Does your spouse (or SO) have the right

[Bobmi357]

personally, i call this behaviour cruel, in the worst way, and i really don't care why he felt he couldn't do it, it was completely unfair.

that, and not communicating with me, has caused a long-term relationship to irretrievably break down, and my children are getting hurt in the process.

and yes, i have been unbelievably tempted to have an affair, and it would serve my ex right if i had.
you can't just expect that your partner will be perfectly happy with your decision NOT to have sex anymore - it [most often] doesn't work that way.

But thats the point WQ, if your partner makes an arbitrary decision and refuses to even begin to talk about, let alone come to some sort of liveable compromise, the relationship is pretty much in the toilet. It takes two people to make a relationship, and two people to save it. You can not bear the burden of trying to salvage what you had by yourself and if your partner refuses to help, all the efforts in the world won't fix it.

In your case your husband's mental problems only compounded the issue. As one that has lived through such situations myself, albeit from a male perspective, I don't blame you for feeling bitter and angry. The last three years of my first marriage I too was extremely bitter and angry, so much so that the stress started affecting my health.

In your case if you can ask yourself "Did I make every reasonable attempt to save the situation?" and answer yes, then you have no real reason to keep blaming yourself.

You've closed one chapter in your life, but you have your kids, and you have to believe that somewhere out there is a guy that will love to make love to you, and hold your hand in the mall, or wrap his arm around your shoulder at the movies. The world is full of nice guys that rarely get noticed. There is a guy for you and you will find him, you got to believe that, or else you might as well give up and join a convent.

 

[Bobmi357]

and then one day when you finally decide you've had it up to here, and you announce your intention to leave, suddenly it's all "but honey, you KNOW i love you!"

When I told my ex I was moving out, she yelled and screamed, threw things, then pulled out her nuclear weapons thinking that would still work. Tears.

Little did she know that she herself had disarmed her weapon the day she left me curled up in a ball for several hours whimpering in pain and desperately needing hospital attention due to a kidney shutting down from dehydration.

The tears flowed for about 10 minutes until she realized I was ignoring them.

I am a sucker for a crying woman, especially my wife, but she had played that particular note til I got used to it. And for what its worth, my second wife only cries when she's in pretty intense pain. She doesn't use her tears as a weapon in arguments.

 

[warrior queen]

But thats the point WQ, if your partner makes an arbitrary decision and refuses to even begin to talk about, let alone come to some sort of liveable compromise, the relationship is pretty much in the toilet. It takes two people to make a relationship, and two people to save it. You can not bear the burden of trying to salvage what you had by yourself and if your partner refuses to help, all the efforts in the world won't fix it.

In your case your husband's mental problems only compounded the issue. As one that has lived through such situations myself, albeit from a male perspective, I don't blame you for feeling bitter and angry. The last three years of my first marriage I too was extremely bitter and angry, so much so that the stress started affecting my health.

In your case if you can ask yourself "Did I make every reasonable attempt to save the situation?" and answer yes, then you have no real reason to keep blaming yourself.

You've closed one chapter in your life, but you have your kids, and you have to believe that somewhere out there is a guy that will love to make love to you, and hold your hand in the mall, or wrap his arm around your shoulder at the movies. The world is full of nice guys that rarely get noticed. There is a guy for you and you will find him, you got to believe that, or else you might as well give up and join a convent.

i'm not really blaming myself for this happening - i know it takes 2 to screw something up this bad, so i place equal blame here.
i'm not even really angry about it anymore - i got through most of those emotions years ago.

what i do understand is how people who find themselves in situations similar to this can go out and have an affair in order to try and fill the enormous void.
i know how easy it would be, because i have been right there - affair just waiting for me to take off my clothes.......
and the temptation to do it was completely overwhelming.

in a way, i actually DID have an affair, because the emotional closeness i was looking for, was from someone outside the relationship, and i got it.
so i am guilty of that.

and when it comes right down to it - that's equally as bad as going thro with sex.

