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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 29, 2017 11:49:08 GMT -5
The feeling of discomfort comes from the realization that despite other feelings you may have for her, which might include love, you do not have a sexual relationship with her (I'm inferring the context, so please correct me if I am wrong).
It seems to be called "counter-refusal" on here, but I prefer to just call it refusal. You have your reasons. She has hers. They are all important reasons. Neither of you are authentic with each other about what they are, and you find yourselves (one or both) to be unable to change that. When someone with whom you do not have a sexual relationship touches you, it can feel uncomfortable. For you, you have been trained to know that intimate touch has an unsatisfying limit with your wife, that makes you feel unfulfilled and unhappy.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 26, 2017 20:03:26 GMT -5
This is an open question -can therapy ever work if you have to drag your spouse there and you know they really didn't want to be there. Verses a spouse who gets the marriage is in trouble and is willing to try therapy? I do think therapy can work if both are open to it......and you have a therapist that you jive with. The "it" being the big question. If you go, then something intended as "therapy" will happen, one way or another. The therapy will happen. The effectiveness of the therapy; however, depends on the goal of the therapy in each participant, and the willingness of both parties to see it through. To say nothing of the quality of the therapist. My ex was "open to therapy" in her mind. Her stated original goal was to determine whether or not she should be in the marriage. She entered therapy not being into me, while being into her affair partner. Not surprisingly, the course in which she directed the therapy ended up justifying her aversion and contempt, rather than challenging it. Had she been able to enter therapy with the goal of either discovering and admitting the truth of her feelings, or of figuring out a way to part with the least harm done, then it might have saved a lot of time and heartache, because she wasn't going there to learn to build our house together.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 23, 2017 15:07:12 GMT -5
he is starting to touch and pay attention to areas we have talked about. You are comfortable with your informed stance - I think that having a plan of what is within and without bounds of enhancing your life is great. You are looking at it and have a handle on what you want to happen and whether you are closer to it or not. I'm not sure if "touch" and "pay attention to areas" means he is pursuing with you sex that he wants to have with you, but whatever it means, it is satisfying your criteria for staying invested right now. While it isn't applicable to your scenario, there's enough that appears surface-familiar in what you have said that I should present another view. Sometimes in these scenarios, people who are sexually averse to a partner will try to pre-empt or substitute a less-vulnerable intimacy in lieu of a fully invested sexual encounter. Mrs Apocrypha found that giving occasional BJs, or cuddling, or touching with Netflix or something, was either an acceptable level of closeness for her or would offer the degree of control over circumstance or duration that fit with her comfort level, without really going "all in" herself. It would either "get her off the hook" if she could pop me off quick after a few weeks under pressure, or she could use it to guilt me into not being appreciative of cuddling "offered". As such, it can feel like it's going "in the right direction" while actually, it's being used as an appeasement or stalling tactic. I know this because I have done this myself in a relationship prior to my marriage when I was "off sex" with my partner. Part of the idea of taking an empathetic approach to the problem of a conflict over desire, is in understanding that the refusing spouse ALSO has a problem to manage - the flipside of your goal. Their problem is that they don't want to have sex with their partner. So they navigate by trying to figure out how to have the least sex they can have, or present the appearance of sexual investment while engaging and holding with the least amount possible. It doesn't always mean that it's going in a different direction; it could just be running parallel to the trajectory of an actual mutually invested romantic partnership. Time and awareness help in judging that.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 23, 2017 10:47:34 GMT -5
Guys weren't having sex with me before I was married to him, getting turned down by a guy at a bar because the friend your with is cuter/sexier/prettier hurts a lot too Do you believe that if he doesn't want you, that nobody ever will?
