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Post by greatcoastal on Aug 13, 2021 19:52:43 GMT -5
Well, H still declines to accept that our marriage was sexless. According to him (still) we enjoyed an imaginative, frequent and robust physical relationship- which HE tells ME I absolutely loved every moment of. I replied “and what about after 2001?” I expect that it’s part denial, part ego preservation and just partly simple BS to save face. Whatever. If he has some validation to achieve via Tinder- get busy and have fun it changes nothing for me. I had a similar experience. After I told her I wanted a divorce my ex insisted we had sex every few weeks or months when the actual interval was years. And it's not surprising a refuser would hit Tinder or date in general. After all, they may not be opposed to sex, they might just be opposed to sex with you. From my distant and now bemused view I would wager my ex kicks up the dating up a notch in about a year when child support is gone and our youngest heads to college. A 'refuser' can have several reasons for dating after the divorce, many of them the wrong reasons. A few that come to mind: Dating to relieve loneliness. They crave closeness to someone. yet in reality they need a new person to control. Dating for revenge. The ex'es that want nothing better than to make your life miserable, let them live in their little fantasy that "they were never the problem" Dating because your ex has someone. They feel left behind, and the need to "catch up" . Got to keep up their false image of being the most 'likable' one who could never do anyone wrong ! A big mistake, that will lead them to more bad choices, affecting the children too. Dating for the money. Everything from a "sugar daddy" to a "provider", or a free meal, or entertainment, to a house to live in. How often it comes back to - the money. Fortunately I have zero contact with my ex, and want to keep it that way. What her manipulation does to my children is a whole nother story. For me, personally, I'd rather not have to think about it, as the healing continues.
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Post by worksforme2 on Aug 14, 2021 6:29:51 GMT -5
greatcoastal...all these reasons ring true to me over the coarse of my dating life. there are probably a couple more, but if these constitute the main reasons then I would have to come away thinking, it doesn't bode well for most singles.
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Post by jerri on Aug 16, 2021 2:41:30 GMT -5
So this morning I found out my wife was having an affair. I suspected it because she has been secretive with her phone lately and she ruined a “date night” on Saturday night by telling me repeatedly her feelings are platonic and that she isn’t “in love” with me, which is code for having an affair according to Google. She was also indifferent when I explained how painful her refusal to hold hands or allow any physical contact between us was in this context. So this morning she left for work and left her phone face down charging and boom, in comes a text from her paramour, a real loser of a guy (vs. me, professionally) with a 4 year old daughter. So all of this abuse from her that made me feel guilty for wanting physical intimacy and she’s getting it on the side. I certainly recognize my role in creating an environment where she has such little respect for me that these things are possible. Any true man with self respect would have left after being harshly rejected for months and told by their wife that they aren’t into me anymore. I wonder how many of the refused folks on here have spouses who are cheating on them. Keep in mind that this whole period I sat through couples’ counseling and did every non-sexual thing to improve the relationship that she asked of me. Then when I asked to see progress in this area she said she could not get over that hump. OF COURSE I’m not going to look as good as her affair partner; we’ve been married for 13 years. OF COURSE there are going to be butterflies with him that she does not have with me. I am 100% confident that the improvements in our communication, my own self confidence and quality time that I made would have made me more attractive IF she was in the relationship. But now I know I never had a chance because she was “in love” with a shiny new object. This is exceptionally disrespectful. Now both our lives are going to implode. Our young children will grow up in a broken home. We will each be living in small one bedroom apartments because that’s all we can afford. Moreover, after speaking with attorneys today, I found out I’m in a jurisdiction where alimony is a thing and her cheating does not move the needle. For normal folks like us, we are advised to mediate You just can't trust her and her judgement! What happens if you get sick later? I wouldn't want a selfish partner that might throw me away when I got ill! And of course it is easy to say because I am on the other side looking in. Ask for an emergency therapy session (alone) Apocrypha are you too busy at work?