 

[warrior queen]

When I told my ex I was moving out, she yelled and screamed, threw things, then pulled out her nuclear weapons thinking that would still work. Tears.

Little did she know that she herself had disarmed her weapon the day she left me curled up in a ball for several hours whimpering in pain and desperately needing hospital attention due to a kidney shutting down from dehydration.

The tears flowed for about 10 minutes until she realized I was ignoring them.

I am a sucker for a crying woman, especially my wife, but she had played that particular note til I got used to it. And for what its worth, my second wife only cries when she's in pretty intense pain. She doesn't use her tears as a weapon in arguments.

heh..........yeah, well.........
i am one of those suckers who listened to the arguments about why we should stay together......
they always came immediately after i'd said "i've had enough".....

so for 5 years, i stayed......... 5 long and wasted years.

like i said somewhere, i should have left the very first time.

but, hindsight is always a great thing, and i was still listening to all those lessons on how one should 'stay and make every effort'.

 

[midwestyankee]

Let me suggest a resource for you, Bobmi. It's a book you may well know, but if not then it could be very useful. It's The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. He includes a terrific chapter on honesty and communication as well as a lengthy section on love. I recommend it as often as I can. It should be required reading for married couples.

 

[James G 5]

Ok, not to go off on a rant ( ) but I have often said my issue is not with monogamy ITSELF but with the MINDSET of monogamy.
What I mean by this is that monogamy is completely unnatural to human beings, but society, culture, and religion dictate it to the majority of people (in pretty much all cultures the power elite, the intelligensia, the religious caste, and the artists generally step outside this, altho to do it openly is often at their peril), so most people strive to live this way, albeit often with many failures & much lying & sneaking around.
So we create memes* and mores** and structures to support the idea of monogamy.
IMO, some of these monogamy supports worsen the problem this thread deals with.
First and foremost among these is the conflation of SEX and LOVE.
The idea that the 2 are (or should be) synonymous leads to a LOT of grief.
You take men, who have (generally) higher and more agressive sex drives than women, and tell them that sex=love and you should save sex for marriage and only have it with your spouse and combine it with cultural tendencies to teach men to be unemotional and treat physical affection as foreign unless it's foreplay and of COURSE you will end up with men who expect and demand sex from their partners, have trouble giving affection or understanding non-sexual affection, and feel hurt & rejected when sexual attention is withdrawn. And that ain't even a run-on sentence
You take women, with (again, generally) lower and less agressive sex drives, give them the sex-love-marriage speech, tell them about their "marital duties" (there are still those who believe it worthwhile to keep a woman ignorant till her wedding night then say "he's going to do something to you and it might hurt but it's so you can have babies"), fill their heads with fairy tales of "soul mates" and "Prince Charmings," and the idea that with time and babies a great affection that will last till their old age will be created. Then reality sets in, their husband isn't Prince Charming, they (the ladies) have to work, care for kids, etc usually with partners who don't take equal shares of the responsibility and you get tired cranky women who want attention and affection and have to deal with "Mr Feely Hands" to get it.
Add in to this the idea coming from "sex=love" that love is some sort of commodity with, as they say, men trading love for sex and women trading sex for love and you have the whole love-sex-affection situation growing greatly exacerbated.
Add on a few YEARS of this situation and you often end up with one partner or the other witholding sex (and often the situation I mentioned in my previous post where one partner witholds sex trying to force the other to initiate, while the other feels a complete lack of affection) and the other feeling starved for affection and both of them questioning their love, especially as the biological rush that accompanies initial meeting and hormanal attachement from first sex wanes.
Then, typically, the male (who is usually the one feeling starved for sex) seeks sex outside the relationship, or the woman (who is typically feeling starved for affection) goes outside the relationship often giving sex to find affection. In some cases, this can lead to a short term improvement since the now-satisfied man feels better about being affectionate as his need for sex is decreased or the now-recharged and loved woman feels better about giving sex, but it's often a short term and negative fix since it's based on deceit and the women who cheat, especially, see little reason to stay.
Obviously there're a ton of other reasons why one partner or the other might lose interest in sex, short or long term. That can either jump-start or worsen the circumstances I've mentioned. Also, the roles aren't always so clear cut. Sometimes it's all about other facotrs entirely. But the situations and feelings I've outlined, and the mindsets driving them, are visible themes in all too many of the situations we see discussed here. (Don't even get me started on how men see sex as a symbol of their own virility and self-worth and therefore seek it if the spouse isn't giving, or how women see sex as a symbol of their own attractiveness and self-worth and therefore seek elsewhere if the man isn't giving, assuming one or the other just doesn't spiral down in to hopeless depression instead).
Now, back at the beginning of this I mentioned the mindset of monogamy and its unnaturalness. Am I attacking monogamy or suggesting polyamory is always the solution to these issues? No. What I am saying is, if you're going to support monogamy or try & live that way, go in to it with your eyes open & some view of reality and how you view love and sex. Think hard about what you teach your children about these things and how they "should be"...and then look at the EXAMPLE you, and society at large give them and how different it is from reality. Nothing dissapoints like high expectations that're left unmet. And maybe, just MAYBE consider that for some people another way of life MIGHT work to address these issues and be a little open minded about those who choose to puirsue it Don't wrap YOUR identity so tightly in your lifetsyle that it closes your mind to other things or make you feel the need to attack them, and don't let yourself be put in the position of holding on so tightly to a set of false images & ideals that support your lifestyle that they blind you to that which threatens it.


