A Harrowing Week It Has Been

This is a very long post. Bear with me.

At the July 9 joint counseling session, we had agreed to start having regularly scheduled dialogs instead of waiting for one another to start talking. We had discussions on Wednesday (7/11), Saturday (7/14), and Tuesday (7/17).

July 11 Discussion

She said she had talked to her therapist about her problems with talking about sex both in the bedroom and out. This came up because in a joint session, my wife said that by "whore in bed" she meant someone who talked during sex.

She said she didn't know how to express what she wanted, and it made her uncomfortable. She said she had trouble even talking about it with her friends. She could tell them whether or not she had sex and whether it was good or not, but no details on the explicit stuff.

She admitted that she wished I was able to just read her mind and do what she wanted (note: she has set herself up for many a nonsexual disappointment because she expected me to read her mind in those instances, too). Her therapist told her that was unrealistic.

The therapist also recommended that we spend some time trying to develop a common sexual vocabulary. Neither of us really understood what that meant.

She said she had spent time talking with her therapist about her parents, including the speculation that her dad might have been in the closet. She repeated some things that came up in marriage counseling last summer about her dad, and how she felt unloved by him. She told her therapist that her therapist whom she saw in the late 90s tried EMDR with her to help work past the anger at her parents. I knew she had done the EMDR, but she never had explained why.

I brought up the counterargument (scroll to the paragraph that begins "If the consumption of media...") to the "porn warped my expectations of sex" theory that her therapist had advanced.

On the first point, which involved her exposure to unrealistic images of women and sexuality, she conceded that watching such programs may have influenced her, but she wasn't willing to buy the theory completely.

In response to the second point of my counterargument her friend's contempt for sex, she said that there were a lot of conversations that I never heard. Things like when her best friend really enjoyed sex with her husband when he took some erectile dysfunction drugs, or when her preschool mom friend initiated sex with her husband because he "looked sexy in his suit".

I said that if we were to subtract all the other things about me that she says are aggravating to her (e.g. not always readily responsive toward her and the kids, not taking the initiative in planning social activities, too opinionated, perpetually unhappy) and her baseline desire for sex was still low, then perhaps the notion of sexual activity itself is a violation of her integrity.

If that was the case, then I believed that we had a terminal situation. I couldn't say that I would remain happy or faithful in that kind of relationship. If tried to say otherwise, I would be lying to myself. She wasn't pleased to hear that, but she didn't fall apart, either.

She said if we did go our separate ways, she wanted me to stand up to my mother if my mother badmouthed her in front of the kids. Given my mothers conduct after her own divorce, I knew my wife had reason to be concerned. I said that I would do that. I didn't want anyone try to turn the kids against her.

She said it was hard for her to think about divorce when she thinks of the kids. She then lost composure and started crying. To buffer the guilt, I said that as the kids got older, they would pick up on the distance between us, and that would have negative side effects as well.

She said that it helped her some to finally admit that she was so angry at me about not being sensitive enough when her brother passed away. She had first brought this up during the fourth marriage counseling session last August. I asked her why she had refused to communicate this with me soon after it happened, rather than holding onto it for close to three years. Her response was that she thought that didn't care enough and would have disregarded what she said.

She said that the attempts to get pregnant really took a toll on her during 2001. Having sex several days in a row when the fertility meter said made sex a chore. She was then offering me sex every so often just so I wouldn't be in a bad mood.

Taking a cue from my therapist, I said that her actions seemed as if she wished I was a nonsexual being. I asked her a question that she had dodged in the past, namely if she was given the choice between killing off my sexual desire or seeking a way to increase hers, which would she take? She said if there existed a pill that would boost her sexual desire, she would gladly take it.

I said it was hard for us to find common ground because it seems like we view sex as two completely different things. I see a playground, and she sees a haunted house. She said she didn't understand the analogy. I said that I looked upon sex as something that could be enjoyed, and she seemed to approach it as a source of anxiety.

July 14 Discussion

We started off the discussion by me recapping and clarifying the points she had made during our last discussion.

Then we talked about an encounter we had the night before. I've put the story in a blockquote so that you can tell when the Saturday conversation resumes.

It was Friday night, and my wife had decided to extend the garage sale by an extra day. She wanted to update the ad on the craigslist.org website. I suggested that she take down the ad and put up a new one so it would be closer to the top. She acted as if that was a big hassle but proceeded to do it anyway. She ran into a snag while posting the new ad. The spam protection mechanisms on craigslist.org noticed that the wording was similar to the ad we just took down, and it was blocking us from putting the new ad up. She got cranky, and I worked around the problem by changing the wording and posting from a different e-mail address. The whole exchange left us both on edge.

When she came to bed, I told her that I was dealing with some uncomfortable feelings. On one hand, I was feeling a lot of anger toward her regarding our dispute. On the other hand, I was feeling a strong desire to be sexual with her. She admitted that she, too, was feeling sexual and had thought about asking for the vibrator. She had decided against it because she said she didn't want to "send mixed signals." The conversation wavered back and forth.

Eventually, I wound up shutting the door to the room and aggressively removing her pajamas. She was responding with signs of arousal, so I progressed to pleasuring her with my hand. But after a while, she lost steam. She said she was sorry, but the desire just disappeared. I stopped. Soothed myself, and then said that I was going into the other room to take care of myself (in light of her expressed anxiety toward me masturbating in her presence).

I asked her to clarify what she had meant about sending mixed signals the night before. she said that normally she wouldn't have tried being sexual with me in that frame of mind. She would have needed to feel closer to me to want sex. She said that she was concerned that us having sex would have led me to believe that everything was better between us. I said that I didn't have any illusions that this was going to make everything better.

I then asked her to describe for me what she thought "better" looked like. This was her list:

• I was smiling and laughing more often. I had a greater level of happiness.


• We were doing more things together as a couple and as a family.


• We were having sex more frequently

I asked her whether she had any insights on why she lost steam. She said that it was taking a while for her to reach climax, and she was getting frustrated and impatient.

I asked her what she and her therapist had been doing in their private sessions with regards to sex. I knew that she had talked with her about the influence of porn on me, and I knew about the therapist's desire for us to learn how to talk about sex with one another. She said that there wasn't much else. I wondered if she had given her some things to work on with regards to her anxiety in the bedroom.

I expressed surprised that after seven or so sessions with her therapist, that was all they had talked about with regards to sex. I said that I didn't have much optimism because she had already expressed issues with the touch, smell, and taste experiences of sex. I didn't see how things could improve until she made efforts to address those things.

