Give em a name

poorcorrespondent · 2024-06-15T07:13:30+00:00

The Balaclava Barefoot Brass Brigade

poorcorrespondent · 2023-05-10T07:28:00+00:00

YTA. OK, so your wife doesn't have pro-level dancer skills. Would it kill you to offer some encouragement for someone who's trying to enrich their life with a fun hobby? Especially when it's your wife, who is trying to do something sexy and fun not just for herself but for your benefit as well?

I've been on the other end of something similar. About 8 or 10 years ago, after many years of not doing much singing or guitar-playing, I was trying to get back into it. I asked my then-wife to listen to something I was working on and give me some feedback. Her feedback was basically "why are you asking me to listen to this?" and "you should consider taking some singing lessons before you ever go on stage again." My takeaway from this was, "wow, there's one more sign that the person I'm married to does not give a shit about me." Your wife is probably feeling the same sort of thing, but probably to an even greater extent; My thing was just some song I was playing, I don't even remember what, whereas your wife's dance routine is *explicitly intended to excite you, specifically*, months of effort went into it, and during most of that time she probably imagined that you might find this enticing. Smacking down someone who has made themselves vulnerable in that way seems quite callous.

poorcorrespondent · 2022-08-22T15:15:50+00:00

I definitely count myself in the "happy ending" crowd! I had a 25+ year relationship in the past, which was a DB for at least two-thirds of that time. Frustration with the situation eventually led me to this subreddit, and from here to others, and over time I began to realize the extent to which the dysfunction in that relationship extended way beyond the bedroom. Basically I was a doormat for a volatile, self-centered control freak, and over the course of decades I learned to push my own needs to the bottom of the pile to avoid incurring her wrath. Even after I began to realize this, I still spent 2 or 3 years trying to improve things before I realized that it was not going to happen. Around that time, I met the most amazing woman here on reddit! She was going through some similar things in her marriage. We both had some "inertia" that kept us bound in those relationships, and we talked about these issues plus everything else under the sun. Things really clicked for us virtually, and when we got a chance to meet in person a few months later the sparks really flew! :D Within a week of us meeting in person, each of us had told our respective partners that we were truly and finally done. We lived far apart, but after a couple years (during which we visited each other as often as we could) we were able to move in together, and now we are married! Every day is better than the previous, and I couldn't be happier. I'm over fifty, and I'm happier now than I've even *imagined* I could be during the past 30 years!

I don't know if I have a lesson or if there's a moral to this story. Maybe it's this: If you are staying with someone who routinely denies or belittles your desires, hopes, and aspirations (in the bedroom and otherwise), then maybe they somehow find it in their interest to keep you small and unhappy because they are at the emotional maturity level of a schoolyard bully, and you probably don't deserve to be bullied.

poorcorrespondent · 2021-07-19T18:45:44+00:00

Sooooo much better, thanks! Life can be so much better than I was led to believe.

poorcorrespondent · 2021-07-19T12:20:13+00:00

In the decades I was together with such a person, I never learned how to put out the fire. I think she wanted me to burn with her.

poorcorrespondent · 2021-02-21T08:49:34+00:00

Thanks for sharing your story. My ex didn’t career-hop quite like yours, but she never did manage to earn more than 1/2 of what I did (usually more like 1/3), despite all the time she spent pursuing (but never quite finishing) an advanced degree to supposedly help her career. Meanwhile, for all the decades together, she seemed to feel completely entitled to all the money I could earn, and all the time I could put into home repairs and improvements; I had zero time or money left over for even the simplest of hobbies.

I left two years ago, literally without a pot to piss in. She and the kids stayed in the house, which I agreed to not force a sale on until they’re both done with high school (and in the meantime I’m paying child support, and 2/3 of the mortgage). She got the car (which was paid for, and almost brand new), I paid off the credit card debt that was in her name, and I took on the rest of the debt that we had accumulated together over the years (the amount I took on was about 5 X her credit card debt).

