My husband and I have been together for a total of 11 years, married for almost 6 and, in my opinion anyway, we seem to have hit a sort of “make or break” point in our marriage.
As a bit of background, I came from a bit of an unstable home with a constantly depressed mother and a narcissistic / perfectionist father. Go figure that I should grow into a depressed and perfectionist-ic young woman with almost zero self-esteem. However, years of therapy later and I’m feeling better than I’ve ever felt in my life – I’ve lost a good deal of weight, have scraped together some self-esteem, fixed up my health a bit, and am generally much more positive than before. There’s just this one problem…our marriage.
I met my husband through friends and was attracted to his personality – he is one of those always the life of the party types, fast friends with everyone, the comedian in the room. I have an awful memory, so I can’t remember if there was “chemistry” or anything like that that drew me to him, but for sure it was his personality. Sometimes, especially now that I’ve been thinking about our “situation,” I wonder if I saw him as my “out” from a depressing and over-controlled household…
Fast-forward a number of years, and a marriage and mortgage later we now seem to be living more like roommates, awesome roommates, but roommates nonetheless. We split chores around the house pretty evenly, with one picking up the slack is either one of us gets bogged down with other things. From the outside, our lives are the picture of perfection – spotless and neatly landscaped home, nice and well maintained cars, yearly vacations, etc.
The whole situation is not helped by his job, and career in general, which involves working odd hours. There’s just no getting around that, the industry that he’s in pretty much ensures that that’s the way it’s going to be, and first shift positions are few and far between and usually awarded based on seniority. We’re both in our early thirties, so that seniority will be a long time coming. Right now, he’s on an alternating schedule where he works two twelve hour shifts one week and the next week works five twelve hour shifts the next week. On account of that, we really don’t see too much of each other so I’m left feeling lonely quite often.
Sex has become a scheduled occurrence usually happening once a month, twice if we’re really lucky. Maybe that would have been fine when I wasn’t feeling all that great about myself and was heavier, but now that I’ve lost weight my libido seems to have sky-rocketed. In terms of his priorities though, sex ranks very, very, low on his list with sleep and chores coming in at the top. I actually sent him a racy text message a week or two ago, asking if he was up for sex later, his response a flat ok. Oh and romance, romance is non-existent – I get flowers only on Valentine’s day and only because I set a reminder on his phone. He claims that he shows his love for me by taking care of us financially (he does make quite a bit more than me), and the house, and my car, etc.
So, here I am with this roommate of a husband and I feel lonely, disconnected, and sort of fed up with him. After all these changes that I’ve made to myself in the past year or so, I guess that maybe I feel a bit hurt that he won’t take the initiative to make similar changes so that we can both enjoy each other more and just generally feel healthier and more in-tune with one another. I suppose that I could also be feeling that it’s a little unfair, I’ve done all this work on myself and I get no comments or appreciation – no “Wow, honey you look fantastic” or “Wow, honey you’ve really inspired me to start working out/quit smoking/etc.” He’s the only one that seems to have not really noticed – coworkers are constantly complementing me, I’m getting much more attention from men now. At the very least I’d like him to put the same effort into our marriage, but to him there’s no problem. I suppose that I have become “un-invisible” now, and damn it I’d like him to treat me like that too!
I have tried implementing a sort of rule that on the two Saturdays per month that he’s off we go on dates to try to reconnect, but they have been all up to me to plan, and have seemed sort of forced, or resulted in some sort of epic fail (i.e. a fight over something stupid). Now that I’ve made all these changes, I want to go out, be seen, have fun, and he wants to sit at home because he’s tired all the time. We can’t even do that peacefully though because all he ever wants to do at home is watch movies (a high point of contention since he only likes action movies so I’m always having to settle for those) or play video games (something that I’m not really into).
When I’ve tried to talk to him about our marriage or sex, or anything “too serious” in his opinion he gets really defensive and often just tries to change the subject. He actually once said, “What, you’re not happy again?” And God forbid I should mention an admirable quality about another guy we know, because then I get the super mature, “Well, then why don’t you just go and marry so-and-so.”
I’m at the point where I just don’t know what to do. Is this even fixable? Maybe I’m expecting too much from him as he claims? I’m not a jump-into-divorce sort of person, but I don’t know what to do anymore. And to add to the problem, I've just found out that he's going to be going on first shift come the new year. While I should be excited, I'm terrified that we won't know how to live with each other anymore.
