1/2 stone (about 90lbs for US readers!) I became (for my age) an attractive woman again. And I worked hard on finding my H attractive again, which wasn't impossible- I did it
Once I'd got my confidence back I tried my husband again. And It worked We had a wonderful '2nd honeymoon' that lasted about 4 months.
Then it stopped. Dead. like somebody switching off a light.
I tried for about 6 or 7 months to get him interested again. But he was 'too tired', or 'too stressed' or 'too busy' or 'too much on his mind' ...... so that's enough rejection again!
I gave up.
(This time it was roughly about the same time he got his own laptop computer and stopped having to share the office computer with me. )
But this time I didn't feel anywhere near so bad, as this time I figured it was NOT my fault. I was NOT fat, ugly and too hideous to touch this time. Perhaps it was not actually my fault the *first* time it stopped! Maybe it's his problem?
So I got used to a sex free life, but a 'getting-on-pretty-well-as-a-couple' life. A 'business going fine' life and a 'he doesn't shout too much these days' life.
I thought maybe he's got a physical/psychological problem with sex that he doesn't want to talk about and I should just let it go. After all, he was in his late 50's. Very fit, good looking and well put together (and well hung ), but nevertheless not a young man anymore....
Then about a year ago I decided to try again (goddamm I just won't give up!) It was our 25th wedding anniversary. I took him to a lovely, expensive hotel in the Cotswolds (a lovely, expensive part of England! ) and tried hard to get him interested.
No joy.
Then just a few weeks ago it turned out he had just started having a bit of 'off-piste' with a friend of a friend of his. An intellectual, emotional and physical affair. With somebody he would be seeing about every 3 weeks. (This was not *exactly* what I had in mind with the old 'don't ask, don't tell, it's over when the job/holiday is over' arrangement)
Well, having a sex-free marriage is one thing, but a marriage where he'll have sex with somebody *else* but not his own wife is something else altogether.
This is where is starts to get really weird.
I blew up at this news.
He was shocked at my fury. After all he had always had 'permission to sleep with others'....... well, yes but not *instead* of me!
In the ensuing upset he told me that the girlfriend (a German intellectual of about 50) was helping him to 're-set' his awful porn habit. I knew about certain parts of this habit (see above!) but nowhere near all.
Turns out that all through his adult life he has needed at least one orgasm a day- really fast ones with porn so he could then concentrate on the rest of life/work/etc. So when I was trying to get him interested in having sex, I was always too late. As in he was no longer interested that day, because he'd already emptied the testicles....... every bloody day. (good job we never wanted children)
H is stressed and unhappy at the moment; convinced he will be dying soon (though he is perfectly healthy) and says he is currently an-orgasmic and the German girlfriend is helping both his mind and his body to get better...........
Before the age of the internet he made a huge collection of porn mags, which he still has and has kept hidden away .He's had some of this stuff for many many years.
The German girlfriend has persuaded him to get rid of it all.
OK.
Good.
I'm all for that
But if I make him stop seeing her, I know he will NOT carry on with this re-set stuff. (or simply replace it all with more internet)
It's very hard for my H to throw *anything* away (he's not quite a hoarder, but it wouldn't take much for him to get there...) And for him to throw away something SO intrinsically part of his very private life, and that he has had for so long (some of these mags are from the 70's) is going to be so very difficult. So if he does it, I shall be impressed.
But without the 'carrot' of a fresh new person to sleep with, is he going to bother to try and re-set his libido to sort-of-normal, for just me.? If so wouldn't he have tried it already ?
Without her as part of the equation, I still end up with no sex-life with my own husband -who I do love. (It's possible I could go out and find a discreet sex-life somewhere else- dunno how H would feel about that though)
With her as part of the equation, at best I get to share him........ do I want that?
What the hell do I do?
Having finally written all this out, I wouldn't be suprised if you all think I'm in the wrong place and actually need a therapist instead! But I'll post it anyway
I've been married for 26 years. I'm 53 now and my H is 63. We had only known each other for 6 months (and only 2 of those were spent living together) before we married.
