Depressed about not being desired
Aug 18, 2020 17:00:07 GMT -5
worksforme2, timedelay, and 1 more like this
Post by Anonymous Steve on Aug 18, 2020 17:00:07 GMT -5
I can offer a slightly different perspective here, because I am in a marriage that has some very similar dynamics, but is following a different path to the conventional you-need-to-get-out wisdom that permeates this forum. I won't use the word "fixed", because it is not really helpful to think in those terms, and even if you put your marriage on a different path, there will be some big ups and downs. In my case, we've been at a low point for some months now, which culminated in me initiating a Talk™ last night. I believe this will lead to some things changing.
Where the received wisdom of this forum is absolutely correct is that this situation persists because you tolerate it. By now, you have worked out that the situation is not sustainable indefinitely (this is clear from your other posts), but you seem like you are going to let it drift down the unsustainable path to its natural conclusion. This is probably the worst thing you can possibly do: you're going to end up with a horrible, acrimonious divorce later on to avoid a cleaner one now (and yes, this is one of your options). This is a poor tradeoff for both you and your wife.
If you actually want to change your situation for the better, the first thing you absolutely need to do is accept (and embrace) that divorce is a possible end state no matter what you do. From what you have posted, it sounds like your fear of divorce is overwhelming your ability to act to do anything. You have the power to change things unilaterally that fall short of simply issuing your wife a divorce ultimatum (that was not a path that I went down), but you nevertheless have to accept that what you do change might be unacceptable to your wife in a way that causes her to end your marriage. You should roll this dice and accept that there are risks. Your situation has been deteriorating for 19 years and is still deteriorating. This is not something that is going to stop on its own and in reality, you are just waiting for your world to become so bleak that it would not hurt so much to use the nuclear option.
If you decide that divorce is too frightening to think about and you're just going to run down the track, uncontrolled and miserable until the inevitable wreck happens when you hit the buffers, then that decision is on you, as many people here have pointed out. A decision not to act is little different from a decision to act.
If you are actually going to do something about this the first thing you need to do is decide what it is that you are prepared to change right now. The next thing is to commit to following though with it. The next thing is to wait a week and recommit to following through with it, because going down this path and then not following through would be an even bigger disaster. Then you have to schedule and conduct the Talk™. In my case, I decided that our physical relationship had become so intolerable that I was going to withdraw from physical intimacy entirely. That was sufficiently unacceptable to my wife that it provoked a negotiation that led to us committing to make things different.
In your case, you should seek to do this with a therapist. We did not, and three or four years later, I'm actually wondering if we should seek some marriage counseling now, even though the situation is no longer acute in the same way. I suck pretty badly at this kind of communication and it was only 10 years before I reached breaking point (with a lot of admittedly forgivable stuff along the way: two children, a change of country and a debilitating and emotionally devastating health condition for her). If you've gone 19 years, it probably means you are not capable of doing it on your own.
After this, accept that if things are going to get better, you are also going to have to change. Do not be frightened of this. Do not be frightened of her criticizing you. Embrace it. Change for yourself and change for her. If you are going to describe yourself as "not a prime catch", but still expect her to change her life around for you while you stay the same as always, you will get exactly the results you deserve. Change is hard and you need to show her that it is possible. If at the end of this, you are a new man but she is still just an old woman, hey, at least you'll have opened yourself up some new options!
And finally, the really hard part. The thing that will make the difference between you constructing a new future and simply precipitating an immediate divorce. The reason why my outcome is different to most of the posters on this forum. You would need to have some understanding and empathy for your wife, even for the things that she is doing that hurt you. Your wife is almost certainly drifting along in a self-constructed obliviousness bubble that preserves her emotional comfort. She constructs this in a way that prevents her from seeing how much damage she is doing to you and you substantially collude in this process with your own behavior (predominantly your silence). You hide your pain from your wife and she looks in the other direction. She could probably drift along in this bubble indefinitely if you let her. The story of your marriage from your side might well be: we had 19 years of horrible and steady decline, then 3 years where everything fell apart totally before we hated each other enough to divorce. The story from her side is probably: the first 19 years were ok. We had our ups and our down, but we seemed to be pretty solid. Then 3 years ago he abruptly became the biggest asshole and I simply could not live with him any more.
So you really need to understand that you would be putting a bomb under her world and you are going to need some empathy, forgiveness and kindness to achieve anything other than make her hate you for it. What you are asking her to do is to stop constantly preserving her own emotional comfort at the expense of yours and at very least in the short term, this will be painful for her. It is also an extremely hard message to hear that you are being selfish in such a fundamental way. This is also why you should seek a therapist to help. A good therapist should be able to help mitigate some of the damage for her, while also helping to prevent her from merely trying to reestablish her bubble. In the longer term, a therapist should be able to help you work out ways that you can express your experience to her, without her simply putting up defenses so she cannot see (this is the reason why I would consider therapy for my marriage now, because it is still far from perfect). If you cannot forgive your wife in this way then there is little point in bothering with this whole exercise and you should just plan your exit strategy.
