Irony

We're communicating more now than we have in years. It's kind of turning me on, which is a HUGE development for me - it's been a looooong time since I've been this interested in sex. And sex is one of the big things at the heart of the relationship problems we're having right now. Progress, right?

Not quite.

I'm miserable in the head, sick in the heart, owie in the tummy, but longing in the pants. And now that I'm actually interested, he's not, because he's miserable, too.

Not that I don't understand, because I think part of the reason I wasn't interested in sex was because I didn't feel like we were close. When we were both home at the same time, we sat in different rooms doing different things. We didn't do a lot together because it seemed like we were always broke. I didn't feel like I had a partner, I felt like I had a roommate. A roommate who wasn't interested in me beyond having someone to hang out with after work and on the weekend. I wasn't feeling respected, wanted, loved. And not that I specifically felt that I was being disrespected, unwanted or unloved, it was more a feeling I had that he was indifferent toward me. A feeling I had that if I was to disappear, that the only time he would notice would be a vague sense of "something's not right" at night when the bed was empty.

I'm sure he'd had the same feeling about me - that I was indifferent toward him. I can't say for sure which of us started feeling that way first, maybe it's a conclusion we reached at the same time. I just don't know. But since we've been communicating, the sense of indifference is gone. I'm not sure what it's been replaced by, but right now, at this very moment, I'm not 100% sure I care - it might be love, it might be hate, it might be frustration, it might be anger, sadness, despair, love, hope, faith, whatever... it's not indifference. And that lack of indifference in turn leads me to want to be intimate. Because there's a feeling there. We're feeling something for each other. Feelings make me feel a ton better than indifference.

But it seems to me that he hasn't yet been able to bridge the gap from anger/sadness/frustration to closeness, so he's not feeling it. I know that everyone's different and that some things take longer for people to feel than others, but with the lack of intimacy in our relationship being a big part of why he's been unhappy, I can't help but feel like I can't win.

Radio Heartbreak Squad

Let me introduce you to the Radio Heartbreak Squad. They're the folks behind the evil conspiracy that says when you're having a rough go of it, the exact wrong song will come on at exactly the wrong time. If you're plugging along, blissfully ignorant, it brings up all sorts of feelings you don't want to think about. If you're already upset, it just leads you further into despair.

Ironically, I was introduced to the squad by my husband, when we were first "dating." And by "dating," I mean "saying sappy things to each other via email and getting to know each other over the phone" during the 4 months between the time we met online and the time I moved here. He was driving to meet some friends, and thinking of how nice it would have been had I been in the car with him. A song came on, I can't remember which one he said it was, and it just made him depressed that I was so far away.

Anyhoo...

Last night, I brought up how he told me a few weeks ago, that the night he told me he was attracted to his coworker, that she had been the one to throw herself at him. I told him how I'd found a message board she posts on where she posted that it had been him who tried to kiss her. And that I needed to know that while we were trying to figure out where this is going, that I needed to know that we were being completely honest with each other. I needed to know I could trust him to not engage in any infidelity.

He got annoyed, told me that it's not up to him to say, that I either trust him or I don't. I asked for a promise. He he could promise, but didn't feel like I would believe him anyway, so what good was it?

He never came to bed last night. First time in years. In my heart, I know he needs time to sort his stuff out too, that we both need time to figure things out - but who says rational thought absolutely has to make us feel better about something? I woke up about an hour before my alarm was to go off, and he was still on the couch. I woke him up and made him go to bed. I couldn't fall back asleep due to the pit of anxiety in my stomach, so I got up. The thought of going in to work made me throw up (or rather, dry heave, since there was nothing in there to get rid of) so I called in sick. I slept fitfully for a few more hours, then got up.

Thinking that I wouldn't think about things if I was being productive, I started to clean the kitchen. Once again, the pit of anxiety in my stomach gave me pause. I watched some TV, then decided to try again. I like to listen to music while I'm cleaning, so I turned on the TV and switched it to one of the Music Choice stations. The song that was on kicked me in the gut.

I Can't Make You Love Me.

