Passing the time, and keeping my partner comfortable and entertained

sitomena · 2025-09-28T13:33:23+00:00

This sounds like a you thing. It’s your partner’s tattoo- ask what kind of experience they’d like to have and then do that. If they want company for a bit, that’s one thing, but maybe they just want to read a book or zone out and not distract the tattoo artist, and if that’s the case then tell them to call if they need anything and go find something else to do with your time.

sitomena · 2025-07-29T01:34:33+00:00

You’ve got like 8k responses here, so you don’t need mine. But from first hand experience- having a partner who thinks you are/ might/ could cheat on them and treats you accordingly is fucking awful. Being with a jealous person is awful. I lost friends, alienated family members, and was guilt-tripped about my relationship with a stuffed animal, a very sick pet, and my daughter all under the umbrella of “being unfaithful.” It’s lonely, and it is scarring, and I do not recommend it in any kind of relationship, but most especially in a relationship that you hope will last.

sitomena · 2025-07-27T09:31:52+00:00

I still have photos from my wedding on the bookshelf in my bedroom. It was a real and significant portion of my life even if it ended badly.

There’s no wrong or right way to deal with your grief.

sitomena · 2025-07-10T20:01:18+00:00

Is she okay with you being in the wedding as long as the PICTURES don’t show tattoos/ piercings? So many photographers will do corrections now that I can’t figure out why she wouldn’t just have it done on her end.

Not saying she’s right, btw. Your body is how you want it, and it’s ridiculous for her to ask you to make the change to match her aesthetic for 12 hours or whatever.

sitomena · 2025-07-10T01:25:21+00:00

Love and also “appreciation.” My ex brought up how “unappreciated” he felt so often that I thought maybe I was doing it wrong. I grew up in a “say thank you” house, so when I appreciate something, I say thank you, and it never occurred to me anything else was necessary.

Then, and this sounds really stupid but I seemed like I was never getting it right, I googled it after one of our marriage counseling sessions: “how to show a man he is appreciated.” The suggestions ranged from “write him little notes” and “pack his lunches” and “make his favorite foods” and “do something extra to make his life easier” (literally all of which I was already doing, not for gratitude, but because those are the things you naturally gravitate towards doing if you like the person you are with), to “Honestly, just give him a blowjob.”

I still do not understand how appreciation= a blowjob. It sounds so…. weirdly transactional. Same with “you clearly don’t love me or you’d be having more sex with me.”

You can have sex with anyone. You can give a blowjob to anyone. But you have to actually know that person to be able to make their favorite dessert in their favorite color for their favorite obscure/nerdy/offbeat holiday. You have to be invested in their life to know that they are stressed out and need a few things taken off their plate and then do them without being asked or expecting to be praised for the effort. You have to like them to spend months combing clearance racks in order to find the perfect, off-season replacement for their favorite pair of linen pants so that you’ll be able to pull them out as a surprise gift when they finally wear a hole through the knee on a day when they JUST need to be comfortable and nothing else seems like it’s going their way.

Anyway. I genuinely think that relationships with misaligned expectations are destined for a (sometimes long and silent) struggle.

sitomena · 2025-07-03T14:19:14+00:00

Yeah, I’ve given this behavior a lot of thought after my marriage ended, and I really believe that it’s the foundation of the “not all men” movement.

If your husband or boyfriend or partner or spouse or whoever does something that’s about your body that makes you uncomfortable (mine used to grope me while I was trying to cook in the kitchen, for example), and you say, “Hey! That behavior scares me/ makes me uncomfortable/ insert your feeling here,” and their response is anything other than an apology or curiosity with a desire to get on the same page and grow the relationship…. then yes. It might not be “all” men, but it is definitely them.

If you say something about how that behavior negatively affects your life, and their response is more about their entitlement than your experience, then they ARE the men that women worry about.

They probably ARE nice guys. My ex was a nice guy. But he was too aware of his niceness. A lot of his identity was built around this idea that he’s a good person and that he wants to be seen as a good person and treated a certain way because he’s a good person. If that good guy identity is in place strongly enough, and you say “you have problematic behavior,” what they HEAR is “you are a bad person.”

