I don't understand how you don't get this. Our marriage is falling apart and you don't seem to care. I have had discussions with myself and tried with you, multiple times a day for years saying, it will get better once she finishes studying, once we move, once our children are a little older... I am lonely and I am disgusted at myself for no longer being confident in who I am, no longer looking in the mirror and liking what I see, while still being attracted to you, while you don't care about what I do, how I feel, what I want or need at all - as long as you get what you need to survive.
You don't seem to understand that intimacy is a part of a healthy relationship or that a relationship is about wanting to be the best for each other and actually trying to be. You don't seem to care or you are driving the relationship into the ground so you have a future excuse for why you left, blaming me for the result.
It was meant to be you and I against the world making a life despite the challenges we face, but I feel like the biggest challenge is us and I don't think you want to improve the situation, other than to make your own life easier so you don't have to listen to me whining.
You call me needy, but I am not, i can survive alone. It is just that when I am in a relationship I want that relationship to be healthy, otherwise there is no point. Relationships are important to me.
I feel uncomfortable being near you. I am scared to touch you, because if I do, you move away. If I tell you what I like or try something new, you judge me and make me feel like I am a deviant, when they are normal things that people do and try. I have these conversations in my head and I fantasise about just not caring and doing as I want with you, but I never will. I fantasise about you listening to me and understanding that I have given every opportunity to you I can to the point that I feel the best of me is gone. And the only thing I get back is your annoyance at my frustration, as if it is me who is demanding and a spoiled child.
You don't get that my moods are a symptom of the relationship that I have tried to build, my growing coldness a symptom of being rejected a thousand times and made to feel that I am not enough. So I fall silent. You say you care but your words are empty because your actions do not support them and then, I end up mirroring you and you blame me.
I no longer feel part of a family, you didn't even take a picture of me and the children together for Christmas, let alone us. That isn't something I should have to ask for, it should be automatic, as you should want to have me remembered in these events, but it has been this way for years.
I used to be warm and passionate, we used to speak about more than the day to day shopping list of tasks, we used to spend time together in bed holding each other in the morning and talking about our future. You stopped doing this before the kids, you stopped trying to impress me in any way, to push your limits for me, to play with our world. You stopped flirting with me and made me feel bad when I flirted with you, when I touched you.
I don't feel like I am a bad person, but I feel that you believe I am. I work hard, I am a good father and I help people when I can, but you are blind to it all, as everything say or do you see as an attack on you. There is no winning for me and in a relationship, it should always be win-win, even when compromises have to be made.
You don't seem to get that I will do anything for you and have done, but I also believe that a relationship is a partnership and there has to be reciprocity, a return in action. A relationship should make two people stronger than the sum of the parts, stronger than each as individuals, but in order to do this, both need to understand the other, trust them in their strengths and help them in their weaknesses. You don't trust my strengths, when I try to help you treat me as if I have attacked you.
As I have said a million times before.
Grow together, or grow apart.
You don't seem to want to grow together because it makes you uncomfortable, because it requires change to move toward someone who is different than yourself, to trust them. You are scared of being vulnerable and hurt, but you don't seem to care about my own pains, my own struggles and disappointments I face in this world. Every day I feel I face the world alone.
I have tried so hard to give you the things you want in this life, but even when I can, it is never enough to make you happy. I haven't seen you smile for me for a very long time and I have become your mirror, unsmiling. Every moment these things weigh on me, every time I look at you, I crumble a little more.
From the moment I saw you, you became the love of my life, yet I feel like my life is ending and all there is left to do, are more tasks. I will not hang on in hope until there is nothing of me left to hold on to. No relationship is guaranteed, but living it by default makes the end quite certain.
I dont want it to end, but I am tired. Tired of feeling this way every day, talking to myself and a the wall.
I don't even want to send this to you as I think you will see it as an attack. But I will send it still, maybe as my last act before I feel I am swallowed up and I disappear forever.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