She then said there were things that probably never would change. She said that it probably would never be as many times as I wanted (she harps on the frequency a lot when she is defending herself.), and that things that she could do to pleasure me probably wouldn't change. She singled out oral sex and said that she'd never get used to doing it and it probably wouldn't happen more than once or twice a year (it happens less than once a year now).

I asked her whether she thought that other men would be happy with the level of sexual engagement that exists between us. She said that she couldn't be certain, but she knew that with her best friend, she refused to have sex in the nude, and many times she needed to read books of women's sexual fantasies during the act to keep involved.

That left me with a really bad impression. Her statements were drawing lines that said, "don't expect me to work too hard on this." I decided to hold off an think about this some more.

July 17 Discussion

Facing any two-choice dilemma is so wounding to some people's narcissism that they just shut down -- or won't shut up. They regress and the reptilian part of their brain takes over. Some hold siege until their partner capitulates. Others verbally (or physically) bludgeon their spouse int surrendering all priorities so that their two-choice dilemma doesn't surface. Both types overlook the internal dilemma that their behavior creates: demanding that they be "loved" by their partner, but acting in ways that are neither loving nor lovable.

-- David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage, p. 299

As I hinted at in a prior posting, things started to fall apart after this discussion.

I let my wife take the lead to let her say what was on her mind. She said she didn't have anything to say.

I talked about the job search, which I had renewed a few days earlier with a refresh of my resumes on the big four job boards. I said that the resumes were generating responses, a mixture of local and nonlocal leads.

I ad libbed my way through the points of my critical mass statement.

I said that it sounded as if she was wanting from me:

• An improvement in demeanor. Be more pleasant. Smile.


• Be more present in the moment. Pay attention and spend time with her and the kids.

I added that it sounded like she envisioned that sex would happen more frequently, but not as much as she thought I would want. There were no signs that she was willing to confront her anxieties in the bedroom.

I said I felt like she was selfish in bed. I cited our sexual encounter on Friday night, saying that she is open to being pleasured to certain degrees, but after she lost her momentum, it would have been unheard of for her to then turn and offer to pleasure me in some way.

I said that she said she had so many issues... touch, smell, taste, fluids... about the only thing she was willing to do was be on the receiving end of sexual intercourse.

I said that I believed that her characterizations of being absent in the relationship weren't fair. Although there were times that I wasn't immediately responsive to her and the kids' requests for attention, I did spend time with her and the kids.

I was there for the kids in truly meaningful ways, in addition to chores like feeding, bathing, and diaper changing. Usually I was the one who got up with them in the middle of the night. I had worked with both kids to help learn to calm themselves down. I helped them fix their toys and such when they weren't working.

I recalled how she said she really lost interest in sex after I wasn't empathetic enough about her brother's death in 2003. She didn't admit to the anger until our marriage counseling almost a year ago, and she really didn't fess up to the depth of the anger until the last month or so.

And because she assumed that I didn't care, she chose not to communicate her feelings toward me. That happened to coincide with the 18 month drought where she was offering quickie mercy fucks on a quarterly basis. And even in the fall of 2005 and the summer of 2006, when I was asking her why she wasn't paying more attention to our sex life, she held onto the "I don't know" excuse.

I said that her refusal to communicate and then withhold sex seemed like she was punishing me. I said that I didn't believe it was right for her to do that. I didn't deserve to be treated that way.

I then referred to an incident that had happened two weeks before. I was sleeping in bed, and she got into bed after turning out the light. I started stirring, thinking about making a sexual advance. A few minutes later, she asked me if I was masturbating. I said that I wasn't. Indeed my hands were nowhere near my genitals. She said she needed to know because she was feeling anxiety. I asked her if she was interested in making love. She turned me down, saying that she didn't want to do anything before her next therapy session.

I said that the fact she experiences anxiety at the slightest suspicion of me pleasuring myself in her proximity without her consent is a sign that she still has deep codependency issues. It had been a decade since my last "addictive slip."

I then said that my problems with the "addiction" weren't her problems, anyway. She had her own issues of recovery, and as far as I could tell, she hadn't worked on that much over the years.

• After she found out about the phone sex bills in 1994, she saw a counselor a few times through her workplace EAP.


• She went to one CODA meeting about that time.


• A couple years later, when we moved, she went to an S-Anon meeting for about a year, and then stopped going when she started palling around with one of the women who was attending the meetings.

I said her trouble with my sexual behavior had more to do with the fact that she hadn't done anything to deal with the codependency issues than any lurking addiction that I might have been harboring.

I said that intense anxiety is something that should be triggered in situation where life and death is key. Observing a husband sexually pleasuring himself, especially when you refuse to be available sexually, should not provoke that kind of response.

I said that I didn't have a lot of reasons to believe that she was intent on dealing with her sexual issues. The only thing about sex that they had talked about, to the best of my knowledge, was that:

• Her lack of sexual curiosity and experimentation in her late teens and early 20s wasn't odd.


• Porn may have warped my expectations of sex.


• We needed to develop a better agreement on vocabulary on sex.


• She needed to stop expecting me to read her mind about what she wanted in bed.

I said that there didn't seem to be any effort on her part to deal with the desire level or the anxiety. I felt like I was lying to myself by trying to believe that she was going to make a real effort on this. I couldn't be sure, given what I knew. I would need to make a leap of faith.

I said that I was lovable and didn't deserve to be treated this way, with affection being withheld for varying grievances.

I then I said that I would rather be alone that stay in a relationship that violated my integrity by lying to myself.

She fumed.

She said she found it hypocritical that I would be so impatient with her when she had "stood by me, forgave me, and tried to understand" all those years with my addiction. She said it was unreasonable for me to expect her to change within a matter of a few months.

I said that I had been patient for a very long time, going back as far as early 2002, when I agreed not to initiate sex because she was feeling pressured. I had waited silently for over three years, only then starting to push for more involvement when the drought had lasted over a year. Through several months of dance lessons, I had tried to reconnect with her with very little change. And then a year ago, I started to assert myself more.

Since then she had gone to one therapist for a short time, at first begrudgingly, then ceasing quietly. She had only started going to her current therapist when she got angry at me for turning down a mercy fuck. Even with this current round of therapies, she seemed to be revisiting old issues and keeping the focus on my inadequacies.

She sat there for a few minutes, and then said she would try to think of an analogy to make things clearer since I used them all the time. She then said she couldn't think of anything. She then said that because she couldn't think of anything nice to say to me, she would prefer to end the conversation.