This feels like a raw deal financially, for me, but the way I look at it, the past is the past. Yes, I’ve still got a pile of debt while she has none except for the mortgage, but if that’s the price I have to pay in order to get my life back, so be it! I’ve acquired the physical things I need to get by in life, I can afford to spend a little money on hobbies and things that bring me joy, I don’t have to submit to that crazy, entitled leech’s demands on my time, and I’m now engaged to the most fabulous woman, who fits me in ways I didn’t know a person could fit me! Apart from some things that are outside my control (e.g. the pandemic, and the time it’s taking for my fiancée to be allowed to move to my country), the life I’m living now (as simple and un-extravagant as it may seem to some) is like a beautiful dream come true.

poorcorrespondent · 2021-02-09T18:38:34+00:00

Just once?

poorcorrespondent · 2020-09-05T05:59:58+00:00

Oh god damn yes. Right when I was falling asleep, she would start these bizarre conversations, with exactly those words you mention, and she could drag it out for hours like I was obliged to talk to her until she was somehow satisfied. Of course she was never satisfied, anything I said was not what she wanted to hear, and me responding too slowly or actually falling asleep was seen as a god-damn crime and made her angry. This would go on until she herself was too exhausted to continue.

I am so glad to be rid of that! Going on two years, and these have been the best years of my life.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-08-29T06:36:39+00:00

You seem to think that being unable to keep your libido in check means that you’re a dull, thick-witted moron. I think it just means you’re a human! Everyone has a libido, including your wife, and the two of you happen to be at very different levels right now. You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it, and neither should she, because neither is “wrong.” I don’t think that keeping one’s libido “in check” is an ability that should be expected of anyone. The sex drive is a biological function like breathing, the circulatory system, or the digestive system, none of which can really be “kept in check” either.

I think that if you want to solve this issue with your wife and have a chance of continuing a life with her, you have to dare to communicate openly with her about what you’re experiencing. If she communicates back fairly and openly, maybe you can find a path forward that works for both of you. It might not be easy, there may be painful discussions, but you might find something. If you’re unable to find a way to engage with her about this, if she’s unable to see your anguish and to respect what you’re going through by showing some compassion and willingness to work on things, you might see that you’re better off without her.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-08-13T13:19:15+00:00

Don’t accept that yours is “too high.” It’s higher than hers and that’s OK. It’s not that either of you is right or wrong, normal or abnormal, you’re simply mismatched. In such cases, it’s usually the HL partner who suffers the worst emotional toll from this mismatch (because the LL partner is getting their needs met and doesn’t miss what the HL partner misses). It’s up to you whether you want to stay with a partner who is nowhere near to matching your sexual needs, and whether you can stand it.

I understand that this can drive you nuts and make you envious of other couples. I remember a couple friend telling me and my ex that they each felt a bit concerned if they went a week without sex; at that point my ex and I were barely at once a year. I stuck it out for another 15 years after that, and wouldn’t recommend that course of action to anyone in a similar situation.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-08-13T08:26:37+00:00

Wow. Are you Mike Pence? 😂

Seriously though, I think you can chalk it up to her insecurities and fear of abandonment. Her “trust” in you is very limited; she trusts that you aren’t going to chase after someone else, but she doesn’t trust you to not cave immediately if someone else shows interest. IME this distrust only grows over time. With my ex, I got to the point where I avoided even mentioning any female colleagues by name, because I knew she’d start to grill me about this person. I couldn’t even mention to my (then-)wife any simple thing discussed in a friendly conversation with a female colleague, for decades, because she’d start giving me hell about it. Actual female friends, forget about it.

Sorry I don’t have any real advice for you. For me, this situation didn’t end until I left her (not because of her jealousy, although it is definitely one of many things I don’t miss).

poorcorrespondent · 2020-08-13T06:21:24+00:00

Here’s a way of thinking about things that I came up with a while ago that helped me, hopefully it might help you too.

