I Am Married But Lonely
I am lonely in a marriage of 5 years. I have always been able to keep my spirits up and have mostly kept my temper under control. I even had friends in high school joke that I was so even keeled that one day I was just going to blow up from the pressure building inside. Others often describe me as a happy person, always smiling, but I am finding it harder and harder within my marriage to find that person that I've always been. I'm losing myself to negativity from comments that are constantly bombarding me, straight out of my husbands mouth, and now I'm feeling so lonely. He is supposed to be my husband not my critic, not my roommate. He is not abusive and he is not unfaithful and could NEVER be that I am sure, in fact he is very passive, not expressive, not attentive, and he views his negativity as a good trait and sometimes uses it as a "joke". I constantly ask him to stop being negative, and I constantly give him positive feedback and reassurance, and all that I'm left with is very basic conversations that trivialize everything that I do.
These are my thoughts as I'm trying to fall asleep tonight crying my eyes out: I sleep wierd, I don't get up at the right time, I don't have the right attitude in the morning, I'm a stay at home mom and that's not good enough, his lunch is always too hot or too cold, I clean up wrong, I clean too much, The house is a mess, the carpet that's falling apart doesn't need replaced, I let the kid's "destroy" the house, I can never make up my mind about dinner, what I want for dinner is not good, dinner is judged on a scale of one to ten because there's always a need for improvement, if I give his dinner a ten I must be lying, I'm sick all the time, I am too hard on the kids, I never go outside with him to help with his projects (which I do all the time), when I help him he's constantly talking about how I don't really want to be helping, I spend too much time working on my church work (6-9 hours a week), I spend too much time in the shower (10 minutes tops!), I'm wrong that the water in the bathroom smells musty, I didn't shave my legs, I stay up too late, and so on and so on.
It's wearing me thin and since the birth of our youngest one year ago, I haven't had the physical energy (I was sick for 6 months and am still healing) or mental energy (don't sleep much with baby hours) to deal with this negativity and lack of help in disciplining our children and he doesn't seem to think the house rules and chores apply to him. I feel like an evil mutant of the person I was a year and a half ago. I hate how I treat the kids. And this kind of interaction doesn't breed fondness and loving encounters from my perspective, but he expects that despite whatever happens I should still have sexual closeness to him or, in his perspective, I'm going to leave him, which I would never. On that note sexual encounters are rare and mostly for him, and the only day to day touching is him grabbing my butt, and either a very light goodnight kiss or a sloppy drooling kiss, and if by chance he puts his hand on my hand and squeezes it, if I let him know it feels nice he immediately stops. I am not the perfect wife either, but man I was trying my best and he wore me down to loneliness.