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 22, 2017 13:50:07 GMT -5
My H is actively trying. He is making serious, and time consuming, life changes and our communication has increased ten fold. His normal reset (because obviously I have brought this up in our 8.5 years of marriage) was 2 months before returning to the "norm". Whereas now, we are at almost six months with no slow down. In fact, since January the frequency continues to increase, as does the communication. I actually feel like we are on a real path out of being in a SM. We are up to every 10-14 days, from every 8-14 weeks. Are there still things I want? Absolutely! Am I willing to ruin my family, my life and my possible career so that I can possibly get a little more sex? Hell no. Not right now. I had a turnaround too for a while, but in my case the appearance of progress was based on a faulty assumption of the fundamentals - I was focused on things like frequency and other positive and intimate but platonic elements of our relationship, with also a wider view of sex in general, so I'm projecting my own experience. For the benefit of others who might feel similarly, apart from the twice a month interval, how is the QUALITY or CHARACTER of the sex and of the circumstances around it? Do you feel that he wants this sex with you that he's having, or is it more a thing where there's a reluctance to it, like a loving chore? I hear ya. I agonized over that for so long. Eventually, I realized I had framed it in a way that wasn't helpful and that didn't make sense for my situation. The dilemma posed and agreed to is "family vs sex". And, because the core of the family I was trying to preserve was marriage (I still have a family, though I do not live as married, and my ex-wife is a part of that family, albeit extended), it's more accurately framed as "marriage vs sex". Of course, the idea that I'd ruin my marriage because I wanted sex in it, is absurd. It's not helpful. And (with me), it wasn't about "a little more sex". Lifting the lid, the amount of sex I had in my marriage was the product of my wife being averse to sex with me, vs the consequence of not having sex with me. So, she had sex with me occassionally and did not want the sex she had with me. On the best days, I think she attended to it in the way I'd lovingly change the diapers of my babies. It was a duty that I attended to with care as a part of a loving relationship, but I'd rather not have done if I didn't have to. You know? Gradually I shifted my thinking from amount of sex, or presence of sex, toward how I felt that I knew my wife didn't want sex with me but would choose to have it anyway , and that she wasn't going to start wanting sex with me if I tried I made her realize how good, skilled, loving sex could be. Rather than frequency, I reframed it as WANTING sex with me. I wanted to be wanted. That was a bridge to far for her, and therein lied the truth of our efforts and the likely trajectory over the long run. I realize though, I think this is part of why I went to such extreme measures to stick -- I, myself, did overcome a period of a couple years of sexual aversion to my partner in which I was every bit a refuser, at one point in my twenties. So I thought if I could do it, anyone could.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 22, 2017 11:39:00 GMT -5
Do you expect that feeling to continue? For now, yes, I can't say how I or he will feel in ten years or even two years but right now we are connected and happy and always thinking of our future together. We have normal and healthy disagreements that we actually talk about, we snuggle every night and compliment each other every day, I don't know if I could have any of that if I had decided to leave right now. For that feeling to continue, is it important that you remain married? For now, yes! Absolutely. I would not have the emotional support or the cheerleader behind me if I wasn't married. I need him and lean on him for many things Maybe I misunderstood your prior posts. You seemed starved for normal human sexual intimacy and hurt deeply that he avoids having sex with you. Did I get that wrong? For the "feeling to continue bit" I meant, would you cease to take with you what you have learned or enjoyed so far from your relationship with him. I'm grateful for my parents, for example. I got to a place partly as a result of their upbringing and became the person I am, who I mostly like. But if I stayed with them much longer past my due date, I don't think I (or they) could have continued to grow in a way that seemed natural or inevitable. Are you saying that if you changed your celibate association with this man away from presenting as a "marriage", into that of an "ex-spouse", that you are confident you would not maintain an amicable and mutually supportive relationship that includes some elements of comfort and care? Or are you saying that the mutual fantasy of a marriage brings something on its own?
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 22, 2017 11:26:41 GMT -5
Do we, the refused, LET them refuse us. Do the refused LET the refusers refuse and cheat? Even if you confront them? Do we let them get away with it? You can't control what a person does. All you can do is affix a consequence to the behaviour. Just as his behavior has affixed a consequence that you feel. So, yes, "You let him." What else can you do to prevent an adult from making a choice? What they are really saying is you let him make his choice, while accepting the burden yourself to reduce the consequence of his choices, and of the situation (which is that he doesn't want to have sex with you). What is the natural consequence? Aside from legal/bureaucratic procedures, a Western marriage is usually a shared idea of partnership that includes a monogamous, exclusive, mutual romantic investment. You are choosing to uphold that presentation when your lived reality doesn't reflect it. In not desiring sex with you (that's the situation HE deals with), the consequence is that he avoids it with you. This alone means that you no longer have a mutual romantic investment. By agreeing to portray yourself as "married", with the expectation that he desires you when clearly he does not, or that he have sex with you when he won't, means you are choosing (as is he) to be inauthentic to each other and to yourselves about the nature of your relationship. The greater burden of that inauthenticity, as the more invested partner, falls on you. If the most that happens as a result of his lack of investment is that you get upset from time to time... that's a manageable consequence for him. In cheating on you, especially with your knowledge and those around you, the relationship is no longer exclusive, either. I can tell you from experience, it is hard to be married to an ex-wife or to a single person. You need to rewind to what you think a marriage IS. Decide if you have that. If you don't, then play the ball where it landed and adjust your expectations accordingly. Allow the market correction to happen. Or, continue pretending. The marriage is over in any practical sense. Not the relationship, per se; but the marriage. The marriage isn't bringing anything to the table that an ex-spouse couldn't.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 22, 2017 9:33:16 GMT -5
Right now I do not regret staying and staying had enhanced my life. I would not be the person I am today without him. I would more than likely be a shadow of the beast that is my mother. He has opened my eyes (and continues to do so) about how I am truly nothing like her and should never care about her approval or love... because the damage she will cause is far too great of a cost. He has made me feel my hobbies are worthy and important and he made me a mother. I would also not be on my path to becoming an MD... So you know, that is cool too. Do you expect that feeling to continue? For that feeling to continue, is it important that you remain married?