(By the way I'm in England. Having read a lot of posts on here, I can see most of the members are in the USA and several speak of Church/Religion related bits of marriage; it's not quite like that in the UK! We do an awful lot of 'living-in-sin' and I only know ONE person who regularly goes to Church, and he's Italian . We Brits are basically a bunch of atheists...)
So.
Our married sex-life followed a perfectly normal trajectory to begin with- pretty active for the first 2 years then tailing off slowly.
Then I started putting on weight (I've always been prone to being a chubby - genetically [thanks dad] and my own bloody fault for being a lazy git), as such I considered myself to be getting less attractive the fatter I got, so less sex was to be expected. I didn't have the world's highest sex drive anyway, so I was not too worried.
[Somewhere in the first couple of years of our marriage (whilst everything was still hunkydory), H was starting to do work in Europe etc, and I thought it would be a good idea to give him 'permission' not to feel guilty about going 'off piste' whilst he was away. So I said I didn't mind what he did while he was away/if he slept with somebody else etc. I just didn't want to know the details and so on. Kind of a 'don't ask/don't tell' sorta thing! (so that has been running in the background for about 25yrs- he's done a lot of work in Europe and a lot of holidays-alone-in America in that time)]
Then in the year 2000, I gave up smoking holy crap. That made any previous weight gain issues look like a walk in the park... (year 2000 was also the time of broadband internet roll-out in the UK; more of which shortly...! ) and sex stopped. More or less dead.
I tried to get him interested occasionally, but most humans can only take so much rejection before they give up trying. I gave up.
I wasn't so upset by the actual lack of sex (as I found *myself* so horribly un-attractive, I could never imagine anybody wanting to touch me, and my own libido had died a death anyway). I was more freaked out by the thought that this 'no-sex' marriage was really weird, not normal, and everybody else had sex at the very least once every few weeks.... which was rubbish I know, now...)
The next few years were pretty grim. (and also for reasons unconnected with sex, more connected with him being a shouty grumpy bastard) I ended up on anti-depressants, which kill libido even further than mine had died by itself.
During which time, the Internet Thing made it's presence felt.
My H and I only had the one computer, in the office. (um, yeah... we work together. This really doesn't make life easy....)
And he wasn't always very careful about 'tidying-up' after himself on the computer.
NO! I wasn't 'spying', or 'checking up on him' etc. He'd leave stuff open.. 'in the dock', task bar, or whatever: if he'd been disturbed, maybe someone at the door, or the phone rang, or whatever......
So the next time I went into the computer for email/invoice/read the news/ebay/blah blah... whatever he'd been looking at, and the 'searches' for it, were right in my face.
OK, I knew men *reasonably* well by then. Men like to look at sex (and, um... 'get off' to it) And the internet is full of sex, so the two are going to meet. A lot
His search terms were for 'sex' (fine) usually preceded by 'anal' (really? hmmm... from a personal point of view; slightly queasy, painful and not at all pleasurable, but I know some people like it.)
But that was often preceded by the word 'brutal'.
oh crap. that just made me feel sick.
I was married to and living with a man who liked to get off on watching women being brutalised in the most degrading fashion.
(Now I do understand that the more 'drug' one takes (whatever the addiction is) more and more- or more and more extreme- is needed to get the same effect. This knowledge does not make it any the less horrible, though)
By this point I was finding my H as un-attractive as I was finding myself (and he was finding me), so lack of sex was a good thing.
BUT, but, but....... when he's in a good mood he can make me laugh like a drain. There has to be a reason we got married in the first place So I stayed. (and for practical reasons: we work together, it's his house, his expertise in the work, I'm financially stuffed on my own)
Then when I hit about 46 years old I got a MASSIVE kick up the arse from menopausal hormones. Realised I didn't want to die without ever having had sex again!