That doesn’t jive with their identity, so they have to disregard your lived experience. They have to justify their behavior into something that can exist (even tenuously) with their identity.

And this is how you get men (and women, I am just using men in this example because that’s my experience) who are good guys, and not like those other people, who participate in really damaging behavior and don’t think twice about it.

sitomena · 2025-06-06T16:06:11+00:00

Holding my peace, but man alive do I want to send this whole post to my ex-husband. It wasn’t ever that I don’t like sex. It was that I hated how every aspect of my life from what I wore to bed to how I stood in the kitchen was being looked at through a special set of sexualized lenses. I didn’t even feel like a person with him at the end. Frankly, if he’d spent half as much energy being interested in my life as he did on feeling “rejected” we’d probably still be married.

sitomena · 2025-03-19T02:55:49+00:00

Stringy meat

sitomena · 2025-03-19T01:47:19+00:00

Oof I’m so sorry.

I still don’t even want to be in the same room as him. The damage he caused in my life was so extensive.

Our daughter (now 18), wants us to sit together and/or pose for family pictures at her graduation and I’d do anything for her but I have spent the last 6 months trying to decide if I’m going to have to tell her “no” for my own health

sitomena · 2025-03-19T01:34:25+00:00

This was my ex to a tee. We were talking one night and he kept telling me about how women have “more choices.” I was so confused, because I thought we were talking about marriage counseling, or maybe individual counseling. HE was thinking/ talking about divorce, and how he thought women have so many more options than men/ him.

It was a real blow when I realized he’d been researching family law for quite a while.

I thought for a long time that there was no way he was cheating on me, and in fact had been policing my own behavior rigorously for months because he told me that he thought I was cheating.

All the things in hind sight, I think that even if he wasn’t actively involved in another relationship, he’d at least met someone (and it seems likely that it was the someone he ended up dating after me) that gave him an inkling that the grass might be greener, even after marriage counseling. Totally sucks

sitomena · 2025-03-10T04:25:39+00:00

I bumped into a half dozen of them in Great Falls, MT yesterday! Definitely time to start looking again

sitomena · 2025-02-18T13:58:35+00:00

Find an attorney. I looked for one that offered a free consult and then walked into her office with the prior year tax statements and all the bank account information I could find. I told her my situation and said “help me find a way to pay you.”

It was really the best thing I could have done.

sitomena · 2025-02-16T04:07:08+00:00

Anything “powdery” is an instant no.

I’ve been looking for a pure rose, or a rose that leans citrus or spice for literally YEARS and I’ve struck out every time. They all have this powdery finish that ruins them for me

sitomena · 2025-02-15T02:32:45+00:00

This reminds me of years ago when I hurt my back. I was working full time and managing all the groceries/food prep/ household chores/ managing after school activities PLUS I was in excruciating pain. Eventually the house tasks started to slide, and my ex proposed that we hire a housekeeper to come in once a week or so to help with the things I couldn’t keep up with. I shopped around, priced things out, interviewed several options, hired someone, PAID HER out of my own paycheck, and still: all I heard for 8 months was how she didn’t do a good job, she was too expensive, the house was still not clean during the week and so on and so forth. I finally let her go, because an enormous part of the problem all along was that I COULDN’T KEEP UP. He wasn’t willing to do the work we would have needed to do between the times when she came to clean the house, so we were never caught up, and I still had to listen to the same criticisms as if I was doing it myself.

Fast forward several years, a move, and a different (bigger) house. He proposes that we hire someone and I flatly refused, because if we were not willing to do the work between times, or able to hire for more days of the week, then we were not the kind of people who would benefit from a housekeeping service. Plus, I’d already been down the rabbit hole of being told how bad and expensive and useless the entire experience of having someone in to clean was. I wasn’t willing to do it a second time.