July 18 Joint Session

Crucibles are always interlocking. When one partner goes into his crucible, the other partner goes into hers -- or gets out of the marriage.

-- David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage, p. 316

My wife and I did not speak further until our joint counseling session.

The therapists started things off by asking how things had been going. A rare consensus between my wife and me indicated that things were not good.

My wife said that she wanted to separate.

She then said she was angry from the previous night's dialogue, and said she felt like I had been saying everything is her fault. She said she felt on the defensive and didn't deal with it well. She said that I thought sex was the only issue, and that actually there were several issues that had been there for a while.

She said she had been selfish for wanting to have a family so bad, that she overlooked the problems between us in a rush to have a second child.

She said she didn't want to do this anymore.

My therapist asked what kinds of problems there had been. My wife said that I didn't want to do things with her, like go to the grocery, watch TV, or play board games. There had been more downs than ups over the years, and I didn't do "giddy" very well.

She said she was having trouble being nice, and that she didn't want to be hateful. My therapist said that regardless, counseling was a place where she needed to give an "honest representation" of where she stood.

She said, "I want to shove his 'integrity' up his booty."

She said that I acted like all of our problems were due to a lack of sex. She was angry that she waited for so many years for me to be happy. She said I didn't acknowledge the "baby steps" she had been taking to work on the problem. She said that she didn't think we'd ever have a connection.

My therapist asked in what ways did my wife feel like we were still connected. My wife responded by saying that we were the parents of two beautiful girls, that I was the provider of money and help. She was the stay-at-home mom, and that everything else was just a bonus.

My therapist asked her how things were different before the kids came along. My wife said that we might do things together as a couple, perhaps go to a movie or sit together while watching TV. In the car, sometimes she would try to strike up a conversation about something that was being discussed on the radio, if she could stay awake. We used to kiss good-night instead of going to bed at different times.

(I didn't say anything during this time, but my recollections were quite different. The different bedtimes started long before the kids came along. Once we moved to our current location and started telecommuting, she tended to work three or four hours in the evening while watching TV rather than trying to get her hours out of the way during the day so that we could have the evenings free.)

She said that we struggled with sex even back then, though. She remembered being more in the mood, but it never seemed to be enough for me.

She said she didn't feel like she withheld sex from me. She admitted that she sometimes had sex with me so that I would be in a better mood. She noted that in the first few years after my addiction, things were lean, but they got better as she lost some weight and didn't feel as unattractive.

She said that she didn't think the sight of unrealistically thin women on TV had much of an effect on her self esteem.

She said that things started going downhill after the move in 2000. We'd have occasional good spells, but she said I was becoming jealous of all the time she was spending with her best friend.

She said that our early years of sex seemed freaky because it took me so long to climax. She said she would talk with her friends, who said that their husbands didn't last nearly as long.

I admitted that during the years I was using phone sex services, I had masturbated a lot, to the point where I was desensitized. Soon after she found out about the activity in 1994, our sex life throttled back, and I ceased masturbating, when we resumed sexual activity a few months later, I was lucky to last more than a couple of minutes.

I got onto the subject of her friends' attitudes towards their sex with husbands. I discussed how my wife and her friends openly made light of turning down their husbands and their husband's sexual inadequacies. On one of my birthdays that fell a year or so after my staying power plummeted, I got a card from one of her friends that joked about an aging man being like a microwave... just set it for two minutes and it goes "ding".

My wife's therapist went on an extensive discussion of how our society had become too open about sex lives, and that there needed to be boundaries about what spouses shared with their friends. She asked my wife if she had ever asked whether it was okay to share details with her friends. My wife honestly answered, "no".

The therapist also talked about how guys tend to get a little too loose with locker room talk. I said that I didn't engage in that sort of thing back in my high school years because most of the people I ran around with didn't talk about their sexual exploits. I speculated that one of the big reasons was that many of them were in the closet and knew that such things probably wouldn't go over well in a small town on the northern fringe of the Bible Belt.

My therapist said that my wife must feel like she's in a very lonely place. My wife agreed. My wife described me as "passive aggressive." My therapist asked for clarification. My wife replied that although the tone of my voice was calm, it sounded to her like I was trying to make everything her fault.

My therapist asked her whether she thought I used my ability to communicate in manipulative ways. She said that sometimes she felt overwhelmed by what I was saying. She added that she hated when I tried to restate things in terms of analogies. When I used them, she got angry and just blocked me out.

We got on the subject of the masturbation anxiety/sex rejection incident. In this area, both her therapist and mine seemed to be confused utterly about what my wife was saying. She claimed that she had no problems with people masturbating, but she had issues with me masturbating on a regular basis when we were having troubles and not having sex. She viewed it as me saying that I didn't want to be close.

We got on the subject of foreplay as a means of building closeness. I said that in the past, I had taken my wife's rejection of foreplay personally... that she must be doing that because there's something wrong with me. I said that I used to put too much emotional investment in foreplay as a source of validation. If I could make my wife feel good and get her aroused, I must be a good person.

I said that over the past year, I had changed my view of foreplay. I understood it to be a means of negotiating the level of connection between partners. Given that my wife had become so proscriptive about what could and could not be done, I understood that she didn't want us to be close.

My therapist noted that time was running short and asked where things were headed. For all of the discussion about sex and boundaries, she noted that my wife had come in with a very different set of thoughts. She wondered if perhaps we should be coming to some sort of agreement on whether these sessions should be trying to repair the marriage or leading to its dissolution.

My wife's therapist said she wanted to have at least one more joint session, so we agreed to have some sort of decision by the time we met on 7/25.

That night, my wife spent an hour or so talking to her other best friend who is currently separated from her husband.

July 19 Post Mortem

We talked briefly before going to bed Thursday night. She had seen her therapist earlier that day.

I said that I thought we should hold off on me moving out until I can get the job situation straightened out. We were having a hard enough time affording things with one household, and I didn't want to worsen things with the cost of two. She said she was okay with me staying here for now, and that I could even sleep in the same bed so that I didn't hurt my back by sleeping on the couch.

I said that I'd be okay on the couch. I then said that given the current circumstances, I would no longer be attempting any sexual activity with her.

She said her therapist thought that I was fixated too much on the frequency of sex, and that we needed to focus more on the content of sex.

I said that I thought her remarks about her issues with masturbation set up a paradox. She has said she doesn't want to have sex unless she feels emotionally close to me. She has also said she thinks my masturbation lessens the closeness between us.

