Three Resentments
I'm titling it that optimistically. I want to get through three tonight and I want to get through them more succinctly this time.
So, Resentment the Second:
1985. We were camping in the mountains with our daughter, aged 2 1/2 at the time. I had gone off on a hike of my own and discovered an astounding spot where a rough-hewn wooden footbridge crossed a stream at a point where there was a clear emerald pool, a waterfall, great big mossy boulders and a grove of massive ancient Giant Sequoias. A place you'd go half way around the world for if you saw it in a picture. I wanted my wife to see it and I wanted to swim in the pool which I didn't feel entirely comfortable doing without anybody there, as the rocks around it were steep and slippery. She's not big on hiking--she likes to hang out in camp, cook dinner, putter around making things nice, which makes for very good division of labor on camping trips--but on our last day I convinced her to take the very easy, almost level one mile stroll down to the spot. She got into a worse and worse mood as we went and when we got to this God's-own-handiwork place she crossed her arms and said she had no idea what she was going to do down here while I went swimming and why did I drag her to this ugly boring place. So I took a quick swim and we walked back and had a fight in the car that was so bad--I trying to get her to cop to how unreasonable and intransigent she was being--that our daughter started crying, hard, and we had to pull over and comfort her. To this day I don't know quite what brought it on, except she REALLY doesn't like being cornered into doing stuff she doesn't want to do, and somehow or other I had done that. Actually now, 21 years later, this no longer makes he steam with rage, thank God, but for a very long time it did.
Resentment the Third:
Oh what the hell, let's jump to a big and complicated one. In the first years of our relationship, from when we first slept together on Christmas night '73 until around the time our first kid was born, in '82, we had an extremely plentiful and easygoing sex life. We would basically just have sex all the time. I remember some adult she was working with while we were living together in summer '74 was bragging how she and her boyfriend had sex three times a week and my then-girlfriend now-wife and I felt pretty smug and happy hearing that because we were doing it four times a day pretty much every day, and sometimes in semi-public places if the mood took us. This eased off some but for a long time it never occured to me that there could be such a thing as wanting sex with her and not freely and happily having it. I slept with a few other women during this time but the relationships were brief so I never got a chance to see that it could be otherwise. We were using IUD as contraceptive at the time and in 1980 there was all the talk about the dangers of IUD's and her attitude was oh forget it, the IUD is fine, but I was thinking ahead to having children with this woman (there was the possibility of infertility) and I talked her into removing it and switching to the diaphragm. Our sex life never entirely recovered, except briefly during the first pregnancy, when the fear of pregnancy obviously wasn't an issue, and then it got really bad for a long while and the resentment here is this: as I became increasingly unhappy with her decreasing sex drive, or distaste for condoms and diaphragms, or whatever it was, she would never talk about it, she would never see it as a problem we were having: I was alone with it. I tried to open the discussion many times but she wouldn't talk about it or what we could do about it. We went to therapy for it twice (read: I dragged her to therapy for it twice) and both times she walked out the of therapy early on, once actually walking out right in the middle of a session we were having. I resent that she made it my problem and not ours. I would date this resentment to 1985 when she walked out of the first therapy and 2001 when she walked out of the second.
Resentment the Fourth:
Maybe this is part of Resentment the Third but I'll break it out separately anyway: Even now, when there is warmth and fluidity back in our physical relationship, many of the things I like to do most sexually I almost never get to do. She rarely like her breasts touched. She won't let me go down on her. Basically foreplay consists of back rubs and kisses on the neck, which she claims to be entirely satisfied with, but she doesn't like to be kissed on the lips in bed--okay in the shower, or hanging out in the kitchen, but in bed she feels smothered. Many a therapist I have brought this up with, including one we saw together, immediately asked whether she had been sexually abused--common cause of that distaste for direct stimulation. Well, depends who you ask. When she was age 10-12 her brother, six years older, used to con her/bamboozle her/bribe her/wheelde her her into giving him hand jobs. If you ask me, that's abuse. If you ask her, it's perfectly normal between siblings. (If anybody wants to weigh in on this, by all means I'd love to hear it!) Whatever the reason for her reluctance to be touched directly in a sexual way except in the act of actual intercourse, she won't deal with it, and I'm left having to build circuits of satisfaction out of the contact we do have. The big twist on this is that occasionally she will suddenly REALLY want her breasts touched--we're talking once in a year and half--and that used to be an amazingly wonderful thing for me but now there's so much pressure around it--this is it! I better enjoy it!--that the sexual energy starts to run backward instead of forward and I'm actually almost happier in the lower-key norm. To sum up, the resentment is: I'm left alone with this, it's my problem, not ours.
As I write all this I'm eager to jump to column four, where I lay out my part in all this, and focus on my own faults, but I'll do this the way my sponsor tells me and do the whole second column before I move on.
