View Single Post
Old 19th March 2019, 06:58 PM   #330
Shaken
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2019
Posts: 1
Re: I don't love my wife and never have...

I can't believe I am on a forum writing this after only five months of marriage, but here I am.

I met my wife three years ago this April. We became friends after a few conversations, and she developed a huge crush on me (I could tell, and she verified it later). Due to what I assumed to be external pressures (An older couple who were like family to me tried to set me up with her), I actively avoided developing feelings for her. I could tell she was smart, but back then I had this savior complex thing, and thought she was too good/clean/pure/inexperienced for me.

I went on a trip for a few weeks with a religious group, and came back in a relationship with somebody else. I knew that I had actively chosen this other woman (because she set my mind on fire. I find intellectual conversations extremely important and stimulating). My then friend, who would later become my wife, was hurt by this, and stilled her affections.

She left for a year abroad right after I broke up with the other woman (she was extremely abusive, and my wife was the very opposite of abusive). From a distance, my fantasies worked their magic. I saw only her positive qualities. She is an excellent writer, and a very imaginative person (as am I). At a distance, all these great qualities of hers shone through. She wrote regular updates while away on a blog, and I read each one with increasing interest.

I had realized that I may have let someone special get away, and I was determined to make good on a second chance when she returned a year later. I had written many songs the previous few years, and even one about longing for her return from abroad.

Once she returned, I asked her out. And from the outside, it seems as though we never looked back.

What really happened was this: From the moment she returned, the signs that this would be a very unfulfilling relationship were there. On our first date, we talked for hours. I bared my soul to her, and we talked of meaningful things. I asked her many questions (as I am wont to do), and could find nothing wrong with the answers, but I did notice that all this verbal processing was wearing on her (she is very introverted when it comes to her thoughts, and answers questions precisely and accurately. Great at analysis, but poor at back and forth interactions).

This would be, and continues to be, my main source of dissatisfaction in our relationship. Chemistry comes from dynamic and deep conversation. And although she has the ability to process things deeply, she cannot articulate in speech the way I can what she thinks about things.

Anyways, according to this personality test called "Myers Briggs", we were the near perfect match for one another. I an ENFP, she an INFJ. Not to burden any potential hearers with the details, but the point is that what I loved, when I said I loved her, was the ideological picture I had constructed in my mind, rather than the date-to-date reality of our stop-and-go interactions with one another.

The cracks showed almost immediately, and only were carefully papered over by such Idealization. After our first kiss goodnight, I found myself audibly saying, as if it were a Freudian slip, "This isn't going to last" (after she had closed the door). But then I put it out of my mind, returning to the strength of my momentum from a year of waiting in anticipation for the ideal woman to return (completely free of both the negative and the positive qualities of the woman who had crushed me the summer we met) and the strength of my unreal Ideal picture of who she was. Even when she clearly didn't feel like enough for me, unable to keep up with me, I would explain this away with my faith in God. I would say to myself, "No one human being can be all and everything to another human being without it emotionally and spiritually crushing both. God can be the inexhaustible source of our longing for love precisely because he is infinite".

When we made things official, that same night I read to her a passage from a book that ostensibly said the same thing- that she could not be my everything.

But it seemed like at every turn, I was having to buttress my dissatisfaction with her with prayer. I had pre-committed to seeing this relationship through because of my year of longing for her return, but at many milestone moments, I felt nothing but apathy. When I spent Halloween with her and a group of mutual friends, I was not attracted to her at all, and resisted holding her hand. The mutual friend noticed this, and commented indirectly on it by stating how he knew when he met his wife that she was "the one", when he couldn't imagine a future without her, and the thought of her would be in his mind even when she wasn't around.

I blamed my lack of feeling that day on a splitting headache (which I indeed did have), but I knew the real reason laying insidiously beneath. I knew I didn't feel this way about her. The thought of her never- never- made my heart sing. However, I am a very affectionate person, and showed her affection, even in moments of less-attraction.

I told her I was in love with her after just three months. She was shocked (she thinks about the future, I only think about the present and the past. I said it when I was feeling particularly good about her, and was consumed by my overvaluation of her many positive traits. But this feeling of attraction to her was brief and inconsistent. A month later, after my own feelings had gone up and down a hundred times, when I felt little for her, she then told me that she was in love with me.

I told her then that now that she had opened up her heart to me, I had a responsibility to care for that love.

To not break her heart.

By five months, we were talking marriage. We visited her parents, and they approved of the match. We visited her Grandmother, who also approved. There were elements of attraction.

However, while on the way back from visiting her grandmother, she broke down crying in the middle of a conversation between us. It was a very deep, very hard, very complicated conversation, and she was feeling inadequate. She said that she wasn't enough for me.

I responded by reassuring her that she was enough (I am good at lying, even to myself). There was an element of sincerity in the response that followed. I asked her to point me in the direction of someone I could find that was more intelligent than her (She was valedictorian of her university, and applying to med school). Where could I go to find someone that might be more capable of keeping up with me? Where?

But that was not the problem. She could keep up with me, but she couldn't keep the conversation going. Conversation would always grind to a halt because she would not have anything to add after a while, because she does not process verbally what is on her mind.

But all of these decisions I was making about continuing to date her were completely at odds with my intuition. I knew she wasn't right for me, and my body was already responding to the stress of maintaining the divide between thought and intuition.

On the drive home, the song lyrics "I don't love you, but I always will" played over the radio, and I wept inside. When she dropped me off, I went into my room and wept. The next day was Sunday, and I didn't have work until Monday. I wept through one day to the next, completely missing church.

