What is wrong with “old and alone”?
You have that certain “jene ce qua”? It’s not the piece of paper?-----Not a paper bond you have. It’s not the marriage certificate. It’s not the multitude of lawyer papers intertwining you.
You can’t put it in words.
No, Roderick, you are foreign to me. That doesn’t make you wrong. But it does make you something I wouldn’t choose.
No, I understand non-verbal communication. But if you think my dog understands me as well as anyone I speak honestly with, then I’m not the one kidding myself. We invented language for a reason.
I think I am with fervour. You do you but it is a pretty foreign concept of happy to me.
There is no reason you can’t work to improve the marriage you have. You shouldn’t let fear stop you from at least trying.
It sounds very sad to me to feel so alone and unloved in a marriage.
Your first paragraph makes some sense, although there may in fact be a reason. The second paragraph is completely puzzling to me. Have I said or implied somewhere that I feel either alone or unloved? We don’t have sex, we don’t have complex relationship-oriented conversations. We have lots of other stuff, including emotional intimacy (CarnalK, thanks so much for comparing me and my husband to you and your dog. I shall treasure that always).
Let me try to be clearer: I am afraid (which you point out may not be good) that an attempt to “fix” my marriage could end up breaking it up completely. I don’t know what would happen, no-one else knows either. In that event, I would end up old and alone (as would my husband, not so incidentally). I’m not at all clear how I would be happier in 5 years, old and alone, than I would be in 5 years, old and still married, even if our marriage is as far from perfect as some of you seem to think it is. That doesn’t mean that I think that nothing is worth trying; it is clearer to me (thanks to some of the posts here) that sitting back and letting status be quo is not getting me anywhere either.
I’m trying very hard not to feel defensive about my thoughts and feelings around the issues that I have raised here, not to mention my life choices, but I am having a lot of trouble with that, so I think the best thing for me to do is to bow out of this discussion. Thank you all for your input.
I wasn’t comparing your husband to my dog. I was drawing a sharp contrast between verbal and non-verbal communication. Frankly, the fact that you can’t have deep conversations because of a language barrier, after 26 damn years, shows pretty clearly to me that communication isn’t particularly important to you guys. So I take your professed level of emotional non-verbal communication with a healthy grain of salt.
So you’re going to bail on this conversation, like you’ve done your marriage?
Nobody has stopped listening. Some of us have said that your concepts are foreign to us. I painfully explained my situation. But the conversation is too-----what? intense?
Some of the things you said are weird. In one of those fake Myers-Briggs tests there was a statement, “I value weird.” I was a “strongly agree”. My sister was a “strongly disagree.”
I’m not your therapist. But if you can’t throw some random shit at the internet, maybe it is you that has difficulty communicating.
fervour I meant to reply to your post earlier in the thread about your marriage. I have chronic pain as well, which has impacted everything in my life, including my marriage. I can empathize. I wish you the best as you struggle with this.
Thanks, Sunny Daze. I sincerely appreciate your empathy and wish you grace to deal with your daily pains.
TV tells me that 70 is the new 50. But all of my internet research tells me that 50 is still 50. That is, 50 is STILL when many ailments become normal. My pain is not outside of the norm. It might be a little early. It helps to hear from people who are dealing with pain successfully, like yourself.
I don’t normally ask my sister about her sex life, but I did today ask if she and her legally wedded wife, having been together for 23 years, are still having one. Her response was
OH, YEAH!!!
I figured that was enough said.
I am sorry, Roderick Femm, for how I probably came off as attacking you and your marriage. I am sure there’s plenty of good but your situation just seems so sad and frustrating to me. I would be angry if I got sucked into it and some of that probably came through in my posts. I really hope you two can come to a happier equilibrium.
Ditto.
I may have a little insight here, since my wife is Japanese and we’ve been together for 22 years. Her English isn’t always perfect and my Japanese is fairly rusty, but we realised early in our relationship that if we were going to make this work, we had to sit down and talk through a lot of issues clearly and openly, with no room for assumptions or misunderstandings. It’s easy to put some of the cultural differences into the “too hard” basket, but those are precisely the things you need to address openly and clearly, either together or with a professional counsellor. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from a friend about 10 years ago, when I wasn’t satisfied with the way my marriage was working and it looked like we were drifting apart: and yeah, lack of sex was a part of it. My friend told me that as part of a long-term couple you can get used to thinking of everything in terms of “we”, but sometimes you need to think of “I”: ‘I’m not getting what I need from this relationship, so I need this to be addressed or it’s not going to last’. So I did, and we talked through a lot of stuff, and worked on a lot of things, and it turned out pretty good. I suggest you need to do the same.
I am perplexed as to how some here do not get what you are saying here.
There are many aspects to a marriage (hetero or gay no matter), to romantic love, and to having made a commitment to each other. There are shared histories, shared goals, and shared dreams, even as physical desires have diverged or faded. There is deep emotional intimacy that requires neither sex nor words.
I would submit that those who do not know that may be the ones whose marriages are flawed, no matter how much they schtup and how much they talk about feelings.
That does not change the fact that diverged physical desire has deep psychological impacts on both partners, the potential for feeling rejected, for both to experience that their feelings and needs are not being adequately addressed. I do not believe the answer is automatically either for the uninterested partner to engage no matter how little drive they have, or for the interested one to live sexless, or to, with permission and transparency, go outside the relationship for physicality, or to end a relationship that means so much. There may be no satisfactory solution for either and that stinks.
But ignoring the hurt that you seem to be experiencing does not seem to be a great path forward. Talking about it may be difficult wth your partner, for many reasons, but even a shared acknowledgement that this mismatch of desires is a problem for the two of you to address and some empathy from him for what you are experiencing can help.
Good luck.
For interest a long running threadthat started in 2011 and continued off and on including into August of last year about couples whose long term relationships had become “passionless.” Admittedly a bit different as the op does not feel like “just a roommate” but feels deep emotional intimacy. Still.
Holy crap. This thread terrifies me. Is marriage/long-term partnership a gamble even worth taking? I’m not sure.
I’ve been with my husband for a bit over 11 years, and our sex drives have never really matched up well for reasons I won’t get into here. Our relationship otherwise has always been a very strong romantic companionship, but our mismatched sex drives were starting to become a serious problem for both of us about 5 years ago.
Our solution was to open up the relationship so our needs could be met, without losing the great things we have together, and it’s worked very well for us. He’s had the same girlfriend for most of the time we’ve been non-monogamous, she’s become a good friend to me, and we’re actually looking at all moving in together later this year. It’s obviously not the right answer for everyone, but the way we looked at it was we had a mostly amazing life together with one large problem that, unresolved, would absolutely have meant the death of our relationship, so we decided to work together to fix it.