Yes, there is a risk the she cannot live any other way than in outright denial about what she is doing to her family. If this is the case, you just need to decide whether you can live long-term with her selfishness, and the answer to that is probably no. The almost inevitable path of this kind of relationship is that you will start acting out as a futile way of trying to puncture her bubble to communicate your pain to her. She will just dismiss this as you being an asshole, partly with some justification, but also because doing so does not require any self-examination on her part. You will steadily withdraw affection from her until you can see that it hurts her; she will simply withdraw from you still further.
Where the received wisdom of this forum is absolutely correct is that this situation persists because you tolerate it. By now, you have worked out that the situation is not sustainable indefinitely (this is clear from your other posts), but you seem like you are going to let it drift down the unsustainable path to its natural conclusion. This is probably the worst thing you can possibly do: you're going to end up with a horrible, acrimonious divorce later on to avoid a cleaner one now (and yes, this is one of your options). This is a poor tradeoff for both you and your wife.
If you actually want to change your situation for the better, the first thing you absolutely need to do is accept (and embrace) that divorce is a possible end state no matter what you do. From what you have posted, it sounds like your fear of divorce is overwhelming your ability to act to do anything. You have the power to change things unilaterally that fall short of simply issuing your wife a divorce ultimatum (that was not a path that I went down), but you nevertheless have to accept that what you do change might be unacceptable to your wife in a way that causes her to end your marriage. You should roll this dice and accept that there are risks. Your situation has been deteriorating for 19 years and is still deteriorating. This is not something that is going to stop on its own and in reality, you are just waiting for your world to become so bleak that it would not hurt so much to use the nuclear option.
If you decide that divorce is too frightening to think about and you're just going to run down the track, uncontrolled and miserable until the inevitable wreck happens when you hit the buffers, then that decision is on you, as many people here have pointed out. A decision not to act is little different from a decision to act.
If you are actually going to do something about this the first thing you need to do is decide what it is that you are prepared to change right now. The next thing is to commit to following though with it. The next thing is to wait a week and recommit to following through with it, because going down this path and then not following through would be an even bigger disaster. Then you have to schedule and conduct the Talk™. In my case, I decided that our physical relationship had become so intolerable that I was going to withdraw from physical intimacy entirely. That was sufficiently unacceptable to my wife that it provoked a negotiation that led to us committing to make things different.
In your case, you should seek to do this with a therapist. We did not, and three or four years later, I'm actually wondering if we should seek some marriage counseling now, even though the situation is no longer acute in the same way. I suck pretty badly at this kind of communication and it was only 10 years before I reached breaking point (with a lot of admittedly forgivable stuff along the way: two children, a change of country and a debilitating and emotionally devastating health condition for her). If you've gone 19 years, it probably means you are not capable of doing it on your own.
After this, accept that if things are going to get better, you are also going to have to change. Do not be frightened of this. Do not be frightened of her criticizing you. Embrace it. Change for yourself and change for her. If you are going to describe yourself as "not a prime catch", but still expect her to change her life around for you while you stay the same as always, you will get exactly the results you deserve. Change is hard and you need to show her that it is possible. If at the end of this, you are a new man but she is still just an old woman, hey, at least you'll have opened yourself up some new options!
And finally, the really hard part. The thing that will make the difference between you constructing a new future and simply precipitating an immediate divorce. The reason why my outcome is different to most of the posters on this forum. You would need to have some understanding and empathy for your wife, even for the things that she is doing that hurt you. Your wife is almost certainly drifting along in a self-constructed obliviousness bubble that preserves her emotional comfort. She constructs this in a way that prevents her from seeing how much damage she is doing to you and you substantially collude in this process with your own behavior (predominantly your silence). You hide your pain from your wife and she looks in the other direction. She could probably drift along in this bubble indefinitely if you let her. The story of your marriage from your side might well be: we had 19 years of horrible and steady decline, then 3 years where everything fell apart totally before we hated each other enough to divorce. The story from her side is probably: the first 19 years were ok. We had our ups and our down, but we seemed to be pretty solid. Then 3 years ago he abruptly became the biggest asshole and I simply could not live with him any more.
So you really need to understand that you would be putting a bomb under her world and you are going to need some empathy, forgiveness and kindness to achieve anything other than make her hate you for it. What you are asking her to do is to stop constantly preserving her own emotional comfort at the expense of yours and at very least in the short term, this will be painful for her. It is also an extremely hard message to hear that you are being selfish in such a fundamental way. This is also why you should seek a therapist to help. A good therapist should be able to help mitigate some of the damage for her, while also helping to prevent her from merely trying to reestablish her bubble. In the longer term, a therapist should be able to help you work out ways that you can express your experience to her, without her simply putting up defenses so she cannot see (this is the reason why I would consider therapy for my marriage now, because it is still far from perfect). If you cannot forgive your wife in this way then there is little point in bothering with this whole exercise and you should just plan your exit strategy.
Yes, there is a risk the she cannot live any other way than in outright denial about what she is doing to her family. If this is the case, you just need to decide whether you can live long-term with her selfishness, and the answer to that is probably no. The almost inevitable path of this kind of relationship is that you will start acting out as a futile way of trying to puncture her bubble to communicate your pain to her. She will just dismiss this as you being an asshole, partly with some justification, but also because doing so does not require any self-examination on her part. You will steadily withdraw affection from her until you can see that it hurts her; she will simply withdraw from you still further.