You deserve better than to have to beg for love

It is 3:20Am Sunday April 20th 2014. At least that is the time as I begin to write this post. I have just come down stairs after spending about 30 minutes talking to the man I call husband while he lay with his back to me pretty much not responding to anything I was saying. I had been sleeping on the couch again. He came downstairs and woke me up insisting that I come upstairs to bed. I went upstairs to bed. He tried to have sex with me. I haven’t been particularly well for the last several days. I’ve had what appears to be two periods in a span of 15 days. I’ve been dealing with a significant amount of stress for the last couple of months and I think everything has just taken a toll. It’s been a struggle and I’ve felt a glaring lack of interest and support from my husband that has made it feel that much worse.

I just wrote earlier today that I don’t see a way for me to achieve success with the goals I have set for myself as long as I remain in my marriage. At this present moment I am certain that for as long as I remain in this marriage I will continue to have situations like this where I am up at 3:20AM in the morning feeling lost, alone, sad and lonely, filled with heart-ache, angry, wanting to cry but fighting the urge knowing I need to be stronger than this. 17 years of this — clearly I have no backbone if I am still crying over it. I shouldn’t be here.

Despite the title of my post, I don’t beg for love. The problem I have with my husband is that he insists he loves me; but I never see the love. I never feel it. Usually it’s fine. After 17 years you get used to a routine. I’m usually too busy to be concerned with the state of my marriage. Our relationship is what it is. I don’t look to my husband to help me feel complete and fulfilled. That ship sailed ages ago; but when you’re panicked about your health and things are happening to you that cause your mind to start going haywire with thoughts about the possibility of dying, you do sort of expect a little bit of support, especially from someone who claims almost every day that they love you.

Far from feeling like my husband was there for me the other day when I was worried and thought I might end up having to go to the emergency room, he seemed more cold and callous than I have seen him in a long time. He was in pre 2005 mode. 2005 was the year we separated. Things between us were pretty ugly then and had been since 1997. I won’t go into detail; but he wasn’t a very nice man to have for a husband. Since we got back together in 2007 he has seemed “improved”; but recently I’ve been seeing traces of that old version of him. The other night when I was sick he was so uninvolved and seemingly unconcerned that I couldn’t hold back from saying something to him when we got in bed. It was as if we had gone back in time. I talked and talked and talked. And it wasn’t a case of nagging so much as it was a case of wanting to get some kind of response and so you keep going hoping eventually something will be said that gives an indication of care and interest. But he kept his back turned to me then eventually began to get up to walk out while I was in the middle of speaking.   That’s the kind of behavior I was used to pre-2005. I couldn’t understand what was going on.

Refusing to be on the receiving end of what he was about to attempt, I went and blocked the door to stop him from walking out. He tried to physically move me. It became noisy. Since then I haven’t really wanted to have anything to do with him. But he has continued in the same daily pattern, the morning kisses, the “I love you from the bottom of my heart” BS. I’ve tried to ward it off but he has kept forcing it on me.

Eventually he wore me down enough to where he was able to try having sex with me tonight. But during the process I began to get cramps. I asked him to stop. He stopped, turned over and assumed the posture of one about to go to sleep. I found it unacceptable that he would just do that and not even express any interest in knowing if I was okay. I said as much to him. He started acting as if I was speaking a foreign language–like he couldn’t understand my meaning. I proceeded to try to explain how his behavior seems to suggest he really doesn’t give too much of a crap about me even though he keeps on insisting that he loves me.  The whole thing went on for at least 30 minutes. He kept his back turned on me most of the time and spoke only two or three times to deny some “false accusation”. For the most part all I was doing was asking him to match his actions to his words one way or another. He heard nothing of my pleas. He heard me only when I said something he construed to be a false accusation. He responded only to those.

So here I am. It is now 4:06 AM.

Putting myself and my stuff out there like this might seem to be something I do with enthusiasm. After all, I write volumes upon volumes; but I have doubts every day about doing this. I have mild panic attacks through-out the day when I think about my pictures being seen, my thoughts being read, the ugly truth of my life being exposed. I ask myself why I’m doing it. And I try to remind myself that I am doing it for me. I’m doing it for Monica. To try to save her somehow.  And yeah, I know nobody gives a damn. Why should they? Everybody’s got their own sh*t. And women like me–women who let men treat them like they are not worthy of love and respect–we don’t deserve pity. We are an embarrassment to ourselves and to all women. So I know the risk I am taking every time I load up this blog and publish the details of my life–with pictures no less. And at the end of the day I might not even manage to save myself. But that’s what I’m trying to do. And you know what, I think I’ll be able to go to sleep now. It is 4:22 AM. I feel much stronger than when I started writing this an hour ago. And that’s what this is all about.