I cried for a while, loaded the dishwasher, then went to wake him up - he'd been in bed for 8 hours since I'd gotten him up off the couch. He rubbed my arm, then saw that I'd been crying. He asked what was wrong, and I told him that the Radio Heartbreak Squad had gotten me. I don't know what I was expecting, maybe some sympathy from my best friend. Instead, he withdrew his arm, rolled over and said nothing. I left the room.

He's since gotten up and has gone from laying in bed to laying on the couch. Hasn't said a word to me. And here I sit, crying on and off, pit of anxiety in my stomach seething as ever. I've been awake on and off since 7AM. Eight and a half hours later, having eaten nothing, normally I'd have come close to passing out from lightheadedness. Yet the thought of food just turns my stomach even more.

"They" say it gets worse before it gets better. I love my husband. I want to make our marriage work. I just don't know how much of this I can take along the way. I don't want to give up the fight. I just hope I have enough fight left in me.

Hopeful

Lest anyone think from my past post that we're headed straight for a divorce filing, we hashed out quite a bit of stuff, and we came to the conclusion that we have too much time, too much love, too many memories to not fight for our relationship.

Big changes will be coming about around here. On both sides. But since I'm the one with all the neuroses, a lot of them will be on my end. And not just to save my marriage - I need to be a better person. I need to stop being scared. I need to stop being paranoid.

I hope it all works.

I guess beggars can't be choosers.

The night before I wrote that last post, I went on my husband's phone and read his texts and Twitter account. Yes, I was paranoid, yes I was wrong.

A few hours after I wrote that post, he said these words: "I think I'm done."

I asked what led him to that conclusion, and he said "what you did last night. I've never given you reason to be that distrustful of me."

I'd explained pretty much everything I said in that post, and he didn't take it any further. No validation of the fact that he'd made it sound an awful lot like there might be future infidelity. But he didn't fight me on it either, which for him, might as well be validation.

Funny thing is, when I told my therapist that hubby said "I've never given you reason to be that distrustful of me," my therapist's reaction was "do you really believe that?" I told him I didn't, and he acknowledged that he could definitely see why I might feel that way.

Actual validation!! It's been so long since I've had actual validation of the way I feel.

I don't want to talk to my girlfriends about our issues, because they're all friends with him, too. I don't want to talk to my friends at work, because we're friends-but-not-THOSE-kind. Plus, they don't know him and I don't want my venting to turn into "wow, her husband's a real dick." I don't want to talk to my sister about it because she's got enough problems of her own. I can't talk to my mom because she's the last person I need telling me how to run a marriage (bearing witness to my parents' marriage is where a lot of my neuroses come from, I'm sure you'll hear all about it eventually).

So basically, I have nobody to talk to other than my therapist.

I can't tell you how much it means to me that an outsider-looking-in can take what I've told them, look at it objectively and be able to validate how I'm feeling.

It would mean so much more if it came from my husband.

Just drinking buddies. Why do I feel like puking?

The last time our relationship was this bad, my then-fiancee/now-husband went looking online for someone to have an affair with. When I found all the evidence, he heartily and profoundly denied it at first, feigning offense that I would think so poorly of him. When he finally admitted that the ads I found were indeed him, he apologized, but eventually "got sick" of me bringing it up and "using it as an excuse" for future insecurities. He said it needed to be done and over with so we could move on. This was within WEEKS of the incident.

I forgave, I stopped bringing it up, but I never forgot.

Our relationship is BAD right now. We'd been working fairly opposite shifts until he got laid off two weeks ago, had been taking each other for granted, have both been depressed for a while now. Between my depression and anxiety, our opposite shifts, our weekend lethargy, and my issues with my plumbing, I have had absolutely no desire for sex. My plumbing has let me down with absolutely no warning on an almost weekly basis for over a year - yeah, really makes you want to be intimate when the sheets could wind up looking like a murder scene at any given time. There's a damn sexy thought right there, isn't it?

