While change has happened at a glacial pace over the last 19 years, it has happened. For some inexplicable reason, change sped up in the past few years. I’ve mellowed, he’s mellowed, and our expectations of each other have mellowed. I think a lot of my contentedness can be attributed to calmer hormone levels too. I don’t long for intimacy like I used to. I used to want him to be my whole world, to be wrapped up in the wonders of love together, to have an unspoken running dialogue of looks, touch, emotional connectedness, and conversational chemistry. The gaping chasm left by that lack was more than I could handle when I was 30 or 35 or 40. At times, a year or two would go by without any physical intimacy. The number of times we’ve had physical intimacy probably isn’t more than the number of years I’ve been alive. It’s been heartbreaking. But something happened in me that I didn’t force or even seek: I now have fewer assumptions of what “we” should look like. Over the past few years, I’ve gone from ever hopeful that he would change to realistic that he probably won’t. At least not enough to ever be what I hoped we would be.
That realism made me bitterly resentful for longer than I’d like.
Then deeply sorrowful, which is heartbreaking for a born-happy person.
Then downright numb, which was almost worse than feeling. Then, somehow, content.
Today, while I miss the state of hopefulness I once lived in, which was much more lively and excited, I’m oddly even-keel about us. I have no idea why, except to guess that realism forces you to settle down and just live in whatever the moment provides. Humans are scarily malleable, and they scarily adjust to whatever their norm is. This has become my norm, and I have grown accustomed to it. Had his “condition” not gradually improved over the years, I wouldn’t sound so casual.
I used to live with an anxious, nagging, complaining, irritable jerk of a housemate who looked out for himself and his time. I used to cry hard several times a week on the floor next to our bed and reach out for comfort in the pages of the bible. When years of this finally forced me at a certain point to accept that we were probably never going to be compatible on a conversational, emotional, or intimate level, and that sexual relations would probably never happen much at all together, I got to a point in which envisioning divorce felt freeing. I never allowed the thought in the past, but the lack of relationship that we experienced for so many years finally pushed me over the edge. Right up to a place where I actually entertained the idea. Sadly, divorce actually sounded nice. It had always worried me that he might go early on in our marriage, and now the idea of calling it off from my end actually gave me a sense of relief.
I can’t exactly explain why, but perhaps allowing myself to consider the worst—and not follow through—was freeing as well for me. As much as it would be a relief to no longer expect loving exchanges with the one adult who could but refused, dismantling and dissolving us wasn’t worth it to me. As I pondered it all, our life was so much more. It was all the moments we had loved our children, all the moments they felt happy and secure, all their future moments that would be bolstered by the wholeness of the word family. We would always be in each other’s lives, so we might as well make the best of it in unity rather than feel forever heartsick over estrangement.
I didn’t think about divorce for long. I’m just not the type who feels good about that kind of thing. The thought passed and life went on. Thankfully when you have children, the events and distractions in a day or a week are enough to change your whole mindset, and the heaviness that plagued you just days before can be overtaken by positive feelings from good things in life that are unrelated to marriage.
Though it has been extremely challenging and pushed me to limits I never considered, today I live with a somewhat laid-back, gentle guy who never tells me what to do and whose worst trait is that he still talks through every movie and every car ride. Between that and the fact that he talks fairly loudly, I feel like I’m always asking him to either lower his voice or consider his audience. I don’t like doing it; I feel like it’s uncomfortably impolite to constantly ask another adult to be more aware of themselves and their setting, but he just doesn’t seem to be aware of some things. Unfortunately, his hearing is slightly worse than it used to be, so not only does he not hear me when he actually tries to—and he does try more now—I usually have to repeat everything I say. That doesn’t make me feel like chatting much, but at least he listens when I speak loudly and clearly. When it comes to me and the kids, we’re often conversing about everything under the sun and my husband may not listen at all until some word or phrase sparks his interest. Then he’ll want us to repeat everything all over again so he catches all the other parts. This is pretty common and gets quite old, but it’s better than what the past was like.
He continues to live by a routine every single day, but in between his activities he’s learned to ask me about my day and be more involved with all of us. He’s no longer the inflexible automaton that wouldn’t let anyone into his daily schedule and tried to control what everyone around him did the moment he entered the house. When he’s in the house now, he no longer walks around with palpable anxiety. I no longer walk on eggshells. Life is relatively easy breezy.
What’s more, he actually does things to help me, to support me, to carry some of my load. He used to clean things, tidy things, and keep things organized for the things’ sake, and for his anxiety’s sake. Now, he does things that will specifically help me. He thanks me for the littlest things. He notices me. He sees me. He offers to rub my back and is willing to put his time in my direction. He suggests we go for walks together, and jaunts to little coffee places.
What used to be a life completely chock-full of his anxiety and my frustration over it has gradually transformed into a relaxed, easy-going camaraderie. Whereas he used to say and do things in every single interaction that were difficult to deal with, now it’s on a much tinier scale. Perhaps once a month, if that, he’ll say something like the old days and it will trigger me to respond with intolerance. Then it’s immediately over before it even began. Triggers are funny things. Sometimes I get all haywire from little glimpses of our old life without even realizing what set me off until I have a moment to think it through. Sometimes I’m the harsh one in my intolerant response. Very rarely does my husband wrong me in word or action anymore. Very rarely. These days, he’s pretty quick to notice if he has, and quick to want to replace it with something kind instead.
Remember, even though this has only taken you an hour or two to read, the gradual changes in our marriage took almost two decades. And not all of them are ideal.
