So me and my husband were married recently after dating for about 5 years. Ya see when we first got together I showered him with affection and gave him alot. Condomless sex, constant gifts, I even baked alot of treats for him. But then I caught him emotionally cheating on me with one of his friends. He tried to explain that he didn’t know what emotionally cheating was and thought that the way he was acting was normal. Lets just say I wasn’t to happy with this excuse but he made it clear he would change and after we had a small break up and went to a counselor he was able to understand what he did wrong and spent alot of time apologizing and trying to make it up to me. But I made it clear alot of the stuff I did for him was gonna stop until I was comfortable enough to marry him. Well skip to a year ago we just got married and during our honey moon I felt that same spark of love I had for him back when. We started dating. I bought some morning after pills and told him to go wild on me. I went down on him for the first time and weeks. Throughout the year many of the things I did for him felt like we had just started dating again and on Christmas I bought him a ps5. He was extremely happy. But recently after our anniversary he pulled me to the side and told him he wasn’t really happy with me. He explained that he doesn’t know if he can stay married to me anymore because I spent so much time reminding him and punishing him for a mistake he didn’t fully understand until after the fact and that even after years of dating nothing he seemed to do made things right. He feels like simply marrying me shouldn’t have been the thing to lead me back to doing stuff I was already doing for him and that the love I’m giving him now feels more like the bare minimum and that he just feels like I was holding back for so long that now he feels even worse because he should’ve been good enough for this sooner. We both brought this up to our couples counselor and she suggested we spend some time apart. Personally I think I need more than just her opinion on this so if anyone has any advice I’d like to hear it loud and clear.
4 comments
I do not get this “I gave him a gift of condomless sex” thing. That seems nutty to me. Like, do you mean you wanted to have protected sex, but decided that you were willing to pay the price of an STD or pregnancy risk in order to give him a gift of more feeling in his penis?
That aside, it sounds like you oversold yourself to him. He expected, maybe reasonably, that you would continue to do all those things after you got married. So he’s disappointed and doesn’t love you enough without all of those gifts.
The bigger issue here is that you don’t seem to have gotten married because you genuinely love each other. It sounds like it was transactional and manipulative. It’s there some reason why you don’t think that your personality and caring could be enough for someone?
When a couple tries to put the relationship back together after infidelity, it is like trying to put a shattered glass vase back together; there will always be cracks and pieces missing. You may try to gloss over them but you’ll never forget what happened and that will make you always punish him just a little, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it. But he can’t take the constant subtle reminder that he’s a cheater and is still earning forgiveness (only you decide that, not him). He wants forgiveness now and is throwing a temper tantrum that he’s not getting it and now the resentment has been built by both of you and he wants out.
There’s lessons here. Being resentful has consequences, that’s what lead you here. You had a right to be hurt. You also have to be able to figure out how to move past things in a reasonable time frame after. If you can’t you gotta end things.
The other lesson is no one can live without their spine forever. He was miserable, and felt like he had no voice so he talked to someone who could hear him. In your hurt, you focused on your own hurt rather than what lead you there. So you “punished” him by withholding intimacy, when you should have broken up with him for violating your trust. Then he was even more miserable, because I would guess either he was continually reminded of it or anytime he tried to stand up for himself or have a voice once again it was brought up in addition to the “punishment”. So he’s been miserable this whole time, hoping he’d be happy when you are because he probably cares about you. Now that you are, he’s still miserable for the same reasons he was 5 years ago and realizes he will never be happy in this.
Both of these lessons stemmed from not being heard. Hurt held inside that long, is gonna be near impossible to get over. If you were allowed to be hurt for a few years and take it out, isn’t he doing the same? Best of luck in the future, I don’t think you are a bad person or wrong for feeling hurt when you did.
You doing everything, he’s doing nothing. End that finally, you never should have married him.