firefly
31st March 2007, 06:35 PM
Reading others' posts i come to realise how so many of us are in pain in our marriage. I am writing to share my story and also to get support and advice from others who may have insights and advice that would help me.
I am a 27 year old wife with a 33 year old husband. We have been married for three years and I do realise that a separation at least is looming. We do not have any children. Initially we both wanted to wait, but now he says he doesn't ever want children while i am thinking that i would want at least one or two children by the time i am thirty five. We met at work and was in a whirlwind romance. We got engaged after 6 months of dating, and married four months following the engagement. I did love him very much but looking back i realise that i barely knew him. One thing i knew then which has always been true is the goodness that i see in him. He really is a good, gentle and soft person, who has been brought up in a strict upbringing and i know his childhood was a hard one which lacked affection and comfort. On the other hand, I have been brought up in a very loving supportive family environment and one cannot ask for better parents than mine. They always encouraged me to speak up and to express myself and i think that's part of why i have always felt free to display my emotions. Despite that, my personality is such that I am quite an insecure person who really needs a lot of love and affection, and I have only recently become a more independent person due to difficulties in my marriage.
Things started to go wrong almost immediately after we got married. The main problem was my defensiveness at his criticisms and his disappointments and disapproval of me due to various things. He was very disappointed to find out how inept i was at housework and cooking. I had been poorly trained, i admit, but i was eager and anxious to learn. Unfortunately i have always been a rather defensive person, who feels very attacked when i am criticised. And so began a series of emotional turbulence in our marriage, where i would become angry and lash out at him whenever i saw him being disappointed, whenever he criticised me and whenever he corrected me or re-do the houseworks which i have tried to do. In truth i was just in a lot of pain seeing him so disappointed in me. I felt that he regretted marrying me and it made me feel so much fear inside, which i channeled out as anger.
On top of that, differences in our personality and ways of life started to emerge and it was very difficult adjusting to him and his culture and way of life. I was a very outgoing person who loved going out but he was very adamant to stay home most times. He also had a problem with inflexibility and a need to have things done his own way - in this way he is obsessive and he is also a neatfreak. Generally i am also a fairly neat person but i found that he was very particular about many little things and this stressed me out to some extent.
The first year of our marriage WAS turbulent. I admit i was emotionally immature and insecure. Most of the time i was in tears and confused about why things were turning out so badly when I loved him and saw him as a really wonderful amazing person. One thing I realise looking back is that our emotional being are very different and do not compliment each other. When i become angry i tend to be vocal and expressive and i want to argue it out with him but on the other hand he would walk away from me. I tried telling him to try to calm me down whenever i start becoming emotional by hugging me or saying something reassuring as i do cool down quite easily if he does this. But he is quite bad at this and tells me he is not the type to be reassuring.
Soon after our first year he told me that he no longer loves me. This devastated me and i greatly blamed myself because i believe it was due to my behaviour and my lack of emotional control. But i loved him and he told me he saw this, from the affection that i give him and from the way i have been trying to improve. However things never did get back to the way it was. I realised we have little in common. But he has always been responsible and kind. But he did not love me and his rigidity about the lifestyle he wanted to live also contributed to my unhappiness. At one point, i tried to focus entirely on my marriage, prioritised the housework and practiced very hard on my cooking. But it seemed to go unappreciated. He later told me that seeing me try so hard made him feel guilty as he could not feel much love towards me anymore. He was still fairly affectionate at that stage, but i feel something was lacking and became a lot more insecure, which led to needy behaviour. I also cried regularly and this i guess made him feel worse.
I stayed because i wanted to put things right and because i wanted to redeem my mistakes when i hurt him in the first year. But i now come to realise that it is very hard for me to stay without expecting things from him, his companionship, his affection, sex, and the whole lot. And it gets harder and harder for him to do so. He takes care of my general need, would be willing to provide transport, buy food for us and be there if i need help in a practical sense but emotionally he is unable to provide as a husband. And i should be able to understand this and most of the time i do try not to ask for too much, and most days i do try and succeed but it's very hard sometimes as it's jsut the two of us in our small apartment and i tend to get lonely and desperate for his love, his affection. Inside me i am frustrated and devastated and i am not always able to suppress this. But i make it worse sometimes when i show him how i feel, when i complain, when i become demanding...as he feels unappreciated for the things that he does try to do for me. So he becomes worse and worse, and does less and less. I realise this and i try to stop but i can't help it as i feel that most times i am already suppressing my needs and desires. And i become even lonelier, feel neglected and abandoned. I decided to get a laptop and internet connection so that i can be less lonely and chat to people. I do read a lot as well, and i try to go out with friends. The thing is going out with others don't make me so much happier either. And having spent so much time focusing on my marriage, i don't have that many friends left. Many are busy with their own families.
