I Don't Trust My Feelings Anymore

[tronprogram]

Thanksgiving was tough yesterday.

 

Since I've left my pregnant wife two months ago, I was almost positive that I'd be spending the holidays alone as no one would want me around. However, the day greatly resembled a typical Thanksgiving in the end. I went home and went out for lunch with my parents, we picked up my wife/SBTX so she could visit with us, and I even drove to my wife's family to drop her back off. All the pieces of a normal holiday were there, but it wasn't a normal holiday. I was mostly thankful for this. However after I dropped my wife off, I drove an hour and a half back to my apartment and the whole time it felt surreal that it was a holiday and I was leaving my family behind. It was a pretty lonely feeling.

 

What got me here was back in May, my wife suggested an open relationship because she thought I'd checked out of the marriage. I hadn't, but I eventually felt I needed the OR right as she chickened out of it. Things spiraled out from there.

 

I wound up having two girlfriends over the course of six months and felt more attraction for them than I ever had for my wife, even when we were dating. It was pretty magical both times. I asked my wife for the separation because I thought this STRONGLY indicated that my heart had some serious issues and it wasn't really fair to drag her through this, even if she was pregnant.

 

What's made the post-separation loneliness easier up until Wednesday of this week was that I had a girlfriend. I loved her very much and I loved her in a way that I'd never loved my wife. The g/f and I had been pretty interested in having a life together until the circumstances (mainly on her end) got too great for her and stifled the romance for her. It's looked like this would happen for a week or two, so I've had brushes with this loneliness feeling already. Since Wednesday, it's looking like this breakup is going to hold and while the shock isn't quite there, I'm re-evaluating the separation.

 

To thicken the plot things, my SBTX had to spend the night in my apartment Tuesday night this week and we wound up reconnecting a little. Not to the point that we want to blindly get back together immediately, but it was nice just for that evening and it softened things up a little. Between that and Thanksgiving, I'm starting to wish I could have my family back and be happy with what I had instead of chasing something I need but could live without. Before the open relationship, I tried not to look at other girls and I always tried to appreciate how simple and drama-free our life was. It wasn't perfect, but I found ways to be happy despite that.

 

Once I was in the OR mentality, I started seeing how unhappy I was and felt like I didn't need to be so reserved about it anymore. I could get what I needed without losing my marriage. Now that I have neither, I'm not sure what to do or where to go.

 

Right now I'm torn between desperately wanting my old life back--especially for my unborn daughter--but also wanting a better life for myself. I wish I could make my old life work the way I need it to work. Does this 'new life' that I want even exist or is it a fantasy?

Edited November 27, 2015 by tronprogram

[oldshirt]

it's mostly fantasy brought on by brain chemicals.

 

 

 

 

Let's back up little bit and have a little physiology and psychology lesion.

 

 

When we connect sexually with a new person and have a strong initial attraction and hit it off sexually with them, we experience a "rush." that rush is dopamine in the brain that makes us feel alive and excited and elevated and invigorated etc etc. It really is like a hit of crack or something and it can in fact be quite addictive for some people.

 

 

As relationship go on into long term relationships, that excitement 'rush' die down significantly. If the two people get along well and enjoy each other, the R can go on but that rush and that on-top-of-the-world feeling eventually fades.

 

 

Now where it gets dicey is if we get it on with someone else and experience that 'rush' with them. Our mind plays tricks on us. Instead of simply rationally telling us that we experienced a rush of brain chemistry and that we really love our long term partner, our brain makes us feel that we are now "in love" with this other person and it makes us 'rewrite history' with our long term partner and our brain suddenly starts telling us that we never really were in love with them and that we always had problems with them and that we should get away from them so we can be with the new partner.

 

 

Our subconscious also makes us find a million faults with our old partner and makes us irritable and disrespectful and hypercritical of them.

 

 

It's an evolutionary process programed way deep into our DNA that makes us bond and mate with one person, have an offspring or two and stay with them just long enough to ensure the survival of the offspring, then separate from that mate to move on to mate with someone else to spread our genes around further to diversify the gene pool.