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Post by Apocrypha on Aug 16, 2021 14:43:23 GMT -5
So this morning I found out my wife was having an affair. I suspected it because she has been secretive with her phone lately and she ruined a “date night” on Saturday night by telling me repeatedly her feelings are platonic and that she isn’t “in love” with me, which is code for having an affair according to Google. She was also indifferent when I explained how painful her refusal to hold hands or allow any physical contact between us was in this context. So this morning she left for work and left her phone face down charging and boom, in comes a text from her paramour, a real loser of a guy (vs. me, professionally) with a 4 year old daughter. So all of this abuse from her that made me feel guilty for wanting physical intimacy and she’s getting it on the side. I certainly recognize my role in creating an environment where she has such little respect for me that these things are possible. Any true man with self respect would have left after being harshly rejected for months and told by their wife that they aren’t into me anymore. I wonder how many of the refused folks on here have spouses who are cheating on them. Keep in mind that this whole period I sat through couples’ counseling and did every non-sexual thing to improve the relationship that she asked of me. Then when I asked to see progress in this area she said she could not get over that hump. OF COURSE I’m not going to look as good as her affair partner; we’ve been married for 13 years. OF COURSE there are going to be butterflies with him that she does not have with me. I am 100% confident that the improvements in our communication, my own self confidence and quality time that I made would have made me more attractive IF she was in the relationship. But now I know I never had a chance because she was “in love” with a shiny new object. This is exceptionally disrespectful. Now both our lives are going to implode. Our young children will grow up in a broken home. We will each be living in small one bedroom apartments because that’s all we can afford. Moreover, after speaking with attorneys today, I found out I’m in a jurisdiction where alimony is a thing and her cheating does not move the needle. For normal folks like us, we are advised to mediate You just can't trust her and her judgement! What happens if you get sick later? I wouldn't want a selfish partner that might throw me away when I got ill! And of course it is easy to say because I am on the other side looking in. Ask for an emergency therapy session (alone) Apocrypha are you too busy at work? Sorry, I've been away at work (which now has ended - bringing its own problems), and am taking a bit of vacation. optima, I'm sorry for this result. It's similar, if not identical to the situation I found myself in close to a decade ago now, before my own life blew up. It doesn't have to be as bad as is made out, and I'll share some of my experiences and things I wished I would have known. 1. As is the case with almost all sexless marriage situations here, the celibacy, the affairs, etc, is a symptom of a terminal disconnection with you, or with the state of being married to you. There is no point to her holding your hand, though this will not seem obvious except in hindsight. She checked out of that part of the relationship years ago, quite likely, whenever the sexless part began. She is less likely to change her mind and want amorous relations with you than she would a random store clerk who doesn't have the baggage. This will feel like a cosmic scale injustice to you, given how hard you've worked to stay in and show up. 2. You may be tempted to work it out, or to work out an "arrangement" in which the definition of what a marriage is is changed. Any open relationship is going to have trust issue at the centre. It also won't make her want or love you more. It also favours her - meaning even if she doesn't have a partner now, she will get one very easily. As she is in an affair, she will want that partner, and they will lie to make it happen. Therapy won't work if she's truly not invested in staying together. If it's just to "see if you should stay together", the therapy will simply be a new tableaux in which to enact the disconnection and to justify her leaving to a third party. 3. In my case, today, close to a decade after my then-wife did the same thing, we switched our goals to amicable and practical co-parenting. We live in a very very expensive city, where semi detached homes are over a million bucks each, and so neither could buy the other out. We've managed to co-parent ok and have mutual finances for now, which we are gradually unravelling, accelerated now that the kids are late teens and her inheritance is coming in soon. No rush at the moment, but it will come. I like to look at the family household as a non-profit enterprise we both are invested in as partners. She has an apartment up the street and is welcome in the marital home on her "days" with them. Our schedules and plans are built around who has the kids - with the intent to be elsewhere as much as possible when she's around the house with kids. We aren't exactly friends, but we are friendly. It took about a good year or more for me to lose my attraction to her entirely, once I accepted that I was done chasing. Now I see her as a normal person and not exactly as my romantic partner. 