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Sorry if this is already posted somewhere else, I couldn’t find it again.
My husband and I have been married 21 1/2 years. Our daughter just turned 21 and is away at college.
When she was born we agreed to do attachment parenting, meaning staying with her until she fell asleep instead of letting her cry. This became a problem because she was not a good sleeper. Sometimes I would fall asleep with her. If not, I was busy with dishes, etc., because he was too tired to help. He often worked 60 hours a week or more. Anyway, he assumed that because I wasn’t watching tv with him, that I didn’t care about him and had used him to have a child. I just found this out from him a couple of years ago. I told him I couldn’t believe he thought this and that it was very hurtful. At the time my mother in law told me it looked like I didn’t care when I’d fall asleep and not come back downstairs, but I said “but I do!” and tried to prove it. I got a watch with a vibrating alarm so it wouldn’t wake our daughter, and so if I did fall asleep, it would wake me without waking the baby, and I’d go back downstairs. And he would ignore me. He would just scowl at the tv and not say anything, as he was fixated on his gory, violent movies, which I hate. I know I’m guilty of having assumed things, too - to me he seemed unapproachable, and I didn’t want to watch what he was watching, so I’d go check my email or something. In retrospect, I should have said, “Hi. Can we watch something else?” So, again a couple of years ago, he told me that he felt even more hurt, because he felt that I hadn’t tried hard enough to get him out of his funk. I asked him how I was supposed to know that. There were times when he did communicate, and say that it seemed like I spent 99.9% of my time with our daughter, (taking care of a baby with no help is time consuming) and that after 8:00pm he didn’t have a wife. I said, “I’ll come back down,” and he would ignore me. And instead of telling me that it seemed to him that I felt like being there was a chore, he decided to start picking on me. For the better part of 15 years he criticized, insulted, belittled, or ignored me. Unfortunately I would react to whatever negative thing he was saying, instead of asking him why he was being so mean to me, and we would just end up bickering. I felt like he punished me for years, based on his assumption about what he thought I had done. We almost split up a couple of times, the last time, two years ago, being the closest we’ve come to divorcing. The next morning, after discussing divorce, he said, “This is hard! I’d miss you!” I said I’d miss him, too, mostly because I felt like that was what I should say. He went upstairs and I texted him, asking him if he wanted to see how it goes for a while. So, we patched things up, and since then he has been like the nice, sweet guy I used to know. He feels like everything is ok now, and it is better, and he has a lot of good qualities and we have a lot in common, but I’m having a hard time resurrecting my loving feelings for him. I wouldn’t expect it to be like the early, passionate days, but I’m having trouble feeling romantic love for him. I say I love him, and I’m trying to feel it again, but it’s more like a fondness. I feel like I’m supposed to forgive and forget and move on, and not hold onto past resentments, but it’s hard to just instantly change how I feel. Our daughter is now studying abroad and we are going to visit her in a few months, and I don’t want things to be awkward then. So I feel like I’m sort of pretending, and holding my feelings in, trying not to rock the boat, at least for the next few months. I feel guilty for the way I feel, or don’t feel, alternating with anger from the past. Having trouble moving forward and not sure what to do.