 

 

that mating strategy may have worked fine for primitive hominids on the African Plains around the dawn of man, but it wreaks havoc now in modern society.

[oldshirt]

where I am going with this is there is no way your wife can compete when you are getting it on with other chicks and getting the rush from them with no other responsibilities and then coming home to pregnant wife that's puking every morning and has swollen feet that she wants you to rub and is riding your a$$ every day about getting the house all fixed up and the nursery ready for the baby and bugging you every 15 minutes if you've paid the electric and heat bills yet.

 

 

It's likely that you really don't dislike your wife or that she is wrong for you. It's just your brain is under the influence of feel-good horny chemicals for the other chicks and so you aren't thinking straight.

 

 

This is what we call the "affair fog" and it truly is like an intoxicated state where your judgement and your perceptions and your feelings and such are all out of wack with reality. It's just like drug addict or alcoholic is unable to think straight, use good judgement etc when he is under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

[oldshirt]

the treatment is really like any other drug/alcoholic, you have to dry out and then let your brain recover and reboot it's own chemistry.

 

 

Only then can you see the reality of how things really are and make rational decisions based on the facts and not how some new chick in your bed is making you feel.

[tronprogram]

I don't believe this is "affair fog" because when my wife suggested the OR, we weren't pregnant. In fact, I was already pretty involved with the first girlfriend when my wife and I found out we were pregnant.

 

Even before the OR, I'd struggled with wanting to go have sex with other women and fantasized what my life would be like with someone else. Two years after we got married, I had a pretty intense crisis. It started when my wife wanted to play the game Second Life because she'd seen it on The Office. I didn't want to play it, but I eventually caved. I discovered the adult portions of the game and started chatting up other women and before I knew it, I was swapping naked pics with them. My wife didn't really get upset, but she didn't like it. So I quit it without much fuss. Then a few weeks later, I really struggled with the question, "Why did I marry this woman?" And I never really answered it. I just sort of felt like I was comfortable and familiar with her and that was good enough. We were pretty involved in church then, so divorce didn't even enter my thinking. I basically just resolved to soldier on and be happy with the comfort and familiarity I had with her.

 

That was fine until she brought up the OR and, again, it was something she initiated. Since I thought it was okay to do something I'd only fantasized about, I jumped at the chance to go out with other women. We said we'd do it around noon on a Sunday and I think by 4:00, I'd gone to the bathroom at my parents' house (where we were headed when we discussed the OR) to set up an OkCupid account. From then on, I was glued to the site, hoping to find a new play partner.

 

This reaction kind of took all of us by surprise. My wife thought I'd been waiting to dump her all this time, but I just felt like I had this really intense desire to go out with other women. I hadn't really associated that with my marriage other than it being the reason I couldn't go out with them. At the time, several people thought maybe I wasn't happy in the marriage, but I couldn't really point to anything that was making me consciously want to leave. There were things I really didn't like (like my wife intensely rejecting me for sex sometimes), but I just lived with them.

 

As time wore on and my wife wanted to close the relationship when I wanted to keep it open, I started trying to figure out why I needed the open relationship so badly if I was happy. I tried reading several articles about it and, at first, I just felt like maybe I was wired to be non-monogamous. That certainly made sense because I was doing just fine having a girlfriend and being married. The new energy I got from the girlfriend was something I could convert into my marriage and it was a pretty magical time. I felt like it had me looking at my marriage in a new light and putting new effort and energy into it. The only thing wrong with it was that my wife felt like it was coming at too great a cost: our exclusivity. So I gave up the girlfriend and tried to get my wife to figure out some help me figure out some alternative here, but she'd just avoid it half the time and tell me what she didn't want me to do.

 

Here's the thing. I don't feel like I ever 'crushed' on my wife when we were dating. I met her on a dating site and got her to meet me on a Sunday afternoon because nobody else was available. From there, I just sorta took a liking to her, but it wasn't in the same way that I'd liked other girls. It was more subdued and calm, rather than hot and passionate. However, I really liked her friendship and I found some sexual attraction there. It just never added up to passion. With these two girlfriends I've had in the last few months, there was passion both times.