Our relationship is one step away from being dead and i guess i better separate from him before his energy totally burns out. I love him and i know he is too good for me. Maybe i am just not good enough for him to love. He thought he loved me but when he really got to know me, he did not love me anymore..This is really damaging to my self-esteem and i now feel that i should be prepared to live my life alone, not finding someone who can accept me the way i am. I look around me and so many women are emotional as well but it seems their life is under control, not wrecked like mine. I know i should leave as it would make him happier and a freer person but somehow my guilt makes it hard for me and i feel that i have the unfinished business of trying to love him unconditionally first. I want to live here with him and just love him, without making demands which made things as bad as it is now. If i could succeed in doing that for a period of six months and he still feels miserable with me around, then i can leave with a better feeling that i have really tried to redeem my mistakes.
I don't know if that is making much sense but that's how i feel. I feel guilty a lot of the times and i keep having flashbacks on how i hurt him in the beginning of the marriage. Sometimes i feel angry that his love for me was so weak that it could not survive, other times i simply blame myself.
I wasn't going to mention this but i guess i will. A few months back my husband had an emotional affair with a temp working at his office. They were constantly messaging each other, spoke on the phone, called each other darling and had met up a few times outside of office. He had held her hands and kissed her cheeks several times but he said the physical contact stopped there and i believe him because he is a religious man. When i found out about it, i flipped, had rage attacks and had a bit of a breakdown. I am now on antidepressents as it is, and i do get a bit depressive sometimes when i sleep the whole day or cry for hours. Not often, but sometimes.
He has ceased contact with the girl, or so it seems, but of course it's been a real betrayal and i must not be in denial that he doesn't love me. I think sometimes i am in denial that is why i keep expecting and asking for things as if our marriage is normal, which it is not.
We are still living together in his house, which explains why he can't move out as its' his place. I just bought my own place but its still under construction and won't be ready for at least several months. We have talked about separation several times but i just can't bring myself to do it. I still love him although i dn't feel that we are really that right for each other because we are too different and can't really understand each other. But i do see and recognise in him so many wonderful qualities that i seek for in a husband. YEt we don't connect emotionally and we don't have the same perspective on life and on what we want to do in our lives. But a part of me feels that i can never find someone as good as he is.
Logically i feel that i should go before he starts to hate me and resent me even more. The longer i wait, the older i am, and i do want to have kids and a normal family of my own. But my confidence about my own personality and emotional stability is now greatly shaken.
I want very much to be loved for who i am because i know i do have a loving and caring nature, and maybe he is not meant for me, but yet i am so scared, so torn up inside, so hurt and so afraid of loneliness.
Please help me, please give me some insights and your opinions..thanks..
I am a 27 year old wife with a 33 year old husband. We have been married for three years and I do realise that a separation at least is looming. We do not have any children. Initially we both wanted to wait, but now he says he doesn't ever want children while i am thinking that i would want at least one or two children by the time i am thirty five. We met at work and was in a whirlwind romance. We got engaged after 6 months of dating, and married four months following the engagement. I did love him very much but looking back i realise that i barely knew him. One thing i knew then which has always been true is the goodness that i see in him. He really is a good, gentle and soft person, who has been brought up in a strict upbringing and i know his childhood was a hard one which lacked affection and comfort. On the other hand, I have been brought up in a very loving supportive family environment and one cannot ask for better parents than mine. They always encouraged me to speak up and to express myself and i think that's part of why i have always felt free to display my emotions. Despite that, my personality is such that I am quite an insecure person who really needs a lot of love and affection, and I have only recently become a more independent person due to difficulties in my marriage.
Things started to go wrong almost immediately after we got married. The main problem was my defensiveness at his criticisms and his disappointments and disapproval of me due to various things. He was very disappointed to find out how inept i was at housework and cooking. I had been poorly trained, i admit, but i was eager and anxious to learn. Unfortunately i have always been a rather defensive person, who feels very attacked when i am criticised. And so began a series of emotional turbulence in our marriage, where i would become angry and lash out at him whenever i saw him being disappointed, whenever he criticised me and whenever he corrected me or re-do the houseworks which i have tried to do. In truth i was just in a lot of pain seeing him so disappointed in me. I felt that he regretted marrying me and it made me feel so much fear inside, which i channeled out as anger.
On top of that, differences in our personality and ways of life started to emerge and it was very difficult adjusting to him and his culture and way of life. I was a very outgoing person who loved going out but he was very adamant to stay home most times. He also had a problem with inflexibility and a need to have things done his own way - in this way he is obsessive and he is also a neatfreak. Generally i am also a fairly neat person but i found that he was very particular about many little things and this stressed me out to some extent.
The first year of our marriage WAS turbulent. I admit i was emotionally immature and insecure. Most of the time i was in tears and confused about why things were turning out so badly when I loved him and saw him as a really wonderful amazing person. One thing I realise looking back is that our emotional being are very different and do not compliment each other. When i become angry i tend to be vocal and expressive and i want to argue it out with him but on the other hand he would walk away from me. I tried telling him to try to calm me down whenever i start becoming emotional by hugging me or saying something reassuring as i do cool down quite easily if he does this. But he is quite bad at this and tells me he is not the type to be reassuring.