*Main Entry: meme
Pronunciation: 'mEm
Function: noun
Etymology: alteration of mimeme, from mim- (as in mimesis) + -eme
Date: 1976
: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

**Main Entry: mo·res
Pronunciation: 'mor-"Az, 'mOr- also -(")Ez
Function: noun plural
Etymology: Latin, plural of mor-, mos custom
Date: circa 1899
1 : the fixed morally binding customs of a particular group
2 : moral attitudes
3 : HABITS, MANNERS

Ok, I'm done now

 

[Missingmeds]

Excellent post James with some fine points made.

 

[James G 5]

Excellent post James with some fine points made.

Thanks
I got some PM feedback on it & I want to reiterate what I said towards the end, I am WELL aware the reasons I mentioned aren't the only reason, or sometimes ANY of the reason for various couples, and that I was making broad generalizations about the sexs...I was trying to address a braod number of events and something that's often an element, not give the be-all-end-all explanation
Your mileage may vary

 

[midwestyankee]

James, excellent post.

I wouldn't worry too much about having made your points with broad generalizations (actually, I'm sure you aren't concerned about it but some readers might be) because that's all you can use when you talk on broad terms. As a society, we do tend to follow along trendlines and certain generalizations are simply unavoidable.

One factor that I find revealing in your post is that of expectations. So many people enter into relationships with unrealistic expectations it's a wonder many relationships last at all. We develop these expectations as we grow up from the examples we see in life, literature, the movies; they're all around us. And most examples we absorb are false because they exist as entertainment, or misunderstood because we don't know the entire context.

The "beautiful princess" and "shining prince" expectations that form the center of the "there-is-only-one-love-of-your-life" myth do an immense disservice to society. You already mentioned many of the reasons but I will just amplify one: good people ignore other good people in the search for the perfect mate.

Now, let's see if I can tie this back to the thread's topic. I have only limited experience with the problem of a partner choosing to refuse sex (though more experience than I would like), and it appears to be a matter of a power play or manipulation quite often. I wonder how many times the true root of these manipulations is the disappointment that comes from wildly unrealistic expectations that were not met?

 

[Noor]

James, excellent post.

I wouldn't worry too much about having made your points with broad generalizations (actually, I'm sure you aren't concerned about it but some readers might be) because that's all you can use when you talk on broad terms. As a society, we do tend to follow along trendlines and certain generalizations are simply unavoidable.