We're good for something every once in a great while, but there's no actual sexual intimacy - I can't get into it because I'm just not interested because I'm petrified I'll ruin it by bleeding everywhere, he can't get into it because he feels like he's making me do something I don't want to do (and conversely, never initiates anything because he feels like he'd be pressuring me, and then is always splayed out on the couch, playing video games in his underwear). And now he's having trouble finding me sexually attractive because I talk too much about my plumbing issues, when I thought that letting him know what was going on would help serve as an explanation as to why I wasn't in the mood. But it wasn't until I pointed out to him that he's always in his underwear on the couch playing video games that he realized this is not all MY problem. Underwear/couch/video games is not a bone-jumping combination, you know? So we've got my depression and anxiety, my plumbing issues and the accompanying stress, his lack of motivation and reluctance to start anything to even TRY to get me in the mood, and the whole couch/underwear/video games thing... we're hot. A hot MESS, and he's officially deemed this a sexless marriage.

He went out with some friends from work on a Friday night a couple of months ago, came home tipsy and told me that he found himself attracted to one of his coworkers. I was not surprised in the least - I've known that would eventually happen since the first time I met her, over a year ago - she has the looooong hair and big eyes that he loves (though she's since cut the hair and is now growing it out again), she looks good in those adorable black-rimmed librarian glasses that look awful on me. She's kind of a tomboy, kind of athletic despite being a little chunky, likes gaming stuff and comic books, she creates things that are more worthy of deviantART than scrapbook.com, reads sci-fi and fantasy, and part of her decorating scheme includes video game posters and action figures. Most people who know my husband would probably start to wonder if he was okay if he wasn't attracted to her.

The night he told me he was attracted to her, he said that it freaked him out, because he'd never in our entire relationship been attracted to someone else. In the same conversation, he told me he doesn't know how much longer he can go without sex before he starts looking for it elsewhere or if he'll be able to control his actions when he's out at the bar with his friends.

Cue coworker's desperation. She and her man broke up over the summer, and she's been desperate for male physical contact. She's been obsessing over a guy she met online. Hubby likes to try to fix broken people (maybe that's why he's bored with me, my brand of crazy is just beyond his repair capabilities). He's spent almost every Friday night hanging out and drinking with her for two months. He's since told me that he's no longer attracted to her because she's whiny and desperate, but he keeps going out with her, rolling his eyes as he leaves the house, saying that he'd rather not, but that he said he would, so he has to. I'm uncomfortable with him hanging out with her, but when I mention it, he rolls his eyes, sighs heavily and says "so are you the jealous little wife now, who won't let her husband have female friends?"

This past Friday night, he had way too much to drink and I had to go pick him up at the bar. Part of the way home, he fretted that "the girl he fancies figured out that he fancied her." So while I was sitting at home bleeding like a stuck pig because of medication I'm on to help regulate my cycle so we can try to have a baby (not that I was invited to go out anyway - I've expressly been told that Friday night is his night out and I should stay away from "his bar"), my husband was out worrying that the girl he has a crush on figured it out. And this is what I had to listen to on the way home. Depressed, anxious, hormonal becuase of the medication I'm on, and I'm captive to my husband's worrying that his crush figured out he liked her.

And now, since we're in a sexless marriage, he's brought up the possibility of making this an open relationship. Because we're not having sex, and he needs sex to be happy.

Let's boil this down...

• He has a crush on her.
• She's desperate.
• He's a big flirt when he's drunk and self-admittedly might not be able to control what he does in the vicinity of attractive women after he's had a few.
• He goes to have a few on Friday nights, with the girl he has a crush on, at a bar where it would just cause more problems than I need to deal with if I were to show up unannounced (I've already gone there once on a Friday night - with a friend who suggested it - and got accused of "checking up" on him - when he got there he said "you know this is my bar, and I'm here to meet my friends and am going to ignore you all night, right?" He later said to me it was supposed to be a joke and lighten the mood - but it did nothing of the sort)
  
• He wants an open relationship.

Why do I feel like I'm being groomed for the inevitability of an affair? Whether it's with her or not, I've got this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that he's going to go out and do something stupid and tell me that it's my fault, and that I shouldn't have the nerve to be hurt because I should have seen it coming.