Second thoughts

[Cinnesyn]

I'm engaged to a man (we're both 44) who I feel is only with me because I have good earning potential. Tonight, I told him I really needed him (in bed) and it was emotionless and mechanical. No foreplay. No kissing. Purely physical. It made me feel like he had a job to do and he wanted to get it done as soon as possible. It was over in less than 10 minutes. It was physically GREAT but emotionally terrible. I just wanted to cry afterwards.

 

I had different expectations. I'm going thru menopause and have been overly emotional lately along with being hornier than hell. I love this man but lately he's been withdrawn and moody. In my low self-esteem state of mind, I feel he's not happy with me but I'm better than nothing.

 

A few months ago, I posted about his emotional cheating in pogo. I've been monitoring everything he's been doing online and find that he is obsessed with viewing women's profiles in pogo. (Pogo is a gaming website where you can post a profile of yourself and you have a cute little cartoon that represents you.) When he is playing on pogo, he ALWAYS looks up women's profiles. Every single woman in the room... the only time he looks up men's profiles is if their screen name is feminine sounding. He has a thing for blonde women (I'm a brunette) and if the profile contains the word "blonde", he'll look up their profile many times during his pogo session. He doesn't chat with the women anymore but he used to. We had a HUGE fight over a chat screen he closed suddenly when I walked up to his computer. He's been emotionally faithful since then but I know he was emotionally cheating prior to the huge fight. He admitted it.

 

If he knew I was monitoring him, he'd be really mad. I don't trust him because I don't feel loved. I'd rather dump him now than find out six months down the road that he's in love with someone else. I feel that his weird attraction to other women isn't something an engaged man should be doing. I hate him for not giving me 100% of his attention. I want to hurt him for hurting me but I love him and want it to work out. It's such a terrible feeling to not feel loved in a relationship but to love someone so much it hurts when they do something so innocent. But I don't feel looking at every woman's profile is 100% innocent. Really ticks me off, in fact...

 

Do I sound like a complete crazy idiot? What the hell is wrong with me???

[Cinnesyn]

Oh, the second thoughts comes from the realization that I can't marry this man with the way things are going.

[jmargel]

Marriage is not going to solve the issue. If anything marriage takes issues before the wedding and magnifies them by 10. If you communicated to him that this upsets you with his behavior and he refuses to stop then of course that is a sign of things to come. It's natural to just look up a profile now & then but it's another to do it to every woman or chat (I would assume this meant flirting) with them as well.

 

Don't marry just for the sake of getting married. It won't last. You should be going into a marriage knowing in your heart that you have nothing to fear about this man. Since you can't change him the only thing you can do is change what you can control.

 

If this guy was married before, find his ex-wife and have a secret one-on-one talk about what really happened in his past marriage. Good chance you might find something that he didn't tell you.

[bab]

I think it would be a wise idea to hold off on the marriage until the both of you have worked through these issues. There could be a mirad of reasons that he could be withdrawn for a short period of time, but it's also possible that this could be just the tip of the iceberg of what's to come. Like you said, better to find out BEFORE you take that plunge. Talk to him, go to counseling, but don't marry him, at least not yet.