I apologize for the very long post, but any advice would be much appreciated.
-Mademoiselle
As a bit of background, I came from a bit of an unstable home with a constantly depressed mother and a narcissistic / perfectionist father. Go figure that I should grow into a depressed and perfectionist-ic young woman with almost zero self-esteem. However, years of therapy later and I’m feeling better than I’ve ever felt in my life – I’ve lost a good deal of weight, have scraped together some self-esteem, fixed up my health a bit, and am generally much more positive than before. There’s just this one problem…our marriage.
I met my husband through friends and was attracted to his personality – he is one of those always the life of the party types, fast friends with everyone, the comedian in the room. I have an awful memory, so I can’t remember if there was “chemistry” or anything like that that drew me to him, but for sure it was his personality. Sometimes, especially now that I’ve been thinking about our “situation,” I wonder if I saw him as my “out” from a depressing and over-controlled household…
Fast-forward a number of years, and a marriage and mortgage later we now seem to be living more like roommates, awesome roommates, but roommates nonetheless. We split chores around the house pretty evenly, with one picking up the slack is either one of us gets bogged down with other things. From the outside, our lives are the picture of perfection – spotless and neatly landscaped home, nice and well maintained cars, yearly vacations, etc.
The whole situation is not helped by his job, and career in general, which involves working odd hours. There’s just no getting around that, the industry that he’s in pretty much ensures that that’s the way it’s going to be, and first shift positions are few and far between and usually awarded based on seniority. We’re both in our early thirties, so that seniority will be a long time coming. Right now, he’s on an alternating schedule where he works two twelve hour shifts one week and the next week works five twelve hour shifts the next week. On account of that, we really don’t see too much of each other so I’m left feeling lonely quite often.
Sex has become a scheduled occurrence usually happening once a month, twice if we’re really lucky. Maybe that would have been fine when I wasn’t feeling all that great about myself and was heavier, but now that I’ve lost weight my libido seems to have sky-rocketed. In terms of his priorities though, sex ranks very, very, low on his list with sleep and chores coming in at the top. I actually sent him a racy text message a week or two ago, asking if he was up for sex later, his response a flat ok. Oh and romance, romance is non-existent – I get flowers only on Valentine’s day and only because I set a reminder on his phone. He claims that he shows his love for me by taking care of us financially (he does make quite a bit more than me), and the house, and my car, etc.
So, here I am with this roommate of a husband and I feel lonely, disconnected, and sort of fed up with him. After all these changes that I’ve made to myself in the past year or so, I guess that maybe I feel a bit hurt that he won’t take the initiative to make similar changes so that we can both enjoy each other more and just generally feel healthier and more in-tune with one another. I suppose that I could also be feeling that it’s a little unfair, I’ve done all this work on myself and I get no comments or appreciation – no “Wow, honey you look fantastic” or “Wow, honey you’ve really inspired me to start working out/quit smoking/etc.” He’s the only one that seems to have not really noticed – coworkers are constantly complementing me, I’m getting much more attention from men now. At the very least I’d like him to put the same effort into our marriage, but to him there’s no problem. I suppose that I have become “un-invisible” now, and damn it I’d like him to treat me like that too!
I have tried implementing a sort of rule that on the two Saturdays per month that he’s off we go on dates to try to reconnect, but they have been all up to me to plan, and have seemed sort of forced, or resulted in some sort of epic fail (i.e. a fight over something stupid). Now that I’ve made all these changes, I want to go out, be seen, have fun, and he wants to sit at home because he’s tired all the time. We can’t even do that peacefully though because all he ever wants to do at home is watch movies (a high point of contention since he only likes action movies so I’m always having to settle for those) or play video games (something that I’m not really into).
When I’ve tried to talk to him about our marriage or sex, or anything “too serious” in his opinion he gets really defensive and often just tries to change the subject. He actually once said, “What, you’re not happy again?” And God forbid I should mention an admirable quality about another guy we know, because then I get the super mature, “Well, then why don’t you just go and marry so-and-so.”
I’m at the point where I just don’t know what to do. Is this even fixable? Maybe I’m expecting too much from him as he claims? I’m not a jump-into-divorce sort of person, but I don’t know what to do anymore. And to add to the problem, I've just found out that he's going to be going on first shift come the new year. While I should be excited, I'm terrified that we won't know how to live with each other anymore.
I apologize for the very long post, but any advice would be much appreciated.
-Mademoiselle