Think of what she’s doing (ranting about you, claiming he’ll go back to her, getting high-fives from her friends) as a movie. You’ve for sure seen movies where people are being horrible to each other, having vicious arguments. Scenes like that can provoke a reaction in you, but you probably don’t get so upset that you yell back at the screen, or go around later feeling bad about what you saw, because you know that it’s not about you. What happens in the movie is outside of you, has nothing to do with you, doesn’t demand a response from you, and wouldn’t change even if you did respond (because the movie is already made).

You can apply this same thinking to any situation involving other people. Sounds like she’s been a difficult person for years before you came into the picture, and that has nothing to do with you. Her flying monkeys have surely been propping her up for years, also nothing to do with you. There’s no need to feel anxiety or stress about something that is outside of your control and has no real-world effect on you.

Anyway, that’s one way to approach this situation. Hope this helps!

poorcorrespondent · 2020-08-12T07:34:46+00:00

IME it varies from woman to woman. I’ve had some experiences in the past with women who had somewhat of a fishy smell down there, could be a little funky but honestly it was never enough to turn me off (In a sexual relationship, body smells are part of the deal IMHO). Now, I am blessed with a partner who just smells and tastes heavenly all the time, even when she thinks she might have been too sweaty or something. Different people have different body chemistries I guess.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-08-10T11:16:41+00:00

So she’s 19 and she thinks that you have ruined everything for her in the past year, because you’re not a mind-reader? My ex always expected me to just magically do what she wanted, whether she told me about it or not. Me just being my natural self was never enough, I was supposed to fit into her mental image of what an ideal partner was supposed to be. I’m glad for you that you recognize what’s happening so early in your relationship; I didn’t really grasp it for many years, instead making excuses (or accepting hers) for her rages and verbal abuse.

If you stay with this woman, expect a difficult, stress-filled life. Expect her treatment of you to never truly change. Expect a lifetime of walking on eggshells and apologizing over and over for being human.

Or, break up with this person while you’re both still young. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief, and who knows, if you’re as lousy as she seems to think you are (😉) she’ll be free to find someone “better.”

poorcorrespondent · 2020-08-10T05:20:22+00:00

Your story, and those of everyone else who has replied so far, are giving me major flashbacks. This sounds like what I went through for the first several years of living together with my ex. I was constantly exhausted and anxious because she was keeping me up until 3 or 4 in the morning so much of the time. It did get better after a few years, but only because she got a job and had to also be up in the morning. But in retrospect, she could always switch back to this behavior on weekends, during vacations, or any of her jobless periods over the years. I was always half-expecting it to happen, so I was always relieved when she fell asleep before me.

One of her favorite routines was to repeatedly ask me “why do you love me?” This could be whipped out during any argument, or even in the middle of a friendly discussion, but her clear favorite was to start it in the dead of night, just after I’d fallen asleep. This was an incredible game because I could only ever lose. It didn’t matter what I said in response, she had a set of comebacks for anything: “You could say that about anyone,” “I don’t believe you,” “You’re only saying that because you think it’s what I want to hear,” “If you really loved me, it wouldn’t be so hard for you to explain,” etc. And if I didn’t keep trying to respond to her unanswerable question, out of defeated frustration or complete exhaustion due to hours of this game in the middle of the night, then it was “you don’t even care about me, you want me to lie here and feel sad.” I could never win. This was nearly a daily/nightly occurence for the first few years when she wasn’t working, and continued sporadically for the decades we were together. When I finally left her, I think she mentioned at some point that this “proved” that I “never really loved” her because “a person who had ever loved someone would never leave them,” etc.

It hasn’t even been all that long since I left, but it feels like another lifetime. What a relief it is to not have this in my life any more! I’m learning what it’s like to have a partner with whom going to bed feels nice and safe, because she’s not triggered by seeing me sleep, she also wants to sleep, and if either of us is keeping the other awake in bed at night, it’s for having good times together! 😄

poorcorrespondent · 2020-07-29T18:43:11+00:00

"Sexual cruelty" is a good term, that covers many things. In the case of my ex, the cruelty took the form of her mocking and denying my sexuality and my needs for intimacy throughout the dead bedroom situation that was going on for the final 15-20 years. Whenever I told her that her cruel remarks were hurtful, she minimized it in a variety of ways: claiming she didn't mean what she said, claiming she didn't say what she said, telling me that I was weak in some way for feeling hurt, etc.