Oh blimey I worked hard on this. Stopped drinking/eating crap for about a year, discovered the gym (I still LOVE the place and am going mad in 'no-gym' lockdown...) and lost about 6 1/2 stone (about 90lbs for US readers!) I became (for my age) an attractive woman again. And I worked hard on finding my H attractive again, which wasn't impossible- I did it
Once I'd got my confidence back I tried my husband again. And It worked We had a wonderful '2nd honeymoon' that lasted about 4 months.
Then it stopped. Dead. like somebody switching off a light.
I tried for about 6 or 7 months to get him interested again. But he was 'too tired', or 'too stressed' or 'too busy' or 'too much on his mind' ...... so that's enough rejection again!
I gave up.
(This time it was roughly about the same time he got his own laptop computer and stopped having to share the office computer with me. )
But this time I didn't feel anywhere near so bad, as this time I figured it was NOT my fault. I was NOT fat, ugly and too hideous to touch this time. Perhaps it was not actually my fault the *first* time it stopped! Maybe it's his problem?
So I got used to a sex free life, but a 'getting-on-pretty-well-as-a-couple' life. A 'business going fine' life and a 'he doesn't shout too much these days' life.
I thought maybe he's got a physical/psychological problem with sex that he doesn't want to talk about and I should just let it go. After all, he was in his late 50's. Very fit, good looking and well put together (and well hung ), but nevertheless not a young man anymore....
Then about a year ago I decided to try again (goddamm I just won't give up!) It was our 25th wedding anniversary. I took him to a lovely, expensive hotel in the Cotswolds (a lovely, expensive part of England! ) and tried hard to get him interested.
No joy.
Then just a few weeks ago it turned out he had just started having a bit of 'off-piste' with a friend of a friend of his. An intellectual, emotional and physical affair. With somebody he would be seeing about every 3 weeks. (This was not *exactly* what I had in mind with the old 'don't ask, don't tell, it's over when the job/holiday is over' arrangement)
Well, having a sex-free marriage is one thing, but a marriage where he'll have sex with somebody *else* but not his own wife is something else altogether.
This is where is starts to get really weird.
I blew up at this news.
He was shocked at my fury. After all he had always had 'permission to sleep with others'....... well, yes but not *instead* of me!
In the ensuing upset he told me that the girlfriend (a German intellectual of about 50) was helping him to 're-set' his awful porn habit. I knew about certain parts of this habit (see above!) but nowhere near all.
Turns out that all through his adult life he has needed at least one orgasm a day- really fast ones with porn so he could then concentrate on the rest of life/work/etc. So when I was trying to get him interested in having sex, I was always too late. As in he was no longer interested that day, because he'd already emptied the testicles....... every bloody day. (good job we never wanted children)
H is stressed and unhappy at the moment; convinced he will be dying soon (though he is perfectly healthy) and says he is currently an-orgasmic and the German girlfriend is helping both his mind and his body to get better...........
Before the age of the internet he made a huge collection of porn mags, which he still has and has kept hidden away .He's had some of this stuff for many many years.
The German girlfriend has persuaded him to get rid of it all.
OK.
Good.
I'm all for that
But if I make him stop seeing her, I know he will NOT carry on with this re-set stuff. (or simply replace it all with more internet)
It's very hard for my H to throw *anything* away (he's not quite a hoarder, but it wouldn't take much for him to get there...) And for him to throw away something SO intrinsically part of his very private life, and that he has had for so long (some of these mags are from the 70's) is going to be so very difficult. So if he does it, I shall be impressed.
But without the 'carrot' of a fresh new person to sleep with, is he going to bother to try and re-set his libido to sort-of-normal, for just me.? If so wouldn't he have tried it already ?
Without her as part of the equation, I still end up with no sex-life with my own husband -who I do love. (It's possible I could go out and find a discreet sex-life somewhere else- dunno how H would feel about that though)
With her as part of the equation, at best I get to share him........ do I want that?
What the hell do I do?