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 22, 2017 9:29:03 GMT -5
Hmm. I would say my emotional self-harm has been drastically reduced. I'd likely assert the same for my ex. I would also say that the financial effect has been every bit the disaster I'd anticipated - worse even - and had hoped to avoid at great cost. I would say I'm lonely - in a different way. But I am not crying every day, like I was for a year. I've slowly been escaping the sense of self-disgust I inflicted on myself as a result of staying. And I've regained a sense of self and hope that I can author my future, rather than depending on someone who is clearly not interested in working together with me.
So, it's like leaving a toxic corporation with a tyrant and whimsically cruel boss, and setting up a small shack selling my own wares in a hard scrabble beginning. It feels more real, mine, and the trajectory is unknown - whereas the other was an ever mounting high stakes plate spinning trick.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 22, 2017 9:13:02 GMT -5
You've had a lot invested, over a long time, in maintaining a stable structure based on a secret. You are getting close to letting go of one secret, and at the same time, work (a source of stability) is threatened. Your whole hamster cage is being rattled right now.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 21, 2017 14:07:14 GMT -5
Well that's the thing, everyone is in their own situation, so what's acceptable to one is unacceptable to another. It depends on circumstances. I wish you well in finding your desired match. Caris, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that you feel differently or do something different. It seemed that you were perplexed in your initial post as to why there was a lack of attention on your profile. Without much data to go by, some possible answers were offered as to why that might be. What you do or don't do with that is up to you. I wish you success and love in your endeavor.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 21, 2017 13:59:28 GMT -5
"The Third Ultimate Truth, the great equalizer: If your spouse refuses to take care of your needs, eventually someone else probably will." Judging by the many people here who have been celibate and faithful for years, I don't think that's true. Many in SMs cope with their misery by doing self-destructive things like overeating. They cling to their SMs while taking actions that are likely to keep others from being sexually attracted to them, I absolutely want to make sure that I'm not attractive to anyone else! Until this marriage is either mended or ended, I don't want the added temptation of some other woman coming on to me and having to turn her down. Even if the marriage implodes, I will not end up with the label of "cheater" to follow me around for life. In a small rural area, labels stick with you regardless of whether or not they are deserved. So until I am either out of this relationship, or content and happy in it, I will do everything I can to minimize the possibility of my judgement being overridden by my urges. Thus, I drink, I over eat, I don't exercise​ other than work related physical activity, and I avoid the doctor. I consider it a temporary sacrifice in exchange for my sanity. I also ran the same logic on my own life - basically investing in solo activities and refusing to flirt or enjoy opportunities and relationships that seemed to be an opportunity for me to become interested romantically. I was very aware of how prone I might be to cheating. This led to me becoming isolated, less attractive physically, appearing and sometimes being more dependent on my wife for social interaction and less interesting as an individual. It accelerated the decline, and itself became a thing she openly resented me for. And I've seen that happen within my friend circles lately, with naked contempt evident between spouses. It's not defence at all against the initial problem, and creates additional burdens to overcome both in the existing relationship and after its demise. Be an attractive person with interests. That's the person your wife fell in love with. That's the person you need to learn to love, and that's the person, with luck, your next lover will be attracted to.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 20, 2017 16:41:31 GMT -5
One thing that almost automatically bumps women out of my faves is if they list 6+ dates before considering having sex. For me, that's possibly 2-3 months, and suggests that the person is really more interested in finding friends and a person to just do things with than a romantic connection. Are you sure you made your profile public? We are all different, but a single man who wasn't willing to wait six dates before having sex with me, would not be for me. Well that's the thing. At my age, in the post 40, post divorce, part time custody dating market in a metropolitan city, I might meet up and date 3-5 women before I find one in which we both light up enough to make it to a meet in the first place (most people chat a fair amount online before meeting, and also determine a lot of shared interests from the get go), and THEN find out we both like each other. At LEAST 6 dates with two part time parents, coordinating child schedules, and in between dates with the other people they are dating casually, means it would take about 3 months. Now, string maybe 4 of those in a row that don't work out until the 5th time lucky, and a whole year has gone by with a lot of coffee, drinks and hanging out - mostly at my expense - and an entire year celibate. If I'm meeting several people, and a few are online trying to get my attention, I'm more likely to go with the one who demonstrates a clear interest, who I like and am attracted to, and who isn't shy about expressing her own needs. If her need is not to have sex with me even though she says she really wants to - I can get married again to do that dance.
