Hi Buck,
First to frame my post from today (and other posts from other days): I'm having a flooding kind of day today. I'm in one of my black holes and I'm struggling to get out of it. My husband has cited that when I'm in these places, in the past he has pulled me out and it's exhausting to him emotionally. He has been saying this to me for years, before the affair and certainly after the affair. I post the negative black hole stuff here because I don't want to burden him with it as he's got enough on his plate emotionally dealing with my affair.
Another thing to frame this: like and love are 2 different things. Like happens because, well emotionally we like certain things. What is pleasurable to one is not necessarily pleasurable to another. Love is a matter of the will. It springs from liking, but is driven by deeper motivations.
That said, I love my husband, but don't much like him right now. Just like with my kids- I love them always, but when they're sassing back or fighting with me over basic hygiene (daughter and the shower...), well, I just don't like that. I still love them, hence pushing through the unpleasantness of my daughter's resistance to the shower, and still reading to her, listening to her after story time and talking to her and sharing how much I love her before she goes to bed. I didn't much like how she was defiant towards me, but I love her and want her to understand that on a gut level.
I love my husband- I see his strength and determination not to break up our family in staying in this so long after the affair and my divorce paperwork. I see his selflessness and desire to work on the marriage in going to individual counseling (it's like my daughter with the shower- he needed the help but was resistant to it). I see how dedicated he is to our children' well being in his determination to get them the help they need to succeed and his distress over their own distress. I see (now) his great desire to have a companion and a grateful appreciative wife. I see his great vulnerability and deep hurt for the way that I used him during the affair and the way I would complain about him to all my friends over the years. I see his desire to always be rooted in the truth and not to have his emotions run his life, how he has built his life on that bedrock. I admire his organization at work and his ability to befriend anyone and find a way to relate to everyone in his life whether he likes them or not. He's also attractive, funny with the kids, interested in growing in his faith life and always looking to improve himself. He's very skilled in learning new things, always interested in improving his skills (hunting, building the basement, doing the landscaping w/ trees, bobcats, dirt and rock walls). He's intelligent, well versed in a variety of subjects, good conversationalist and frankly, sexy to be around when my baggage isn't in the way.
That all said, I don't like the emotional abandonment, the pain from all the criticism, the judgement, physical abandonment, financial abuse and belittlement I've received from him over the years. He's shown tremendous progress on the financial abuse end, has come leaps and bounds in his work on empathy and dropping defensiveness (I have worked very hard on that too) and has made efforts to make sure I don't feel physically abandoned. He still has problems being sexually attracted to me after the affair (who wouldn't be disgusted by what I did?), has difficulty accepting and validating my pain (his is so great now, how can I expect to share mine and be comforted by him after what I did? How can I logically even ask him to work on any of his stuff when what I did was so devastating to him?) and still has trouble understanding the negative way I take his comments, sharing of his pain/ disappointments and his positive praise for other women (even second hand from his friend. I mean really, if you have a wife who is insecure about her body and you haven't said/done anything validating for her in the last 2 weeks, why would she want to hear about how hot his friends wife is now she's doing a drastic diet and exercise program
).
There are aspects of his behavior I certainly don't like. But I do love him very much.
This has been a hard week. He's been sleeping on the couch for various reasons (not from me yelling at him or rejecting him, he's having a tough time with even hoping for us to make it through this). He's also not returned several tennis serves I've put in his direction for time together/ intimacy/ sex, which heightened my insecurity. My mental health problems, abuse as a child and now compounded with the affair make it difficult for him to see any positive reasons for staying in the long term and difficult for him to accept any overtures made by me. I'm working very hard to improve my mental health, my means of communication with him and increasing my gratitude toward him. He's having a tough time trusting it, the progress I have made, and holding on to hope as I do keep having these "black hole days" where my own patterns of negative thinking well up in me from past hurts and abuse I've received.
Things in our daily life (like the not sleeping with me and rejection and out right meanness he displayed) triggered me very hard today and that is where I currently am at.