Soon after our first year he told me that he no longer loves me. This devastated me and i greatly blamed myself because i believe it was due to my behaviour and my lack of emotional control. But i loved him and he told me he saw this, from the affection that i give him and from the way i have been trying to improve. However things never did get back to the way it was. I realised we have little in common. But he has always been responsible and kind. But he did not love me and his rigidity about the lifestyle he wanted to live also contributed to my unhappiness. At one point, i tried to focus entirely on my marriage, prioritised the housework and practiced very hard on my cooking. But it seemed to go unappreciated. He later told me that seeing me try so hard made him feel guilty as he could not feel much love towards me anymore. He was still fairly affectionate at that stage, but i feel something was lacking and became a lot more insecure, which led to needy behaviour. I also cried regularly and this i guess made him feel worse.
I stayed because i wanted to put things right and because i wanted to redeem my mistakes when i hurt him in the first year. But i now come to realise that it is very hard for me to stay without expecting things from him, his companionship, his affection, sex, and the whole lot. And it gets harder and harder for him to do so. He takes care of my general need, would be willing to provide transport, buy food for us and be there if i need help in a practical sense but emotionally he is unable to provide as a husband. And i should be able to understand this and most of the time i do try not to ask for too much, and most days i do try and succeed but it's very hard sometimes as it's jsut the two of us in our small apartment and i tend to get lonely and desperate for his love, his affection. Inside me i am frustrated and devastated and i am not always able to suppress this. But i make it worse sometimes when i show him how i feel, when i complain, when i become demanding...as he feels unappreciated for the things that he does try to do for me. So he becomes worse and worse, and does less and less. I realise this and i try to stop but i can't help it as i feel that most times i am already suppressing my needs and desires. And i become even lonelier, feel neglected and abandoned. I decided to get a laptop and internet connection so that i can be less lonely and chat to people. I do read a lot as well, and i try to go out with friends. The thing is going out with others don't make me so much happier either. And having spent so much time focusing on my marriage, i don't have that many friends left. Many are busy with their own families.
Our relationship is one step away from being dead and i guess i better separate from him before his energy totally burns out. I love him and i know he is too good for me. Maybe i am just not good enough for him to love. He thought he loved me but when he really got to know me, he did not love me anymore..This is really damaging to my self-esteem and i now feel that i should be prepared to live my life alone, not finding someone who can accept me the way i am. I look around me and so many women are emotional as well but it seems their life is under control, not wrecked like mine. I know i should leave as it would make him happier and a freer person but somehow my guilt makes it hard for me and i feel that i have the unfinished business of trying to love him unconditionally first. I want to live here with him and just love him, without making demands which made things as bad as it is now. If i could succeed in doing that for a period of six months and he still feels miserable with me around, then i can leave with a better feeling that i have really tried to redeem my mistakes.
I don't know if that is making much sense but that's how i feel. I feel guilty a lot of the times and i keep having flashbacks on how i hurt him in the beginning of the marriage. Sometimes i feel angry that his love for me was so weak that it could not survive, other times i simply blame myself.
I wasn't going to mention this but i guess i will. A few months back my husband had an emotional affair with a temp working at his office. They were constantly messaging each other, spoke on the phone, called each other darling and had met up a few times outside of office. He had held her hands and kissed her cheeks several times but he said the physical contact stopped there and i believe him because he is a religious man. When i found out about it, i flipped, had rage attacks and had a bit of a breakdown. I am now on antidepressents as it is, and i do get a bit depressive sometimes when i sleep the whole day or cry for hours. Not often, but sometimes.
He has ceased contact with the girl, or so it seems, but of course it's been a real betrayal and i must not be in denial that he doesn't love me. I think sometimes i am in denial that is why i keep expecting and asking for things as if our marriage is normal, which it is not.
We are still living together in his house, which explains why he can't move out as its' his place. I just bought my own place but its still under construction and won't be ready for at least several months. We have talked about separation several times but i just can't bring myself to do it. I still love him although i dn't feel that we are really that right for each other because we are too different and can't really understand each other. But i do see and recognise in him so many wonderful qualities that i seek for in a husband. YEt we don't connect emotionally and we don't have the same perspective on life and on what we want to do in our lives. But a part of me feels that i can never find someone as good as he is.
Logically i feel that i should go before he starts to hate me and resent me even more. The longer i wait, the older i am, and i do want to have kids and a normal family of my own. But my confidence about my own personality and emotional stability is now greatly shaken.
I want very much to be loved for who i am because i know i do have a loving and caring nature, and maybe he is not meant for me, but yet i am so scared, so torn up inside, so hurt and so afraid of loneliness.
Please help me, please give me some insights and your opinions..thanks..