In a way, she's saying that she can only feel close when she has veto power over our shared and my solo sexual activity (a classic dodge of a two-choice dilemma, I might add). There's not many people who would put up with that lack of boundaries, so it makes a close relationship nearly impossible. She said that wasn't true, but didn't offer any counterargument.

I asked her whether her friend had any insights for her from their phone call. She said that her friend, who is a child psychologist, said that problems with sex usually have more to do with other things in the relationship. She said that she and her husband had had a lot of sex over the years, but that they had a lousy relationship.

I told her that she didn't have to worry about it anyway, because I wasn't going to bother her for sex.

I told her that I wasn't going to fight over most of the household things because I wanted her and the kids to have a home. She said she was worried that she would be able to afford the house. I said that I would do my best to help them out, but that as time progressed she would need to take on a greater role for supporting herself.

We've been sleeping separately since.

What a Way to Mark One Year of Blogging

Yes, today marks my first anniversary of blogging in this space.

My wife and I had a scheduled discussion tonight, the third in a series since Wednesday of last week.

To start off, I asked her whether she had anything to say. She said she didn't, so I took my turn.

I started with a more mundane beginning, talking about the leads that my updated resumes had been generating.

Then I transitioned into the heavy stuff. I walked through the points of my Statement of Critical Mass, with some revisions to take into account things that I had learned from subsequent dialogs.

I spoke calmly and slowly. It was done mostly from memory.

You cannot imagine how much my anxiety dissipated when I concluded by saying "I would rather be alone than be in a relationship that violated my integrity." That was my "I can live without you" moment.

My wife had the most stonefaced look after I finished speaking.

She paused and then said she found it hypocritical that I was expecting her to make a turnaround in a few months when she "stood by me" for so many years regarding my addiction.

She vehemently disputed my claim that she avoided communicating the extent of her anger at me and chose to punish me by withholding sex under the claim that "she didn't feel close to me" and didn't bother telling me about why because she "didn't think I cared."

She said that I "selectively forgot" about all the times that she said she wanted me to be close. She said she expressed a desire to be closer during a conversation that we had in June of last year. My recollection was quite different. To her, the path to greater closeness was going to the grocery with her.

I said that I had waited more than just a few months for her to deal with this. We had a big argument over a year ago that launched this current phase of the marriage. As far back as early 2002, I had been trying to communicate with her that I was baffled by her resistance to foreplay and lack of interest in sex.

I countered her claim about the addiction, noting that when she first found out about the phone sex activity in the fall of 2004, I immediately sought out counseling, and within three weeks, I was going to 12-step meetings. She went to one codependency recovery meeting and saw a counselor a few times, but never worked on her own issues on a sustained basis. I said that her refusal to deal with her codependency was one of the reasons that she probably developed intense anxiety at the thought I might actually be pleasuring myself.

She sarcastically responded by saying that I must just be OK and she's the only one who needs fixing. She then added that her problems with the masturbation wasn't just that I was feeling good. She said she viewed the activity as driving us farther apart, that I wasn't focusing on the relationship. She then said she'd try to come up with an analogy. After a few moments, she said she couldn't think of one.

She sat there for a few more minutes, looking like she was ready to cry. She then said she didn't want to say anything at the moment because she was so angry with me and was afraid she would say something she would regret. I asked her if she needed a few minutes to regroup. She sat there a few minutes more and then said that she didn't have anything more to say. She watched a DVRed episode of Big Brother and then went to bed.

We have joint therapy at noon Wednesday. I won't back down. I can't betray myself that way.

It's over. After a year of agonizingly harsh self confrontation. I can feel it's over.

What about Future Relationships?

Michelle asks in the comments section:

My question is, if you were to leave your marriage, what would you want to happen in terms of your relationships? I mean, would you expect to find another partner?

This is a good question, and one my wife posed (with some sarcasm) to me last night during one of our scheduled dialogues. She was curious about what a post marital relationship would be like for me, arguing that since I placed such an emphasis on sex, wouldn't it just be a bunch of one-night stands.

I've taken a look at the history of this current relationship, and I've come to realize just how immature I was at its inception. I didn't have much regard for my own self worth. I was longing for someone in my life, and when it happened, I compromised my personal integrity to achieve superficial harmony.

I've challenged myself on the divorce question many times, asking whether its allure is due to some false expectation of a catharsis. If that were the case, I would be leaving the relationship for reasons just as unhealthy as when I entered it.

The question is how do I deal with the anxiety of feeling lonely once the marriage dissolves. I don't doubt for a moment that loneliness will be involved. Reduced contact with my children, the rejection of friends and relatives who may not approve of this decision, and the prospect of geographic relocation will make this something I will do on my own.

The early days will need to be spent developing and reinforcing that which is solid in me. Self validating acts, like getting in better shape, making a new home for myself, and reinvigorating my professional life will be very important.

Because this change may involve the loss of what tenuous social network I may have had in real life, it will be important to counter the loneliness with constructive togetherness. That means finding some regular activities or hobbies that involve live interaction with others. I need to conquer the anxiety of making new friendships that comes from the nagging, but false, presumption that people would reject me if I just was myself.

While I could foresee dating, I would be in no rush to head back to the altar, and that is something I would make clear up front in a relationship that took a romantic turn. I don't think it would be wise for me to commit to something as deep as marriage when my kids should be my top priority both emotionally and financially.

In other words, all of this stuff that I picked up during my therapy work has implications once the marriage is dissolved, otherwise I really won't have grown that much.

What about a Job in the Railroad Biz?

Ever insightful commenter, and occasional blogger, sixdegrees writes:

You know, it strikes me that your interest in trains is an important part of your mental landscape. Do you have opportunities in your present life to develop this further?

While the interest in trains did play a large part of my younger mental landscape, it doesn't pack the same heft as it used to.

My interest in railroad operations and photography hit its apex in my early-to-mid high school years. It began to slide into the background as I broke out of my shell and got more involved with extracurricular activities at school.

It enjoyed a big resurgence in graduate school in the early 90s because I was living in an area that had a very high volume of rail traffic, almost 80 trains a day, between two rail lines. I also managed to connect with other railfans in the region by way of Usenet newsgroups.

After I left graduate school I spent four years over in a neighboring state to the west of us. I have some photos from trips taken during that time, too.

Several things worked to put the hobby on ice.