Today, I no longer burn with frustration or ache for affection. In one way the latter sounds dreadfully sad, as it communicates that I have accepted my lot in life: a marriage that lacks deeply-commu- nicated love. On the other hand, I have learned the hard way that humans can adapt. It’s finally freeing these days to feel content with life as it is rather than yearn for how it could be.
If my husband puts his hand on my shoulder as I’m falling asleep at night, I feel a sense of peace. I know there’s a pretty good chance I could be experiencing outward, soul-satisfying, throbbing love with someone in the world right now—heck, there are over eight billion people out there—but so far I continue to choose the unity of our family over my own romantic love experience.
One huge tool that took me a decade and a half to realize is that if I sleep naked, my husband and I will always have intimacy. I can’t believe it took me so long to figure out. I’ve slept in a shirt my whole life. So has he. We both get chilly if we don’t, so we never slept naked except for the extremely rare times that he tuned into my subtle advances. But if I crawl into bed with no clothes on, he’s game, usually immediately. Unfortunately, the lack of intimacy, chemistry, and connection for so long has made it so that I no longer crave skin time with him. I no longer want to give myself to the person who physically and emotionally evaded me for so many years. While I am loyal to him as family, my body is not his. It isn’t a conscious decision I made; it’s just plain the result of lacking union in so many ways over the years.
I was always very mindful about not wanting to develop my own disorders in dealing with my husband’s difficulties. I never wanted to turn to other things to work through what only time could do. I didn’t want bringing my sorrow to him to be the only moment he chose to comfort me, thereby causing me to seek out a pattern of sorrow comforted by love. I didn’t want to look at other guys. I didn’t want to become a closet eater when he eagle-eyed every grocery item and every morsel I ate. Though I ate healthfully, I didn’t want to rebel by eating junk when he wasn’t around. My mom turned to food when she and my dad lacked intimacy. She literally swallowed her sorrows down with food that tasted good, trying to replace her feelings. She was always up for love and he just wasn’t. I found my parents’ old Marriage Encounter journals from a weekend spent away when I was in high school, purging all my mom’s piles throughout the house to help her simplify life. Reading the journals, I realized that my parents had gone years, even decades, without intimacy. That sorrow contributed to a lifetime of yo-yo dieting on my mom’s part and a habit of avoiding the issue on my dad’s part. Other relatives turned to food, drugs, and alcohol to fill various voids, and I am forever grateful to them all for being given the gift of learning vicariously early on how I didn’t want those non-solutions and resulting habits for my life.
I remember thinking as a kid that the idea of my parents divorcing was the worst thing I could imagine. As a parent now, the worst thing I can imagine is dissolving our family and splitting time with our boys. I don’t want to miss a day of their lives, and my husband can’t fathom missing a day of triathloning in order to have them full-time. While I’m joking, there’s truth in it. I am lonely at certain times in my cycle, but it doesn’t hurt as much because I’m so used to it. In the past I always wondered at what point in the day he would reach out to me, cuddle me, spend time with me, lie down with me. Now, those thoughts don’t even enter my mind. I know what he can offer and what he can’t. I used to wonder which was worse: to pine achingly for love or to go without it for so long that the lack of it no longer hurt. Having grown accustomed to dysfunction is a strange realization.
There are two camps. One might say I’m a fool to accept a life without the deep emotional and physical love of a companion. The other might say I’m a fool to spend any more time vexing over what I don’t have since the rest of my life is quite wonderful.
If we didn’t have children, it would’ve been much easier to release my husband to the world long ago. Because his neglect hurt me so much, I wouldn’t have missed him but I would’ve felt like I had failed on my promise. I used to wish for his sake that he could feel deep love for someone the way I know is possible. I don’t know if he’s capable of wanting to love or be loved by a person that much, but random connections of chemistry change a person’s life, and I think everyone should have the chance to feel that fulfilling kind of depth in a loving relationship.
Ironically, I think my husband actually does love me the most he can. As removed as he has been in most of our years, I think he’s loved me in the only ways he knows how. Like I said earlier, I don’t think it would’ve mattered that much who he married; he probably would’ve been the same with anyone. He’s told me he thinks about me when he’s out riding. I think his way of loving me in the past was to come home from his triathlon and tell me all the little details of his day, even if he forgot to actually interact with me. I used to feel with great certainty early on in our marriage that if I had died at some point, it wouldn’t have fazed him much. These days, I think he’d feel a lot because of all we’ve experienced as a family together through the years. He may not miss me too terribly, but I think he’d miss having someone to talk to, and the dynamic of us four.
One of the ways my husband has always shown his care for me and the kids is in his provision for us. We’ve never lacked anything. But he is a different man in this area today. For the first many years he checked every penny spent and wouldn’t put my name on any account except the credit card. That very slowly shifted over time. For the past ten-plus years, I have rarely run any expenditures by him. Most of his trust issues gradually fizzled away. He knows I’m frugal, trusts my choices, and can guess that I won’t buy any big-ticket item without talking with him first. That’s how I’ve been from the start with him, but he just needed time to trust it. Interestingly, he consults me about his purchases. I don’t need him to, as I trust his judgment. He still manages the money, pays the bills, and does our taxes. But that’s perfectly fine with me. What’s more, several years ago the boys and I traveled to Africa without him to visit an orphanage. I’ve always had a thing for Africa, and he wanted me to experience one of my dreams even though it wasn’t a dream of his. He’s come a long way.
Neglect’s Toll on a Wife: Perfection’s Grip on My Husband’s Attention © 2023-2024 Lila Meadowbrook