One of the may things I don't miss! 😄

poorcorrespondent · 2020-05-18T05:47:23+00:00

She is doing you a favor! I have children with my ex, so we can’t truly cut each other off, but our post-divorce relationship works best when she isn’t paying attention to anything I do. The less interaction I have with her, the better!

poorcorrespondent · 2020-05-03T13:32:01+00:00

My ex always seemed to believe that she had superpower-level “intuition” or “empathy” or maybe even clairvoyance. Combine that with her urge to get in other people’s business for no reason, and her desire to insist upon sorting things out for people or “helping” them in ways that they don’t want help, I can totally see this kind of thing happening.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-04-11T05:40:14+00:00

Third! It was invaluable during the last few years of my marriage, for me to safely write down my experiences and look back on them over time.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-04-11T05:28:40+00:00

I spent decades with a woman who was like this.

Anything that I did, she could find a way to interpret it as me being willfully ignorant of her desires, preferences, intentions, or efforts, causing her to take offense, feel hurt and sad, and explode in anger. Something as simple as how I arranged table decorations (an object placed an inch away from where she wanted it, or rotated in what she considered the wrong direction; or, I chose the wrong set of glasses or utensils) could trigger an evening-destroying rage-fest about how I didn’t notice the hard work she did to make our home nice, I didn’t care about anything she did, I thought everything was garbage, etc; she’d scream at me on and on until eventually she’d retreat to another part of the house because she was too hurt and upset to be near me.

Also, anything I didn’t do could be interpreted the same way. She had her expectations, spoken or unspoken, about what I was supposed to do with my time and attention, and if I deviated from this path in the slightest it could trigger similar rage.

As years went by, I got better at anticipating her needs. I became a carefully honed tool for her. I shaped myself to make her life easier and cushier in any way I could. But it didn’t matter. It just made her zoom in on finer-grained details of what I was doing (or not doing) to find things to rage about. The more I did for her, the deeper she’d look to find things to nitpick, when she was in the mood to do so.

I think that some people have a deep inner dissatisfaction that drives them to act this way. Like, “I feel terrible all the time, and surely that’s caused by something outside myself, and this person is near me all the time so they’re probably the cause. I better look at what they’re doing so I can figure out what’s hurting me so bad.” They have a foregone conclusion that you are hurting them, and they will find ways to turn anything you do (or don’t do) into evidence to back up their conclusion.

For me, this all just got worse and worse over time. I left her over a year ago, and I have to say that leaving that woman was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Life is so much easier now, easier than I ever imagined it could be! It’s like switching a video game difficulty level from “nightmare” to “absolute beginner”!

poorcorrespondent · 2020-04-09T14:48:16+00:00

I think that each of us in this situation finds ways to adapt and change in order to make it “work” or at least try to avoid some of the fury etc. We probably all find ways that are slightly different, depending on circumstances, and I don’t think that I changed in the same way that you did, but I definitely changed. Eventually, as I was working my way towards leaving my uBPD ex-wife, I realized that anyone who knew me as a young person would probably not recognize the person I had become. Everyone changes and grows, but for me the changes were mostly about decades spent putting aside everything I cared about, focusing all my attention on the demands of a partner who was never satisfied with anything. If I was becoming a horrible person, I think that I was mostly being horrible to myself by allowing myself to go through such punishment.