The first was industry consolidation. The 90s saw a large number of mergers and acquisitions that reduced the number of major railroad carriers to four. The Burlington Northern and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe merged. Union Pacific scarfed down both the Chicago & Northwestern and the Southern Pacific. Conrail got carved up into pieces by CSX and Norfolk Southern. Fewer rail lines meant less variety on the main lines. As locomotives got repainted, it got less exciting.

Second was 9/11/2001. For the first time since World War II, the idea of a bunch of guys gathered near a high traffic rail line with cameras quickly became suspect activity.

Third was the arrival of our children. Gone were those days off where one could sneak off for several hours or a whole day on end to spend some time trackside. They were replaced with daddy time.

Fourth was a realization that interest in the railroad industry is a case study in loss. Although the railroad industry is in pretty good health nowadays, it is depressing sometimes to think about just how much of it has disappeared. The mid-to-late 19th century was a period of overbuilding and corporate abuse. That left the railroad shackled with excess capacity and several decades of heavy regulation that kept them from adapting to changing market conditions.

The deregulation of the industry in the early 80s provided respite, but it also involved the massive rationalization of physical plant (read: abandonment of rail lines, shutdown of signal towers, and demolition of sometimes beautiful railroad stations). The overly aggressive downsizing proved to be shortsighted, as capacity problems started to appear in the mid 90s and overwhelm the leaner and meaner rail systems.

Not that I haven't tried to rekindle the interest. I've toyed with the idea of building a website of photos that I took over the years, but haven't been able to summon the energy to do the job well. I even got a copy of Microsoft Train Simulator when it came out a few years ago, but I've only played with the diesel locomotive simulations a few times.

This past year has been one of deep reflection on my life's story, recognizing the good and bad in the choices I've made. From a mixture of curiosity, family events, and obligations to reduce garage clutter, I have been brought into contact with several momentos that I've accumulated over the years.

The railroad photos are one portion of these artifacts, but they are perhaps the most compelling because they can be used to give meaning to events both in the past and the present.

The idea of working for a railroad or some railroad related industry has crossed my mind over the years. Had I studied mechanical or civil engineering as an undergrad, it would have been easier to get a foot in the door.

Within the software development field, there are opportunities.

The major railroads hire developers to work on back office and centralized traffic control (CTC) applications. The latter would be more appealing to me. The employment ads I've seen for these companies suggest that they rely heavily on mainframes. Being a UNIX and Win32 guy, it would require a major retooling of the skill set.

The other area is within the field of railroad equipment, such as locomotives and public transit. The bulk of these positions require embedded systems experience, which is also outside my domain.

Had I gone into mathematics and specialized in Operations Research, I could have been at the forefront of Scheduled Railroading.

More Railroad Photos... 80s Mtv Edition

Well there's people... and more people.
What do they know know know?
They go to work in some high rise
And vacation down in the Gulf of Mexico.

-- John Mellencap, "Pink Houses", Uh Huh

My wife has been trying to get the garage cleaned out for a sale she's having on Friday and Saturday. Today, she requested that I sift through some of the boxes I brought back to our house just before the end of last year.

I pared back quite a bit, but looking through old newspaper clippings and photographs brought back memories.

I'm not sure where the train photos fall on the readership boredom scale. Maybe not the most interesting thing, but perhaps more exciting than my digressions on Schnarch's writings. I dunno. I do know that there are a lot of 80s music fans out in this corner of the Blogosphere, so maybe throwing in some music video references will make this post more tolerable.

Today I'd like to reveal a little bit about my past. I grew up in The Small Town. If you watched John Mellencamp music videos from the early 80s, chances are you saw many of the scenes of The Small Town. His video for "Pink Houses" always had a soft spot in my heart because it included vignettes of railroad activity there.

A couple years ago, I figured out how to use a command line program on Linux to slurp videos from a Real Video server, and I captured "Pink Houses" on my computer for all time.

In a pair of posts a while back, I provided a photo of a railroad signal and some background information. In the latter post, I wrote:

Just shy of the grade crossing is a signal used to regulate the movement of trains on the line. The signal is called a position light, gaining its name from the fact that it uses the alignment of lamps to emulate the positions of the semaphore signals that they replaced.

...

This purpose of this signal is to serve as an early warning to the oncoming train. A little over two miles north of here, there is a crossing with an east-west rail line. The crossing is protected by a similar signal.

...

The unseen crossing... drawing near, yet still unseeable. It represents the choice I will need to make with respect to my family and my career. The east-west direction of the other line represents opportunity, something that is commonly associated with the westward direction in American culture. On a more literal level, some of the more radical choices I could make involve moving far westward.

I failed to mention that the intersection in question was featured in "Pink Houses". I pulled some screen captures to give you an idea.

The scene in this first still takes place just after the second verse has completed. It is a ground level view of the rail line intersection. The tower that controls the signals can be seen in the left background.



The large structures in the background are the bins of a long defunct grain mill. That large black object just in front of the bins is the position light for which the other signal in my earlier post served as an earlier warning.

The intersection makes another appearance at the very end, as a southbound train makes its way across the diamond, the special piece of track that allows two rail lines to cross.



Does anyone remember when through freights still had cabooses?

The next photo comes from my own collection. It was taken at about the same time period as the filming of "Pink Houses". You can see the intersection way in the background. The signal that guarded access from the north was a graceful cantilever structure, and it can be seen in the foreground.



You can get a larger version of image by clicking on the graphic.

The cantilever still stands today, but the position light signal it hosted has been removed, so it is now more of an undignified, decapitated corpse rather than a stately, ever sentient guardian.

The cantilever signal makes a cameo appearance just before the beginning of the third verse, albeit from the other side.



My photo just happens to have been shot from the vantage point of the Lynn Hotel, which is also featured in the video. During the interlude between the second and third verses, you get a full view of the building.



At the time the video was shot, the hotel itself had been closed down. Long after the hotel's closure, a cafe and lounge continued to operate in the building. The lounge entrance can bee seen on the lower right. The cafe was accessible from the south side of the building (unseen, off to the left).

In the evenings, older guys would congregate with lawn chairs just below the old HOTEL marquee in this photograph to talk. The video captures this, too. However, it was earlier in the day, and there was only one guy sitting there.



The building was razed sometime in the late 80s, if I recall correctly. My hometown has a horrible habit of letting old buildings decay to the point of irreparability, and then tearing them down for parking lots. If they keep it up, the Small Town will be all parking lot sometime around 2047.

Ain't that America for you and me?