So, Resentment the Second:
1985. We were camping in the mountains with our daughter, aged 2 1/2 at the time. I had gone off on a hike of my own and discovered an astounding spot where a rough-hewn wooden footbridge crossed a stream at a point where there was a clear emerald pool, a waterfall, great big mossy boulders and a grove of massive ancient Giant Sequoias. A place you'd go half way around the world for if you saw it in a picture. I wanted my wife to see it and I wanted to swim in the pool which I didn't feel entirely comfortable doing without anybody there, as the rocks around it were steep and slippery. She's not big on hiking--she likes to hang out in camp, cook dinner, putter around making things nice, which makes for very good division of labor on camping trips--but on our last day I convinced her to take the very easy, almost level one mile stroll down to the spot. She got into a worse and worse mood as we went and when we got to this God's-own-handiwork place she crossed her arms and said she had no idea what she was going to do down here while I went swimming and why did I drag her to this ugly boring place. So I took a quick swim and we walked back and had a fight in the car that was so bad--I trying to get her to cop to how unreasonable and intransigent she was being--that our daughter started crying, hard, and we had to pull over and comfort her. To this day I don't know quite what brought it on, except she REALLY doesn't like being cornered into doing stuff she doesn't want to do, and somehow or other I had done that. Actually now, 21 years later, this no longer makes he steam with rage, thank God, but for a very long time it did.
Resentment the Third:
Oh what the hell, let's jump to a big and complicated one. In the first years of our relationship, from when we first slept together on Christmas night '73 until around the time our first kid was born, in '82, we had an extremely plentiful and easygoing sex life. We would basically just have sex all the time. I remember some adult she was working with while we were living together in summer '74 was bragging how she and her boyfriend had sex three times a week and my then-girlfriend now-wife and I felt pretty smug and happy hearing that because we were doing it four times a day pretty much every day, and sometimes in semi-public places if the mood took us. This eased off some but for a long time it never occured to me that there could be such a thing as wanting sex with her and not freely and happily having it. I slept with a few other women during this time but the relationships were brief so I never got a chance to see that it could be otherwise. We were using IUD as contraceptive at the time and in 1980 there was all the talk about the dangers of IUD's and her attitude was oh forget it, the IUD is fine, but I was thinking ahead to having children with this woman (there was the possibility of infertility) and I talked her into removing it and switching to the diaphragm. Our sex life never entirely recovered, except briefly during the first pregnancy, when the fear of pregnancy obviously wasn't an issue, and then it got really bad for a long while and the resentment here is this: as I became increasingly unhappy with her decreasing sex drive, or distaste for condoms and diaphragms, or whatever it was, she would never talk about it, she would never see it as a problem we were having: I was alone with it. I tried to open the discussion many times but she wouldn't talk about it or what we could do about it. We went to therapy for it twice (read: I dragged her to therapy for it twice) and both times she walked out the of therapy early on, once actually walking out right in the middle of a session we were having. I resent that she made it my problem and not ours. I would date this resentment to 1985 when she walked out of the first therapy and 2001 when she walked out of the second.
Resentment the Fourth:
Maybe this is part of Resentment the Third but I'll break it out separately anyway: Even now, when there is warmth and fluidity back in our physical relationship, many of the things I like to do most sexually I almost never get to do. She rarely like her breasts touched. She won't let me go down on her. Basically foreplay consists of back rubs and kisses on the neck, which she claims to be entirely satisfied with, but she doesn't like to be kissed on the lips in bed--okay in the shower, or hanging out in the kitchen, but in bed she feels smothered. Many a therapist I have brought this up with, including one we saw together, immediately asked whether she had been sexually abused--common cause of that distaste for direct stimulation. Well, depends who you ask. When she was age 10-12 her brother, six years older, used to con her/bamboozle her/bribe her/wheelde her her into giving him hand jobs. If you ask me, that's abuse. If you ask her, it's perfectly normal between siblings. (If anybody wants to weigh in on this, by all means I'd love to hear it!) Whatever the reason for her reluctance to be touched directly in a sexual way except in the act of actual intercourse, she won't deal with it, and I'm left having to build circuits of satisfaction out of the contact we do have. The big twist on this is that occasionally she will suddenly REALLY want her breasts touched--we're talking once in a year and half--and that used to be an amazingly wonderful thing for me but now there's so much pressure around it--this is it! I better enjoy it!--that the sexual energy starts to run backward instead of forward and I'm actually almost happier in the lower-key norm. To sum up, the resentment is: I'm left alone with this, it's my problem, not ours.
As I write all this I'm eager to jump to column four, where I lay out my part in all this, and focus on my own faults, but I'll do this the way my sponsor tells me and do the whole second column before I move on.
posted by Tom at 9:13 PM
5 Comments:
Hi Tom,
Two quick comments:
1) You are right in doing it in the order your sponsor recommends. Don't worry, we in your audience can wait to hear "your part" in the resentments when it is time.
2) My strong opinion is that your wife was sexually abused and that has probably had a profound effect on her. I have a good friend who comes from a family where abuse took place. She was not even the one abused. She is a very strong person but continues to work through issues that childhood experience caused.
Thanks for your honesty and for sharing.
Flip
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Tom
You may indeed be doing this in the recommended manner, I wouldn't know - but you do seem exceeding prone to bearing grudges which should have been long forgiven and forgotten.
Quantas--
You're absolutely right--which is the point of the whole process--to work the resentments through and get rid of them for good.
I would disagree with quantas, in that I think it's very common for strong resentments to fester and grow just below the sight-line of a relationship. Blogging is a great way not only to vent but to reach some sort of closure, because so often all we really need is to know that our position is both normal and justified, even if we're in the wrong.
The resentment over your sex life with your wife is the kind of thing that some men cheat over. I myself have never been able to bring myself to cheat again, especially after it ended things so very badly with Rod. However, I completely understand the impulse, and I can't really judge anyone who yeilds to it.
You've got the makings of a great blog here.
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