4. Take some time to mourn the future you thought you had, which is now absent. Eventually you will replace that future with a different version. It's ok that it isn't there yet. It will come in time if you let it. 5. Abandon thoughts of revenge if they exist. Find forgiveness and acceptance - it makes you more attractive to mates and also will help you feel better as you interact across the rest of your lives, especially at times like bdays and holidays. You want to be in as healthy a place as you can be so you can move forward. It helped me to imagine that if I didn't want to marry someone but did, and regretted it for a decade or more - that I too would probably not be the best person I could be in general and especially to the person I was "accountable to as my partner. You don't want to be posed as a problem to be overcome by your former wife and her partner. You don't want to lose leverage as father in the family. 6. Sit down and verbally share your intent and wish for an amicable co-parenting situation if you can. Say that out loud, so she can hear it. You might still need to be the bigger person in this. The stage you are in when separating is probably shock, but soon it will feel like you are squaring off for a figurative fistfight, with a gun on the table (that being the lawers) between you. What can each of you do to not only act in good faith but to demonstrate good faith to other, to reduce the chance of it turning into a bigger legal fight -taking a bad situation and making it worse. If you both commit to having two successful and happy parents in your child's life, that's not a bad result. 7. For whatever it is worth, it's likely she and her partner will break up now that she is single. She might even come back to you. That doesn't change anything about the underlying disconnection prior to the affair. You mentioned the fights you were getting into - it's very common for women who are in affairs to pick a lot of fierce and frivolous fights with their husbands. I know - it seems counter-intuitive. I recall my ex yelling at me for dirtying dishes for a fancy meal I cooked for her - and it turned out she was having an affair then.
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Post by jerri on Aug 24, 2021 13:50:25 GMT -5
Bump. Trying to get the "what app spam off the top of the list. We should not give them any encouragement since we don't have an active moderator here.
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Post by flyingsolo on Aug 28, 2021 11:16:03 GMT -5
Over six months of couples’ counseling I made every change she asked of me and our communication improved exponentially. Things felt good between us and restoration of physical intimacy was the last hurtle. Then, after six months sexless i said we needed progress in this area and I needed to see tangible steps to improve. Since then, my life has become a living hell and the situation has deteriorated markedly. Tonight, we went out for dinner on a date night I’ve been pushing for over several weeks. She refused to hold my hand when walking to the restaurant and, at first, said she was working on it but needed less pressure but then told me repeatedly over the course of dinner that I’m just a friend and she has no romantic feelings towards me and is not “in love” with me anymore. I think I made up my mind to go tonight. I cannot stand it anymore. Seven months SM. Where I have drawn the line is the complete physical avoidance and refusal to consider any touch, even hand holding. I’ve explained that it’s intolerable to be married to someone who won’t hold your hand. She’s said repeatedly that she wants a trial separation for her to figure things out (no talk of this until I began pressing for a restoration of physical intimacy) and if the heart grows fonder with distance. I said no: I’m not going to be someone’s option. She either works to improve within our relationship or we divorce and then it’s over. I’m not doing a “trial separation” for her to have sex with others and play at life without me to make sure it’s “comfortable “ for her before exiting. She also keeps telling me it’ll be amicable, we will be civil and I’ll do what’s right for our children which she presumes means that she keeps our house. I feel differently: if we are divorced, I do not care about her financially anymore and it is best for our sons to see me prevail financially not to cave to my wife’s selfish demands. Sorry to hear that optima. Run, do not walk, to a good divorce attorney to start getting your ducks in a row. It sounds like she's already pulled the parachute (and after just reading your updated post where you discovered her affair, I guess she has) and made up your mind for you if she wants a trial separation. You may get lucky and be able to mediate a divorce instead of it getting nasty, but don't count on it. Start putting your plan together now in case you need to find a place to live, arrange your finances, plan your legal strategy, etc. On a positive note, congratulations on the end of your sexless marriage. You will be so much happier in the long run!
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