 

In my marriage, I always felt like it was a struggle to be motivated to do the things that I should be doing. Saying I love you, taking responsibility for things, dreaming about our future, being thoughtful. When I was with these other girls, that stuff felt like it was very free-flowing. I couldn't think of something to buy the person I'd known the last 7 years for her birthday, but I immediately came up with something for the person I'd known two months.

 

This is what I'm trying to understand. It seems like there's more to it than I just got bored with my marriage unless I started out bored.

[Hammie]

You just spelled it all out right there. You didnt love your wife. The marriage has been a make do situation for you. How she feels about you is another matter entirely. I think she discussed open relationship with you as a way to saving what you had. She never intended to go through with it, but thought it would patch up your apparent dis-satisfaction with her in the relationship.

 

I wonder if your version of passion is just great sex. Passion is a lot more deeper emotion than physical satisfaction, and theres the real issue that I think you seem to be skirting around.

 

From everything you have said here and the previous thread you started, I dont see you have any commitment in your heart to this woman. theres definately not the sort of unconditional love non breakup partners have for their spouse, and so I would guess that you entered into that relationship under false pretenses and just discovered for yourself that you ARE capible of feeling emotional about another person.

 

Its like you are trying to have your cake and eat it tho. you wont commit to the relationship and wont commit to ending it. Only now are you finding out that perhaps you had feelings for her once the damage is done.

 

Im not trying to poke holes in you, but you seem to be skipping from one explanation about your maritial problems to another. Why did you wife agressively reject having sex with you? did she explain that? for all you know she is unhappy with your non commitment and is afraid of losing you.

 

Its a tough situation and the only thing you can do is put your cards on the table and be honest with yourself as much as with your wife about where you go from here. I will say that my gut instinct is that if you cannot commit to a marriage to one woman, dont be in one. its cruel to string someone along. The problem is that there are others involved in this that have as much to lose as you do, but you only seem to be interested in your own gains and losses. maybe you need to look at this from someone elses point of view. Start with the Children and work outwards from there.

 

Sorry, I cant be much help here, but you dug your own grave in this.

[tronprogram]

You just spelled it all out right there. You didnt love your wife. The marriage has been a make do situation for you. How she feels about you is another matter entirely. I think she discussed open relationship with you as a way to saving what you had. She never intended to go through with it, but thought it would patch up your apparent dis-satisfaction with her in the relationship.

 

Yes, this is true. She thought it would show her where I was at. I guess it might have.

 

I wonder if your version of passion is just great sex. Passion is a lot more deeper emotion than physical satisfaction, and theres the real issue that I think you seem to be skirting around.

 

No, I've felt some pretty decent intellectual connections to these other girls too. The first girl was much more of a nerd like me and the second girl was more creative/artistic like me. The second girl was an intellectual smorgasbord for me because we just taught each other so much from our drastically different backgrounds. Hell, we barely talked about sex for all that stuff. My wife and I didn't really have that. I mean we had our shows, our movies, our favorite restaurants, our favorite habits together. Secretly, I was kinda frustrated that she could never remember half the stuff I told her about movies and didn't seem interested in it on her own. Not that expected her to be, though. I also love discussing really artsy movies and trying to decode/decipher them, but my wife hated that. The second girlfriend enjoyed it as much as I did. We watched Lars von Trier's Antichrist and really analyzed it for a good while. That was very satisfying to me. Probably as much as the sex we had on our first date.

 

I'm actually having to remove sex from this equation because I've since had sex with my SBTX and she's been much more game than she had been in the past. However, I'm still trying to figure out the reason for the change and determine if this will be a permanent thing or just temporary once things were to get back to normal.

 

From everything you have said here and the previous thread you started, I dont see you have any commitment in your heart to this woman. theres definately not the sort of unconditional love non breakup partners have for their spouse, and so I would guess that you entered into that relationship under false pretenses and just discovered for yourself that you ARE capible of feeling emotional about another person.