I'm Not Proud... or Tired

Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, 'cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

-- Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant" [1]

Well, maybe I'm a bit tired because I'm not going to blog in great detail about today's events, let alone catch up on things that have happened since Friday.

I will say that I didn't get a chance to read my critical mass statement. This week was my wife's turn to lead off the discussion. She talked about how we had discussed things a bit on Friday night, but not much else. She said she didn't know what to do from here.

Our therapists suggested two things for us to try, both of which are described in Weiner-Davis' Divorce Busting. The first, found on p. 150 et seq., is time-limited conflict resolution dialogues. The other, found on p. 157 et seq., is to add a step in the sequence of events, in essence asking the spouse what is going on inside when a negative situation is perceived.

We also talked about how the lack of interaction between us worsens the distance. My wife said that I didn't seem to enjoy doing much, so she sought to get her needs met through her friendships. My therapist asked my wife if she felt lonely in the relationship, my wife agreed. I think I needed to hear that from her. From the perspective of loneliness, I better understood why she was asking for more time for us.

That was the bulk of our session. My wife started to talk about her lack of sexual desire towards the end of the session, but her therapist put a stop to that, asking that be raised in the joint session next week.

This evening, we agreed to have discussions at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday and Saturday.

[1] -- Hat tip to blogger Tom Allen, whose comment from a posting back at the beginning of this year inspired this posting.

My Statement of Critical Mass

Here is the text of my remarks for today's joint counseling session...

Relationships thrive on healthy giving and taking. Over the course of a marriage, a couple will encounter areas of disagreement. It is an inevitable result of our uniqueness as individuals.

When it comes to thoughts and feelings, it is possible to agree to disagree respectfully. When it comes to shared behaviors, it's hard to have it both ways. Some therapists refer to really difficult disagreements as two choice dilemmas.

The use of the word two emphasizes that the choices are mutually exclusive. The word dilemma calls attention to the difficulty in making a choice. Usually each alternative entails some form of anxiety.

Conventional marital therapy attempts to shy away from two choice dilemmas because they can give rise to intense disputes. However, the cost of dodging them can weigh heavily on a relationship. Within the confines of marriage, spouses will frequently do things to torture each other while feigning ignorance.

The therapy I have undergone for the past eight months takes a different viewpoint. Two choice dilemmas can actually be used to help the partners become more mature. Facing anxiety, rather than avoiding it, forces one to self confront and identify what's truly non-negotiable. Greater authenticity entails risk, because it can destroy just as well as it can renew a relationship, but it becomes tolerable when one realizes that preserving a relationship at the expense of personal integrity is corrosive to both parties.

I have been working my way through two of these two choice dilemmas. The first dilemma could be stated as:

1. Remain married to someone whom I believe is minimally sexual or just doesn't desire me.

2. Seek a divorce and start out all over again financially.

The second dilemma is:

1. Continue to seek employment locally, in a comparatively weak software development job market, possibly endangering my professional career.

2. Relocate to someplace both unfamiliar and more expensive, where there is a more lively job market and better career opportunities.

A little over a month ago, my wife linked these two dilemmas by saying that neither she nor the girls would relocate with me if I were to take the second choice of my second dilemma. In other words, choice two of the second probably would force me to take choice two of the first as well.

The primary reason she gave for not wanting me to take choice two of dilemma two is that she did not want to give up her circle of friends, from whom she derives much emotional support. During our conversation on June 30, I noted that her apparent willingness to place more faith in her friends than in me suggested that she didn't have much confidence in the strength of the marriage itself.

The natural response for most of us is to avoid making a choice. We trick ourselves into believing that the absence of an anxiety free choice is really no choice at all. We might defer the choice, with the hope that a better choice will emerge with time. Because the alternatives have an impact on the spouse, we sometimes resort to tactics that try to make our partner give up a choice altogether.

This can bring out an unpleasant side of ourselves. the part that resorts to covert actions to inflict discomfort or pain upon the other. We're all guilty of it. It can surface in many forms:

• procrastination or forgetfulness

• manipulation of the partner's reflected sense of self (“If you were good enough, I would do...”)

• sexual withholding in frequency and involvement (mercy sex)

Sometimes we justify this behavior in our mind by saying, “It's happening to me, too.”

At the end of our second joint counseling session, I set out four conditions that I needed from her to continue working on this marriage. Two of them addressed the two choice dilemmas that she faced in conjunction with mine.

• Start working seriously to address her issues with touch and sexual desire.

• Start putting our marriage ahead of friendss. I viewed her refusal to relocate as an indication that she values her friendships over her marriage to me, my career, and our financial security.

The other two:

• Stop blaming my unhappiness on depression and telling me that I need medication.

• Stop using guilt and intrusive tactics to induce shame over my sexual behavior.

Addressed ways that I believed my wife tried to keep me from making a self-validating choice in dilemma one. They were her forms of inflicting pain on me.

One of the things that keeps me stuck in ambivalence is the question of whether my wife is serious about addressing her lack of sexual desire. She claims that she is.

My past experiences make me feel as if she would just rather me be a nonsexual being. The recently renewed emphasis on past compulsive sexual behavior and the intrusive monitoring of my habits reinforce this.

I have asked her which she would prefer:

1. An increase her enjoyment and desire for sex.

2. A reduction in my sexual desire so it's no longer an issue.

She has answered by saying she wants the first choice, adding that she wishes there was a pill that she could take to make her want sex more. No such miracle remedy exists. Even erectile dysfunction drugs can't do this in men. They only help with the physical aspects. Desire is something deeply ingrained in the mind. Her gynecologist suggested drinking a glass of wine before hand, but that really isn't a solution. It's just a way of temporarily anesthetizing the anxiety.

As time has passed I have come to the conclusion that while my wife's words say “Yes, I am serious about this.” Her actions suggest that she is not.

• Last summer, when I said that I wanted her to seek out therapy, she did so only begrudgingly. She went to a few sessions, said that she wasn't getting much out of them, and then quietly stopped going. She resumed going at the suggestion of my therapist after we had a fight about me declining mercy sex.

• Last fall, she started reading Michelle Weiner-Davis' book The Sex Starved Marriage, saying that it seemed like it was easier to read than most self-help books. She eventually stopped reading the book, leaving it marked a few pages shy of the section where it talks about ways to improve things. She was willing to concede a problem, but not really motivated to explore solutions.

• Last winter, I offered to share with her some things I had been reading that I found useful in my own therapy work. I thought it might help her understand some of the changes in viewpoint that I was experiencing. She never read the material. Within the past couple months, when I tried talking about some of the material, she said that she wanted to throw away the book because I was treating it like some sort of Bible.

