Gray54
Thank you for your reply, it does help to know I am not the only one feeling this way, I feel very alone and confused with this and feel like I don’t have anyone to unpick it with. I stopped therapy about 4 weeks ago as we can’t afford for both of us to go and I felt that in my therapy I was just talking about how angry I am about him not being in therapy so he said he would go but it has taken him over 4 weeks to get started. He finally starts next week.
I, like you, don’t feel that my lack of desire for him will ever change, as well as how disgusted I am that he did with someone else what he promised he would only do with me, I also feel like I have out grown him, when we got together 18 years ago I was a very different person to who I am now but he still seems the same. Before the A we had begun to get issues with this and had talked about it in therapy, but despite this I was desperate to fix it and make it better but then he cheated and my attitude changed completely and while before the A even though I felt this way, I would try to be more intimate in the hope it would help, now I don’t care how he feels about it. He struggles with motivation and drive and can be lazy so I feel all responsibility falls on my shoulders and for a long time I have felt like team leader. I will often find him sitting on the sofa doom scrolling or watching movies and I feel like I have to be in charge and tell him what to do, and while it is never met with resistance, he will happily be instructed and do what I ask or need, it does mean I am always in my masculine or in that parental role, meaning he is in the role of child so that will never work for an adult relationship. I have made it clear on so many occasions how I feel but it doesn’t make a difference, he might try a little harder for a while but it seems that when that isn’t met with a "reward" for him he quickly falls back to old patterns.
Home life isn’t uncomfortable, I don’t feel threatened or scared, he isn’t cruel or abusive, he will help when I ask, do some things off his own back, and day to day is a nice guy, this makes me feel like there is something wrong with me, that I am the problem and will always sabotage and find reasons to not be happy. I often ask myself why isn’t it enough. I think if he accepted that there will no longer be intimacy in our marriage, and let me sleep in my own bedroom without trying to emotionally guilt trip me, we could live together slightly unfulfilled but content. I would be happy to just live along side him as good companions but that will never be enough for him, and why should it. There is an age gap, he is 15 years younger than me and needs more than I am willing to give but yet still wants me and this marriage.
We are both here stuck wishing the other was different.