 

Yes. With the second girlfriend, when we'd hit some difficulty, I'd be much more willing to talk it out and fix it. Not that I really didn't do that with my wife. I just wasn't as gung-ho about it and I'm not sure that I was the one to take the initiative on starting that.

 

Its like you are trying to have your cake and eat it tho. you wont commit to the relationship and wont commit to ending it. Only now are you finding out that perhaps you had feelings for her once the damage is done.

 

Well, I've always had feelings for her. I just haven't been sure they're the right ones.

 

Im not trying to poke holes in you, but you seem to be skipping from one explanation about your maritial problems to another. Why did you wife agressively reject having sex with you? did she explain that? for all you know she is unhappy with your non commitment and is afraid of losing you.

 

Our sex life was pretty good around the time of the OR. It was vanilla and I wanted more, but I lived with it. A lot of times, though, I'd wake her up in the middle of the night to fool around, but she'd get REALLY pissed and slap my hands away if I didn't stop. I wasn't trying to be that aggressive with her, but I felt like she really overreacted and it hurt my feelings. On top of that, she also criticized a lot of what I did too in terms of kissing, breathing while kissing, etc. Minutiae.

 

Overall, I just felt like she'd always been pretty reserved sexually and whenever I tried talking about this stuff with her, she just wouldn't have anything to say about it. I'd try to get her to open up about new things she'd maybe want to try and she wouldn't have anything.

 

Its a tough situation and the only thing you can do is put your cards on the table and be honest with yourself as much as with your wife about where you go from here. I will say that my gut instinct is that if you cannot commit to a marriage to one woman, dont be in one. its cruel to string someone along. The problem is that there are others involved in this that have as much to lose as you do, but you only seem to be interested in your own gains and losses. maybe you need to look at this from someone elses point of view. Start with the Children and work outwards from there.

 

We've been separated for 2.5 months because I didn't want to string her along. However, between breaking up with the second girlfriend and the holidays, it's got me giving the separation another look because I'm lonely. I probably deserve to be, but I'm just trying to figure out if there's enough in my marriage to satisfy me for the rest of my life or not.

 

What's been drawing me back to my marriage is just the familiarity. It's not perfect, there are ways I'm disappointed by it, but there's a lot of good to it. My wife and I have always gotten along pretty well, we're really good friends, we act like adults most of the time, the sex is good, and everyday life is pretty decent with her. For the most part, we don't really fight over much. It's hard to let go of her because she's family and we have a bit of history together after seven years/married six. We're both pretty close to each others' families and we're just ingrained in each others' lives. When we first separated, it was easy for me to just say, "Well, unfortunately as nice as this is, it was built on a faulty foundation and it's gotta go for that reason. It sucks, but that's how it is." I found a little comfort in that, but I was shielded from the reality of it by distance and having another relationship. Once the holidays came around and I didn't have a girlfriend, I was wide open for experiencing the reality of the separation. What I saw what was pretty painful. It's really got me questioning if I want to go through with all this.

 

To sum up, my wife has always felt like a really good friend and we've had satisfying but incompatible sex along with a good home life. With the other girls I've met lately, there's been eye-opening romantic and intellectual attraction and sexual compatibility. When I was dissatisfied with my marriage, I simply just thought it was normal to feel that way and tried to enjoy the good parts. The OR seemed to call my bluff, so I'm trying to figure out how to resolve that. Do I stick with the familarity and history and relative comfort of my marriage or trade up to start a better relationship and better history with someone else?

 

My wife actually has an old friend from high school who's interested in a relationship with her right now, but she's hesitant to embark upon that until she knows what's happening with us. At first, I was glad that she had this guy so that I'd know she had someone. Now that I'm lonely and wanting my old life back a bit, I'm kinda jealous. I don't want to feel that way and I want my wife to be happy, but geez...what cruddy timing.

 

Here's an article that points out a lot of the flaws that went into my thinking around the time I asked my wife to marry me: http://thephilosophersmail.com/relationships/how-we-end-up-marrying-the-wrong-people/

 

The question I'm asking is: are the faults worth it just to keep a mostly good marriage together and keep the history and family going?

Edited November 28, 2015 by tronprogram