Relationship The Only Person I Want Is My Wife, But Intimacy Has Gone

[LilacFaerie]

Hi catjudo
I fully agree that intamacy is not just sex, and that is not what i am looking for. I want to hold hands, cuddle, kiss, hug etc. I want to go on a date with her. I am not interested in just sex. I want a wife not a business partner who helps run the daily operations. I feel like I have given her all the tools to help herself and am very supportive but there is only so much I can do. (snip) Please dont make me out to be the bad guy!

Ohhh NPS.....I don't know if you're out there anymore, but I've just run across this thread b/c I'm looking for answers too to the very loss of intimacy that you describe. I would give anything to be LOOKED at with love by my spouse. Instead, all I see in his eyes is distance. For the first time in 13 years (he's only been diagnosed w/PTSD for a year), I had to ASK to be made love to, and the rest of the evening still went by uneventfully. It's killing me. I've never experienced a "desert" like this, and I cried the rest of the night in our (my) bedroom. He doesn't sleep there anymore. It seems each time I come to a "workable" place of acceptance in my heart, another hardship rears its ugly head.

I hope you've found some peace since you last posted, and if you have, and are still around, I would appreciate it if you'd share what it is you had to do to get that peace....

 

[ProudWife99]

\ hope you've found some peace since you last posted, and if you have, and are still around, I would appreciate it if you'd share what it is you had to do to get that peace....

I know you weren't necessarily speaking directly to me, but I have experienced the exact same things you are currently struggling with. About eight months ago we had reached a point where it felt like there was no love in my marriage. No intimacy in any sort. I felt like he couldn't even stand to look at me. I begged his counselor to help me figure this out and she simply told me "We have to stick this part out. This is the tough part. We cannot push him" So I didn't. I slept alone, I cried alone. I felt completely alone. As soon as I left him alone about it all together, he started wanting to hold my hand. He started wanting to be close and watch TV. HE started wanting to be near me and he started loving me the way I received love. We had to discuss what aspects I was missing, but he had to make the choice to do them. He did.

I know it doesn't always end this way, but with patience and more and more patience we got through it. I stopped bringing it up. I stopped being one more thing he had to worry about and started being one less thing he felt pressured by.

Stay strong and take care of you.

 

[LilacFaerie]

I stopped being one more thing he had to worry about and started being one less thing he felt pressured by.

Stay strong and take care of you.

Thank you so much for your reply.....this comment got my attention because I had just been in to see a counselor at a Vet Center yesterday, and when I told him about this, his question was "so do you feel like you're the one doing all the work, trying to hold this together, trying to let him know you'd like to be intimate with him?" And when I said yes, he said that I needed to stop being the one doing all the work and actually lay out some expectations of my husband and tell him what I needed and wanted. This is not to say my husband isn't in counseling himself; he is. But it's slow going. Since the war, I've got to be married to the most emotionally rigid man on earth - he's like a wall that other people smash themselves against.....so I didn't think my counselor's advice would work so much in my particular situation.

I don't want to be yet one more thing out there that is putting pressure on my husband either.....but I so LONG for a simple touch - like you said, holding hands or just sitting together on the couch. When I put my arms around him, I want reciprocation. It's beyond the sex at this point. I just want him to be close enough that I can feel the heat from his body, the beat of his heart......I see so many lonely days and nights ahead of me where all I do is cry - I hope and pray to God that my husband comes back to me, like you have been blessed with......I need all the encouragement I can get right now....thank you for taking the time to respond.

Hugs to you.....
LF

 

[ProudWife99]

I can imagine the job of a counselor trained in PTSD can be very difficult, as our sufferers respond so differently to different methods. I understand the longing, I understand the loneliness and I hate that you are currently experiencing it. We stress often on here to remember to take care of ourselves. As supporters, we are just as important. At the end of the day, we can only sacrifice the things we can live without. Sometimes we find there are things we cannot live without and we absolutely deserve them. It is a long, difficult road. I wish for peace for both of you, for strength, and for compassion.

 

[Pale Warrior]

Something worth thinking about is the idea of removing sex from the agenda to alow "safe" intimate contact. Setting limits from a very small begining, i.e. I want to hold your hand, but no further for now, allows each person to re acustom themselves to physical contact.

This has to be explicit and some people don't want to talk about it so it may not be possible.

Throughout our healing period I have used hand and foot massage to maintain close contact within safe boundaries, it works for us.

 

[LizardViolet]

My therapist had an observation: that sometimes when a partner pushes you away, it's because they need space and may not be able to ask for it in so many words. So her suggestion was the opposite of the Vet Center's counselor. Give them the space. Take the pressure off entirely. Back away a bit yourself, and let them close the distance between you when they are ready and able to.

...and I wonder what happened with NPS and his wife...

 

[LilacFaerie]

This is exactly what I did - I knew, by my husband's temperament, that going to him and outright ASKING for what I wanted wasn't going to do anything but put the spotlight on how "little" I felt I was getting, and hence, what a "failure" he was. I don't think he's a failure at all, but this is where his mind would've went.

Instead, I quit dropping the little hints, I got up and walked out of the room when a sexually-charged scene would come on a cable movie, and most obviously, I quit going to him for hugs and kisses in the morning before I went to work and at night before I went to bed.

It killed me, but I did it.

He noticed. Last Friday he came upstairs to bed and put an end to my 5 week wait.

He happened to have an appt with his counselor that afternoon, so maybe it was mentioned and the therapist told him to give a little before I became totally alienated from him - who knows? And I have no way of knowing if I will go through another dry spell like that....my guess is that I probably will. But nevertheless, I have started giving him the little kisses and hugs that I had withheld just to show him "thank you for what you did, it means a lot to me, i don't want to become distant from you". If things cool off again, I will again back off.

And I too hope that NPS and his wife are finding a way back to each other.

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