I had conversations with friends to help me process, but I always found it impossible to fully express the doubt and dissatisfaction I was feeling. Two friends told me of their experiences breaking up with a woman who loved them more than they loved the women in return, and they told me I should be careful. One of my friends, I did reveal more of the truth to, but also I accented with him all the more sharply her good qualities, and the good conversations we had shared.

He told me to go for it.

So I did.

I asked her to marry me.

A month later, her mother nearly died of a rare condition. Any doubts that I was feeling about my decision vanished as I went into heroic help and comfort mode. I helped her process her fears and her emotions (something I am good at), and helped her get through some of the most difficult months of her life.

We kept planning the wedding as her mother recovered, but were running into road block after road block. Because my emotions toward her were so up and down, any criticism was very hard to take. She said some things that summer that completely deflated me, and I projected into the future what has come to pass- a one sided and loveless marriage leading to stagnation in me, and worried preoccupation in her, and a gulf of unknowing between us.

As the date approached, I became more and more emotionally distraught, even as I became more externally resigned to the task ahead. Nearly everything was planned, her mother had recovered, and I had moved to the apartment that would be our first home. We had a good time with both our families, and our families mutually liked our choice of life-mate.

But With one month to go, I had the worst breakdown of my life. I have never committed acts of self-harm before in my life, but that weekend, I did. First, She could tell that something was wrong. And so, I told her, in a veiled way. I began to cry, and asked her to write something for me. Please, write something (I wanted her to remind me of the image of her that had been shattered by tragedy and stress). I told her that I know that times had been stressful, but that I had been busy absorbing all her stress, and helping her deal with what was going on with her mother and family, but that I was feeling completely and utterly empty.

This confirmed her worst fears, and she began to cry. We did not speak for the entirety of that week, per her request. And she told me I should do something for myself. I had made the error of making her needs my whole world, and had in turn become a reflex of her emotions. I had stopped doing all the things I loved doing. All my mental energy was going toward maintaining my commitment to the relationship. I stopped playing the guitar, stopped writing, Stopped having conversations with friends, because I feared that doing any of these things would unlock the crushing weight of unprocessed emotions that were pressing down on me.

I had turned my intuition into a problem to be solved through enough tinkering, rather than following it. But this seemed to be as far as it would take me. "No More", my body seemed to be saying. "No More".

That night, I beat myself blue. I bruised my left arm, and my right side. I slapped myself repeatedly in the face and screamed into the pillow.

I then called a friend of mine who was to be in my wedding and who had recently been married. He had expressed similar doubts, in less dramatic fashion, to me in the months preceding his marriage.

I asked him if anything changed or if his fears had been confirmed. He said the were confirmed. His wife was not enough. But He said that his community provided for him a fullness of life that his wife never could. And so, even though she was not "enough", he still cared for her, as far as it went.

His testimony was enough to hold me to my promise. Maybe on the other side of the knot, things would be easier! I could get from my community what I needed more broadly. God, not she, could be the source of inspirations for new music!

I resigned myself to marriage, lowered my expectations, and steeled myself for the big day.

And you know what? Everything went well! I cried on our wedding day, surrounded by friends and family on every side. Our honeymoon was short, but good. And we attempted to build for ourselves a routine of prayer and work and exercise and education that would give us the best chance of maintaining our affection.

Then, after a month of marriage, I was returning from a meeting with a mentor of mine at my church, and I found myself in a conversation with the most amazing woman I had ever met. And she was single! And I was not. She kept up, and advanced a conversation for a full thirty minutes. I felt emotions unlooked for in that conversation that I had never- never- felt for my wife. Not even when I was longing for her to return from abroad.

When I realized what this meant - that I had met someone who I effortlessly loved ONE MONTH after marrying someone else - Wretched man that I am, I have no desire to be unfaithful, but I cannot get this other woman out of my head. We have only ever had chance conversations, usually at church functions. And I find myself rehearsing in my head could-have-beens. If only I had listened to my body, and bore the weight of unfulfilled expectations by canceling the wedding.

It would not have been as bad, I think, if I had met this woman even a YEAR after the wedding. But less than one month? So close to such a final decision, with no way to go back. No way for what has been done to be undone? No way to go back to singleness? No way to turn back time and wait for her? I know I can never be with that other woman. If I were to divorce my wife, I would have to leave behind the friends I have known here, including this new one, who is a friend of us both.

To divorce her would entail a complete shift in life perspective, and with my temperament, would likely lead nowhere good.

But once again, I have started hurting myself physically. I have bruised my ribs, and whenever the stress becomes too great, I press on the spot, invisible to the eye, but a source of enough pain to shock my mind away from the emotional pain of my decision.

My wife notices too, although she may be unable to put it into words. She has had dreams of watching me marry someone else while she watches from the crowd. She knows she can't be my everything, and so she encourages me to do other things. But I cannot shake the feeling that the root cause of my lack of motivation is my near constant feeling of regret.

But I have done all I can to continue to show her love and affection. Continue to kiss her. Engage with her in conversation. Sleep with her. Hold her close. But I do such things mechanically. With an empty heart. It's just that fully 80 percent of my mind is preoccupied with thoughts of regret, to the point that thinking about things as I used to feels like moving through mud in a dense fog in the forest.

All after merely five months. Five months.

Advice?

Last edited by Shaken; 19th March 2019 at 07:16 PM. Reason: Read through it, and found errors and ambiguities that needed specification.
Shaken is offline   Reply With Quote