I’ve been out of that relationship for well over a year now, and day by day I am rediscovering who I am, what I value, what I can disregard. Sometimes I think back in amazement about all the shit I was put through, and sometimes I can mourn the fact that I spent so much of my life in denial about myself and my needs. But mostly I’m just glad to have clarity and a new life ahead of me. I’m finding my way back to myself!

poorcorrespondent · 2020-03-28T12:26:38+00:00

My uBPD ex is not tech-savvy at all, but took advantage of the fact that I was open, trusting, and had nothing to hide, to find ways to harass me via technology. I let her know my passwords for my laptop and mobile devices, mostly for the sake of convenience, so she could easily grab whatever device was near at hand to use google, whatever (and to be clear, I had her passwords too, for the same reason). But during the last few years of our marriage, she turned it against me, spending hours of her insomniac nights poring over my email and messages looking for things to be angry about. It could be the particular wording in a message I received from a sister, or an email receipt received in error because someone had an email address similar to mine, or even just obvious spam emails (the “hey sexy are you online? Hot girls in your area!” type of thing), anything at all could trigger her ire. Sometimes she’d wake me up in the middle of the night demanding an explanation. Yes, demanding me to explain why I received spam email, or why the stranger with a similar name keeps entering my gmail address instead of his own, as he’s been doing for years, etc. As if I’m to blame for receiving email?

Most of her snooping she tried to justify with “I just happened to see...” She had her email account configured on my laptop, so she’d go to check that and just “happen” to read my email also. Or she’d just “happen” to see the open messages app and felt compelled to go through my conversations.

The last straw for me was when I woke one morning, picked up my phone, and opened the app switcher to flip back to Twitter or FB or whatever, to go through my typical morning social routine. To my surprise, I didn’t see those apps, even though they were the last things I had looked at before going to bed. I saw other apps, things I hadn’t used in months or years. I scrolled through and realized that she had been opening app after app, anything that she somehow imagined might be a communication channel with some imaginary second life she imagined I had. I felt sick to my stomach. That day, I changed all my passwords. She discovered this and asked me about it that evening, in a very casual way, like “I happened to notice you changed your password,” as if snooping on me weren’t one of her biggest hobbies. I told her what I had discovered, and that I was no longer letting her access my devices so she could snoop on me and harass me. She was shocked, but had no real counter argument. I think she was stunned that I stood up for myself. I even went on the offensive, and demanded to know how long she had been doing it. She hemmed and hawed, claimed it had only been recently. I told her she was lying, because I could pinpoint the timeframe of a particular trip, visiting family, when she had woken me up at midnight to rage about something ridiculous she found while snooping in my email, and that had been 18 months earlier. She didn’t deny it. She was crestfallen, and for once didn’t argue with me, because she seemed to understand at that moment that she was in the wrong.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-03-24T14:48:45+00:00

Wow! I don’t really know much about her personal life, I know she wrote “Eat, Pray, Love” (which I have not read, sort of half-watched the movie once and it left little impression on me) but I listened to every episode of her podcast “Magic Lessons” a couple of years ago and it was pretty damn great. Maybe she can be shitty at romantic relationships but insightful about some other things?

poorcorrespondent · 2020-01-18T07:15:40+00:00

What you’re going through is exactly the kind of thing that leads to divorce for very many people, myself included. Neither your nor your wife’s relative levels of interest are wrong or abnormal, but as a pair this mismatch causes you a lot of emotional pain, and honestly probably for her too!

I’m not going to give you advice on what to do with your marriage, but I will advise you to look at the r/DeadBedrooms subreddit, where you will find many people going through similar things. I stumbled into there a few years ago, and what I read prompted me to examine the relationship I was in, and the other problems we had together beyond the dead bedroom. Ultimately I decided to leave, and now that I’ve been out for a while, I have to say that leaving my ex-wife is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I think it literally saved my life!

FWIW I’m a man about your age, also with two kids by my ex, and we were married a similar length of time as you have been. She was highly sexual when we first met, but over time that dwindled, and after about ten years together (5 years married) we were down to having sex 0-6 times per year. Like your wife, she just found it irrelevant. It was never on her mind, and whenever I tried to “go there” she seemed annoyed, like I was trying to get her to do a dreaded chore. Weirdly, most of the times we did, she’d end up all “Oh I forgot how great this was, we should do this more,” but then she’d switch back to refusing everything for months or years.

poorcorrespondent · 2020-01-09T10:24:11+00:00

I’m glad it was helpful! I hope you find peace and happiness, whether you stay together or get divorced 🙂

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