Give new husband time for you to adjust
Q . I just watched on You Tube about being in love with someone else while married.
My husband and I got married last year and even before the wedding I didn’t know if I wanted it. But I thought that since I loved him when we met, then I should love him again. But I feel like I don’t love him.
We have nothing in common. He’s into science, I’m into music. Almost everything he does gets on my nerves.
I don’t remember why I fell in love with him. I’ve also lost attraction for him and can’t stand to be intimate.
A. You state this information as if it’s happening to you, without you doing anything about it.
Yet your first sentence suggests that you may have feelings for someone else, which has turned you off your husband. If so, get realistic about what’s going on. The first year of marriage requires adjustment for both people, with stress and changes to handle.
If someone else is flattering you, listening to your concerns, etc., that person can become your escape from all you have to handle with a full-time partner.
Even if there’s no one else distracting you, some differences from your husband had to have been obvious when you first met. Why the reaction to this now?
Often, when “everything annoys” you about a person, something or someone else has you trying to distance yourself.
You may want to hear that there’s no hope for this marriage, but I don’t think you know that yet, since you’re apparently not even trying. Separation and divorce aren’t immediately happy solutions, even when there’s someone else waiting.
Talk to a therapist about you: what you wanted from marriage, what’s turned you off, what you’re willing or unwilling to do to try to make this work.
Talk to your husband once you can come clean about the real issues.
You may still want to end the marriage but at least you’ll know yourself better for the future and not choose someone else you later find too annoying.
Feels disrespected
Q. My best friend’s a successful professional, whose husband of 30 years has become verbally abusive to her.
Recently, she discovered that he’s been texting a younger woman “friend” and inviting her out for lunch. When confronted about the relationship, he said my friend’s trying to control his life. He became even more abusive.
It’s not his first episode of interest in younger women or of meeting secretly with them. My friend feels disrespected and demeaned. What advice do you have?
A. After 30 years, she’s owed truths, not defensiveness and abuse.
She needs to tell him so. He’s gotten away with it before, possibly because she’s had a rewarding life professionally and didn’t want to shake up her world.
Now, it’s a turning point. If she looks the other way, her next years may be spent feeling resentful and more demeaned for accepting his behaviour. However, “having lunch” doesn’t necessarily indicate a sexual affair. Some men (and women) just want/ enjoy the ego-boost of a younger person’s interest in them.
Still, she needs to confront her husband for truth, not put-downs.
One likely trigger for a direct response is for her to get legal advice and tell her husband what they both face if she decides she’s not accepting his verbal abuse or even his presence any more.
She needs counselling to feel strong and secure in herself before doing that.
Regarding …
Reader’s commentary regarding a friend’s concern over a young man and his drugaddicted father (Sept. 5):
“You were quick to stereotype and condemn persons living with substance use disorder.
“Willingness to judge this disease perpetuates the inherent stigma in our society.
“Relationships with persons living with substance abuse aren’t always destructive. They’re not always thieves. Contact with a drug-seller doesn’t always create new addicts.
“A son’s love and concern, plus a meaningful house project, might be motivation for this man to seek assistance and help his son create a new space for himself.”
Ellie: Generalizations and stigma are unfair. I regret that I didn’t include details told me about his father having already taken advantage of his troubled son.
I chose to give advice that protects the son’s already deflated self-esteem. But I agree that compassion must be society’s response (plus treatment) to drug addiction, especially considering the current crisis of criminally-tampered drugs causing deaths.