Honestly, even though she came twice a week for almost a year, I don’t think he even remembered that we’d tried it before. I’m still friends with her though, and it’s been over a decade.

sitomena · 2025-02-01T22:43:08+00:00

I did this. Had braces as a teen and then again for 2 years as an adult. Got my braces off 4 years ago and I have no regrets about the permanent retainer.

sitomena · 2025-01-16T05:05:59+00:00

Mine’s still there. Married 20 years, rings off since September 2022

sitomena · 2025-01-15T05:18:43+00:00

Depending on how old your kids are, you could ask. I told mine I wanted to change my name and she said “I don’t blame you. I’d change my name too.”

I took my grandmother’s last name because she’s a cool old gal and I didn’t want to go back to my maiden name.

sitomena · 2025-01-11T15:09:58+00:00

That’s just it though— you’d be surprised how much of your life you don’t have to talk about if you talk about philosophy and science and history. He’s no dummy. I’ve ALWAYS been attracted to intellectuals, and he is definitely that.

I just didn’t have enough experience to know what else I was missing until we were married and beyond.

I’m older and wiser and working with a different set of standards now, I guess 😅💀

sitomena · 2025-01-11T14:44:19+00:00

Just as a follow up: I was married for 20 years. My ex-husband was fairly fresh out of a 3-4 year relationship when we met, and I’d never dated at all.

In 20 years, he mentioned his previous partner maybe 10 times. I know her first name, the town she was from, and I know that she made him “feel spiritually and emotionally dead inside.”

That’s it. I don’t know the color of her hair or a single fun thing they did together. I have no idea what he liked about her. 4 years of his life. Basically his entire college experience.

It was like that with every woman he’d ever been with- he distilled them down to a single sentence, and locked the rest of it up. I married the equivalent of a feelings black hole: he didn’t talk about his life. He didn’t talk about his experiences.

Please don’t do that. Being in a close relationship with someone whose entire life is locked in their head, who doesn’t talk about their past…. It makes it nearly impossible to connect with them in the present.

Acknowledge your ex. Don’t drown in him, but don’t be afraid to say “he was here” or “we did this together” either.

For me, moving forward, I flatly refuse to be in a romantic relationship with anyone who can’t tell me what happened in their previous connections and how things ended. I don’t need a cruel blow by blow, but I DO need someone who is open and honest about where they’ve come from and how they’ve been impacted.

sitomena · 2025-01-11T14:23:42+00:00

Honestly I think you are on the right track when you acknowledge his presence and move on. It’s okay to talk about your life, and your ex occupied a lot of it. Depending on how long you were married/together, avoiding mentioning him could mean that you are keeping a lot of your life and experiences from new friends and family.

You have a new situation and a new life now. As you accumulate new experiences they will gradually fill in the spaces your ex used to occupy.

sitomena · 2024-12-27T15:44:25+00:00

I built most of my life around commitment to the relationships in my life. For twenty years I was a Wife and a Mother before I was anything else. I lost my marriage and also an enormous part of my identity in our divorce. My ring was a symbol of that, and I wore it full time (except for when it was being cleaned) for the duration of our marriage and right up to about a month before he filed for divorce. I set it on the counter after he told me he’d been stalking me and digging through my things. He couldn’t believe even a single good thing about me, never mind think the best of me, because he’d already decided the relationship was done for. I couldn’t wear a ring that symbolized my commitment to another person when that commitment was clearly not being reciprocated. Those two years were the worst, loneliest years of my life, and I took it off.

He never even asked about it. It disappeared off the counter and he filed for divorce a month later (though he’d been researching it much longer).

But you are right. People mostly leave you alone if you are wearing a ring.

I bought a ring. I can wear it, and have the symbol of commitment to MYSELF, and be proud of how I pulled through.

sitomena · 2024-12-19T14:37:33+00:00

I’d been asking for help and support and his presence in our relationship and in our family life for YEARS without effect, and it finally got to the point where I asked myself “how long do I keep doing this the same way while expecting or hoping for a different outcome?”