• In our discussions of joint counseling, she hasn't been very toward with her own thoughts. I feel as if the only way to get her to make disclosures is to ask her questions, and I don't like that because that makes me feel as if I am interrogating her.

The conclusion I draw from these actions is that she is willing to do token gestures to buy time, but she promptly stops doing them when the anxiety level goes down.

During a discussion this weekend, (my wife) told me that (wife's therapist) had suggested that we abstain from sex for now. I'm not exactly sure of the motivation behind this, but if this is for an indefinite timeframe, I don't think that it will accomplish what (wife's therapist) thinks it will. Putting sex on ice removes (my wife)'s two choice dilemma from the situation, and she has no motivation to address her anxieties.

(My wife) also said that (wife's therapist) wondered if my use of phone sex and porn may have warped my expectations. I believe that several years of therapy and 12-step group work actually went to the other extreme, because I started looking at all my sexual thoughts and behaviors through a lens of suspicion. Indeed, Carnes' writings encourage the recovering addict to assume a guilty-until-proven-innocent posture.

If the consumption of media can warp expectations, then it might be worth taking a look at more recent and sustained behaviors my wife has engaged in.

• She spends several hours a day each day watching television programs that feature women with unrealistically thin bodies and sexually charged themes. This includes soap operas and reality shows. Indeed, her daily consumption of this content far exceeds whatever behaviors I might have engaged in over a decade ago.

• She associates with a circle of friends who openly express contempt toward their husband's sexual desires. They also ridicule their husbands reactions to sexual rejection, even in the presence of the husbands themselves.

If I had to guess, (wife's therapist)'s therapy sessions with (my wife) don't ever touch on things like this because they are too focused on (my wife) as a victim. True self confrontation looks at both sides of the sadomasochistic coin, acknowledging that we are perpetrators of hurtful behaviors to ourselves as well as others.

I also think it is unfair to characterize my expectations as unrealistic. I have been very patient through all of this. I believe that most men, given my circumstances, would have either walked out by now or dodged the dilemma through self destructive behavior.

To put it bluntly, unless there has been some severe degradation in physical health or personal hygiene, it isn't too much of a stretch to think that a woman would be comfortable with touching her husband's penis after 11 years of marriage. Moreover, it's not too unreasonable to expect a woman to be willing to learn how to pleasure her husband, especially if he has been eager to do the same for several years.

Returning to the question of whether (my wife) is serious about this. I want to believe that she is, but my experiences in both the past and present make me believe otherwise. If I give my wife the benefit of the doubt in this situation, I believe that I am lying to myself and sacrificing my integrity.

(my wife)'s sexuality is hers. I won't use our wedding vows as some moral bludgeon that force her do something that compromises her own integrity. I would have liked her to be more up front with me, even if it exposed her to the vulnerability that I might not want to stay in the marriage. Tolerance of that kind of critical vulnerability is what makes real intimacy possible. Instead, she has taken on a defensive and reactive posture.

In closing, I would like to make the following disclosures.

• I'm at point where tactics and posturing won't work anymore.

• I realize that I am mortal, and that life is too short to be stuck in a state of indecision. That just prolongs misery.

• Sometimes you don't get the luxury of complete information to make a critical decision. You have to take a leap of faith and trust yourself.

• Despite my flaws, I believe that I am a lovable person. I am patient, hard working, caring, and thoughtful, and obedient. I am a good father.

• I don't deserve to be in a relationship where affection is withheld for an ever changing set of disqualifying circumstances.

• I am not the same person who entered into this relationship 15 years ago. Back then, I was someone who desperately wanted to belong to someone. As we know from my history with phone sex, I was willing to deceive to hold onto that relationship. I was willing to cave in, too, even if it led to resentment. I have grown since then.

• I would rather be alone than be in a relationship where I violate my integrity.

Job Search Takes Discouraging Turn

You may recall that, last week, I wrote in a post about job leads:

The guy at the Online Payment Subsidiary with whom I would be doing the interview on Friday just e-mailed me to let me know that the time that I agreed on won't work now. So it will either be later on in the afternoon on Friday or possibly a half hour after my joint counseling session on Monday (yech). I expressed a preference for the Friday afternoon time, but I'm making myself as flexible as possible.

I forgot to post a follow-up that the person in question failed to call me at either time. On Tuesday, I e-mailed the interview coordinator to let her know that I had not been contacted by the interviewer and was still interested in carrying out the interview. I got an e-mail Thursday evening giving me a choice of Friday afternoon or sometime on Monday. Figuring the sooner, the better, I opted for the earlier time.

Last week, when I received the reschedule e-mail directly from the interviewer, I ran the guy's name through a search engine. I turned up two pieces of useful information. One was good, the other not so good.

The good info was that this guy had given a presentation recently at a company sponsored development conference, and his talk materials were available for download. This would give me material from which I could prepare and dream up well targeted questions.

The bad info came in the form of a personal website maintained by he and his wife. It was pretty clear from the content that they were quite publicly pious. I have no problem with people who have deeply held religious beliefs, but to paraphrase a couple lines from a recent post over at Mr. Nice Guy, there are two different varieties of this species:

• Pretty sharp people who have some pretty thought provoking things to say.


• Not so sharp people who think they have thought provoking things to say but actually are full of hot gas.

Therese and Recovering Soul and others who frequent this blog belong to the former. My interviewer clearly belonged to the latter, folks who could find obscure verses from the book of Leviticus to determine which brand of oil filter to use. I started to worry that he wouldn't be fond of my current family situation

The call came on Friday afternoon as planned, and sure enough, it was one of the first things that came up in the interview. He asked me about the history of my interviewing process with the company. He knew that I had received an offer with the another department in April, then turned it down on the basis of cost of living, got another offer with the same team in the desert Southwest, but then asked for a position in the Silicon Valley again.

I tried to stay away from references to family, emphasizing the poor quality of the job market here and the need to move into an area with better opportunities. He started asking questions about whether my family would be coming with me and wondered how well I would fare being away from them. I think he made some reference to his own role as a father and how difficult it would be for him. He said that he had serious concerns about such an arrangement.

We burned up 10 - 15 minutes of a one hour interview just on that topic. He touched on it again about 3/4 of the way through, asking me whether I had plans to move the rest of my family out there. I talked about the possibility of them moving out at a later time (more lie than truth, cringe), but I said that there wasn't a fixed plan.