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 20, 2017 14:06:20 GMT -5
I live in a metropolitan city. My male buddy put up a fake female profile just to see what women get, and so he could scope his competition. His profile was empty. His name female but generic. He had one photo of his man-feet in flip flops next to beach coral and a wave. Within 15 hours he had 8 unsolicited introductions and about 30 likes. Maybe it's different in a smaller town. It might be better to reach out and contact a guy than to move to India. Most guys really don't get contacted much, compared to women. Might check in your area to see which app is most common. I have had better results from OKC up here in Canada, and Bumbl, more recently. They have designated me "not independent," "not sex-driven," and " not adventurous." They removed my "wholesome" designation for God knows what reason, as I am definately wholesome. Not independent? Really? I've gone through so much on my own without asking for help. Just got on with it myself. They suck at personality traits. One thing that almost automatically bumps women out of my faves is if they list 6+ dates before considering having sex. For me, that's possibly 2-3 months, and suggests that the person is really more interested in finding friends and a person to just do things with than a romantic connection. Are you sure you made your profile public?
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Post by Apocrypha on Jun 20, 2017 11:23:51 GMT -5
To take an oversimplifying example (which every example here is), let's say that a couple have a working, sexless relationship and adore their kids. Their sexual problems, while obviously a source of tension, are not affecting the kids in any way. A divorce, on the other hand, would throw the family into chaos, financially destroy their stability, and could easily result in acrimony and ugliness. Staying in such a marriage is not defeat. It is a statement that some values are more important to some people than sex. [...] It is a sample of people who left sexless marriages. There is a big difference. Those of us who are in SMs are in enough pain. To be disparaged as weak for having different priorities, and yes, self-sacrificing an important part of our lives for other principles, makes this site sometimes add to the pain instead of help. I made that same argument to baza when I first came here. While I might have been mostly technically correct about the forum in the way you are, I realize now that I was so very wrong in that I missed the larger practical implications. Another possibility didn't occur to me: since my level of attention on the matter had spiked enough for me to seek help, and that was new to me, I felt that our sexual dysfunction was a relatively new issue, like a canary in a coal mine. It didn't occur to me that it was Stage 4 cancer. I have been on this site and its larger predecessor, and I have found it to be a self-selecting sample of people who initially were IN their celibate marriages and looking for ways to fix or endure them. Some worked to the point of considering suicide, drugs to quell their sexual appetite, deliberately letting themselves get out of shape to decrease their libido, hiring hookers, cheating etc. A dear friend of mine ended up checking herself into the hospital. The one who kicked me into gear in at least trying major methods was the sobering tale of a 70+ year old woman, who spent her whole marriage with a celibate husband, divorcing him in her 70's, only to find him shacking up with someone after developing a romantic connection almost right away. If you are in therapy, as I was, you could do what I did, and ask about the longer term success rate of family counselling in which sex has left the relationship. Dr. Schnarch, as well as my own counselor both agreed on what seemed to be an abysmal failure rate - if success is termed as the marriage lasting 5 years or longer and sex returning. The tension resulting from an asymmetrical lack of romantic investment is NOT on a stable graph; it increases over time. So the manageable priority level the tension you are at today will be one of your BEST days in 1-5 years, likely on the sooner end of that spectrum once you have named the demon. The priority increases over time. You are still framing the problem as I did when it was in the tolerable range: as a choice between marriage and sex, with one of those appearing as the higher ideal. At some point, it dawns that marriage is at risk of imminent collapse because the partner who is not romantically invested ALSO regards sex as important. Avoiding it with you is MORE important than removing or lessening the risk to the marriage. Even while that's hard to grasp on a conscious level, the insult is intuitively felt and internalized, and will fuck with the way you think. Just how important is it that your partner avoids sex with you, to make it THAT important. It's bitter medicine to backtrack to base assumptions about marriage that you and your partner had, when you've drifted to the point of uncritically posing the dilemma of marriage vs sex. As you recited vows, if both vows had carried an oath of celibacy, like a priest - would either one of you have chosen to be married? Are you married, in a practical sense? Yes, I know you had a wedding, and that you might legally be married - but people can do that and then move apart and never see each other again. If your concept of marriage includes among other things, mutual investment in a romantic partnership, are you living a marriage, or presenting the fantasy of one? What does marriage bring to the table, that a best case amicable ex-spouse doesn't? Stay, leave, do whatever - I don't think anyone is likely to change their course of action over what strangers write on the Internet. But a benefit of this place is that some people here can help you look differently to get a more authentic read of your situation - so you can assess it for yourself. I can't imagine that's going to be anything but painful - but it might help move people a bit faster through their process if they see the milestones pointed out. I have only seen one person on both boards who managed to get a marriage back on track - hl42 was his handle, and he took some major risks in doing it. Is one choice more moral than another? No, I don't think so - it's just a choice with a consequence.
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