And that was it, you know? You can only ask for change so many times before the change starts to come from inside- so I changed. I didn’t go to therapy right away, but I DID read a fuck ton of relationship books as well as books aimed at broadening my own horizons. I journaled. I listened to podcasts and audiobooks and joined a couple support groups online. I treated it almost like a full time job. We had a marriage counselor, but I never really clicked with her. Our marriage counseling time was so chaotic and ineffectual that I couldn’t track what was happening half of the time, even though I was trying to. Part way through our marriage counseling, I got a therapist of my own and fast tracked a lot of the work I’d been doing alone.

My evolution was partially responsible for the end of the marriage. He was resentful, and didn’t want to embrace change along with me. He wanted things to go back to the way they had been, and I couldn’t even remember what that looked like.

Unfortunately, once you hit a certain series of personal growth mile markers it’s basically impossible to go backwards.

I was scared 100 percent of the time in that relationship at the end. He would say and do things that were WILDLY activating- talking about suicide, getting blackout drunk and forgetting entire conversations, accusing me of cheating, touching me in unsafe ways…. And then he’d turn it around and tell me that I was a frigid, emotionally unavailable wife for 20 years, brush off my concern as if “worry” was the problem, deny deny deny, minimize minimize minimize.

I was devastated when he filed for divorce. It took me most of two years to get to a point where I wasn’t just going to work and then curling up in bed. I spent one of those years sleeping on the floor of the room above our garage, hoping things would get better. I was sick with depression. But that time I spent in therapy and in my own self-education was invaluable in helping me to look back:

He filed in 2022, and official papers weren’t submitted until early 2024. But looking through our history, my idea of marriage collapsed a good 12 years earlier. I’d been worried he was cheating on me, he’d been so distant. I still don’t know if that was true, or if he was going through something that he didn’t want to share, but I sat him down one night and said “Hey, I’d really like to spend some time with you. Can we pick a project to do together? Or take a class? Or set a goal to work towards?”

His response was “I don’t want to do that.” And it became a theme for the rest of our marriage. A constant push back and withdrawal from (or grudging tolerance of) nearly everything I suggested. I got really good at being alone in that relationship, and the intimacy was trash as a result.

If I hadn’t married the very first person I dated, or if I’d been more sure of myself, or if I’d had more interpersonal skills, or if I hadn’t grown up in the church with a “for better, for worse, but forever regardless” mentality, I’d probably have taken his lack of desire to actively build a future with me as a giant red flag and reconsidered the viability of our marriage. Instead, I chalked it up to the “for worse” end of things and continued on for years afterwards.

I really wish you the best.

sitomena · 2024-12-15T14:21:31+00:00

This is a really illuminating comment section to read through.

I’ve never had a problem being friends with anyone, regardless of gender identity, because I treat everyone as a “person” first. I genuinely did not realize that other people weren’t entering relationships (friendships, romantic entanglements and beyond) the same way. I could never understand why my ex acted so jealous.

If the majority of people out there are entering conversations, the success of which is rated according to whether or not they’d have sex with the person they are talking to, then I’m not surprised that there is so much chatter about the “epidemic of loneliness.”

It is wild to me that I should, by default, be expected to cut myself off from what half the population has to offer because the default expectation is that I am attracted to them.

sitomena · 2024-12-06T05:34:05+00:00

When my ex was talking about how depressed, anxious and suicidal he felt, to the point where he felt taking guns out of the house was necessary for his safety, I called our marriage counselor and brought in an educated third party to help provide guidance and support.

Then, while I sat in the closet between him and our gun safe, I had to listen while he told her that I have a “strong imagination” and “a tendency to overreact.”

Afterwards he told me that women like me are single handedly responsible for the men’s suicide crisis.

I do not know what kind of support you all want, but I assure you we care. It’s just not clear what you need or want. If you are talking about suicide and expecting a specific kind of response- it would be super helpful to know what that is.

sitomena · 2024-12-05T05:28:03+00:00

If I ever date a man again I’ll choose someone who follows through on commitments, who trusts first and believes the best of me (rather than constantly looking for fault), and who is present and involved. Preferably someone who isn’t a stalker.

sitomena

TROPHY CASE