One factor that I find revealing in your post is that of expectations. So many people enter into relationships with unrealistic expectations it's a wonder many relationships last at all. We develop these expectations as we grow up from the examples we see in life, literature, the movies; they're all around us. And most examples we absorb are false because they exist as entertainment, or misunderstood because we don't know the entire context.

The "beautiful princess" and "shining prince" expectations that form the center of the "there-is-only-one-love-of-your-life" myth do an immense disservice to society. You already mentioned many of the reasons but I will just amplify one: good people ignore other good people in the search for the perfect mate.

Now, let's see if I can tie this back to the thread's topic. I have only limited experience with the problem of a partner choosing to refuse sex (though more experience than I would like), and it appears to be a matter of a power play or manipulation quite often. I wonder how many times the true root of these manipulations is the disappointment that comes from wildly unrealistic expectations that were not met?

for some reason that song, where have all the cowboys gone, keeps going through my head when I read this.

"I will raise the children, if you pay all the bills..."

Maybe people in marriage are signing up for different commitments?

 

[midwestyankee]

for some reason that song, where have all the cowboys gone, keeps going through my head when I read this.

"I will raise the children, if you pay all the bills..."

Maybe people in marriage are signing up for different commitments?

Noor, I don't know the song, but I believe you are absolutely right about people signing up for entirely different commitments.

 

[crazybbwgirl]

Noor, I don't know the song, but I believe you are absolutely right about people signing up for entirely different commitments.

BINGO! That is exactly what is wrong with marriage. And James - I agree with every single thing you so eloquently said. And I agree that the MOST important thing we can teach our children (especially girls) is to be able to take care of yourself. Don't graduate from high school with the expectation that you'll marry some guy who will take care of you the rest of your life. PLEASE have a back up plan! A skill, a job, a plan to go to college - something.

When I read all the shrill rantings about how awful cheating is and how this one and that one would NEVER cheat or put up with it - I just think - either that person is nervous that THEY might cheat or nervous their SPOUSE might cheat.

Statisitcs alone prove that every married person should have a back up plan - IMHO. And to get back on topic - If you're looking at a life of NO sex - cheating - no matter how much you might not like the idea - starts looking more and more feasible after awhile.

 

[warrior queen]

Noor, I don't know the song, but I believe you are absolutely right about people signing up for entirely different commitments.

and let's not forget that changing commitments during the course of the relationship also need to be addressed together.
people change, grow, refine their expectations.

failure to do that, by either partner, spells doom.

 

[midwestyankee]

and let's not forget that changing commitments during the course of the relationship also need to be addressed together.
people change, grow, refine their expectations.

failure to do that, by either partner, spells doom.

Once again, the C word: communication.

What I see happening sometimes is that people do not grow as they get older, or as they change and their life changes, they maintain their original expectations. Soon enough everything is out of whack and severe problems ensue.

 

[PinkOrchid]

 

[James G 5]

and let's not forget that changing commitments during the course of the relationship also need to be addressed together.
people change, grow, refine their expectations.

failure to do that, by either partner, spells doom.

Yup, and lines of communication must be kept tight or all too often those people grow APART

 

[James G 5]

So, James, tell us how you REALLY feel.

Oh SURE, encourage me to write more novellas, that'll get you points with the rest of the board

Nice post, btw. I'm not sure I'm as pro-poly as you, but I think it has its place and you make good points.

And thanks...Like I said here & have said before, poly isn't easy or even better, per se, and it won't work for veryone...but it's the MINDSET behind monogamy that perpetuates a lot of the myths and bad ideas that contribute to these problems
Changing people's way of thinking is hard without challenging their way of life sometimes tho
Oh well, I got thick skin

 

[moonchild24]

I don't believe that any healthy relationship should go without sex (if you've done it before). If you feel obligated to have sex, maybe you should take another look at your relationship. It should never be an obligation. If both parties are uninterested, that's another story. I think if one party wants it, then it should be addressed as to why the other doesn't and move on from there.