Other than those awkward exchanges, the conversation went pretty well. He let slip that he would have liked to have me come out to their Silicon Valley offices to do another interview cycle in person with his group, but that the HR guy had told him that due to budgetary constraints that wouldn't be possible. With this in mind, I let him know at the end of the interview that if he or his team members would need additional information to make a decision, I would make myself available.

He gave me a chance to ask him some questions, and I asked him six or seven ones that dealt with the specifics of what they do, how they fit into the bigger picture of the company's goals, and what he looks for in evaluating the fitness of a candidate. I wanted to drive home the notion that I was truly interested in both the company and the work of his team.

After I got off the phone, I felt ooky, as if I could feel the job was slipping through my fingers like dry, fine grained sand. I remember feeling angry and struggling to soothe myself.

I got home around 6 p.m., feeling drained. I tried my best to interact with the kids and converse with my wife, but all I could think was, "I WANT OUT OF THIS MARRIAGE. I DON'T CARE IF I GET OUT OF THIS PLACE. I WANT TO WASTE AS LITTLE OF MY FUTURE LIFESPAN MARRIED TO THIS WOMAN AS POSSIBLE."

In retrospect, the probing questions of the family situation probably would send a seasoned human resources professional into a fit of EEOC-induced apoplexy. If the HR folks contact me next week to let me know that I was denied the position and there are no further options for hiring, I am tempted to make them aware of interviewer's gaffe.

On Friday afteroon, I got a call from the recruiter who was representing the Local Growing Network Telephony Software Company. She said that she had in her notes that she was supposed to follow up with me earlier this week, but she could not remember what for. Now there's a way to build confidence! Loose track of your contacts and count on them to remember all the details.

After I summarized what we had talked about last time, she said she would send me some links to a programming tests. It looks like she sent me one for C++ and one for the .NET Framework, even though I told her that I had no experience developing for the latter.

I've Been in a Marriage with a Wife With No Name

Over at Unsolicited Advice: Wordpress Version, blogger magnate Digger Jones remarks:

One issue that 2Am’s wife (who needs a name, by the way)...

I'm too sapped to come up with a name, and this place needs some lightening up. I'm opening up the comment line for nominations.

As for the rest of his post, I think it's a bit late for sexual experimentation. I fear that making her aware of masculine chastitywear just might tempt her to demand that I wear one as part of a divorce decree. (shudder)

I appreciate the thought, though, Dr. Digger!

Relationship between Differentiation and Enmeshment

Digger Jones writes in a comment:

I'm still noodling a bit about this "differentiation" concept, and I have read excerpts you've pointed to Schnarch's writing. Is fusion akin to the codependent concept of enmeshmet?

Close. Enmeshment is one manifestation of emotional fusion. The other is avoidance.

In Bowenian Family Systems Theory, upon which Schnarch based his own work, differentiation of self is a balancing act between individuality and togetherness. In Bowen's eyes, enmeshment and avoidance were two sides of the same coin.

Avoidance was the byproduct of being so emotionally entangled with someone in a negative sense that one had to be physically distant. Closer proximity would produce intolerable levels of anxiety in the avoider.

I should note that the term differentiation of self is from Bowenian Theory, but the term fusion is something Schnarch coined. Bowen's work focused on relationships between family members. Schnarch's contribution was to suggest that the strength of intimate relationships and the quality of sex therein depended on the level of differentiation.

Addressing Reader Curiosities

In a comment, a reader identifying herself as "Michelle" writes:

1) How do you feel about Kristy's comment about her experience with Schnarch and her marriage? Does it resonate with you in anyway? 2) Would you consider separating from your wife instead of divorcing...or does that just drag out the inevitable?

Kristy's story was reassuring to me. I've read the couples' stories in Passionate Marriage and seen the sessions that were featured on Dateline NBC about a year ago, but up until Kristy posted her comment, I had not heard a first person testimonial of someone who had gone through the process. I am grateful that she took the time to share her story.

The story resonates with me in several places. Take this passage from her story:

I am severely depressed and my husband increasing distant. One night we have a big blow out where he asks me questions that I answer in a way that convince me I am unlovable and he continues that thread by telling me he doesn't love me. The next day I realized I was wrong. I am a great person. I told him this and why. Something happened. I *snapped* out of my depression.

This is the point where differentiation of self really kicked in in her story.

For me, the process has been much slower. I went through many years feeling like I was somehow broken because my wife didn't desire me. When I tried to assert myself in the relationship, my wife's responses reinforced this idea that I, too, was unlovable.

She threw every excuse in the book at me... she was too tired, I was too needy, she got her validation from other areas of life so it wasn't as important to her, I was too heavy, my body grossed her out, people stopped kissing passionately when they got older, she didn't feel "emotionally close to me", I was just an addict looking for a sexual fix, I wanted a whore in bed. She had a whole funhouse of mirrors to play with my reflected sense of self. My emotional fusion with my wife led me to take these negative depictions as reality.

If Kristy's remarks resonate with me well, then this remark from an Anonymous reader harmonizes beautifully.

You have a right to intimacy, period. Your wife doesn't get to dictate if you're worthy of affection - it's disrespectful of her to think she does.

If you look at the interactions with my wife in this blog, that appears to be a recurring theme. She treats the expression of affection as an imposition, almost a violation of her integrity. She refuses to acknowledge that both the relationship and I suffer when this happens.

Kristy was fortunate that they hit critical mass at a much lower anxiety point. Her husband seemed to be willing to "show up" and work through his crucible as well.

Thus far, my wife has not shown the same desire to do so in our therapy sessions. Either she doesn't want this relationship to survive, or she is in deep denial that it's still business as usual, and I will sell myself out as I have done in the past.

I think we're more like Peter and Audrey in Chapter 11 or Joe and Faye in Chapter 13 in Passionate Marriage, where the fusion level is so great that the high desire partner has to "test the waters of divorce" in order to bring the other side to his or her senses, not through empty ultimatums, but through quiet resolve.

I don't think a separation, either in the informal or legal sense, does any good. Taking the job on the West Coast pretty much slams the door on reconciliation, unless she undergoes some massive conversion and opens up to the idea of relocation.

Given my experiences with her at the reins of our household finances, I don't trust her to behave responsibly under an informal separation. That just opens wide the possibility that the will overspend or take on large amounts of debt out of spite or emotional distress.

Under my state's laws, legal separations are only good for one year. Once the duration comes to an end, the couple must either reconcile or file for divorce. When I talked to a divorce attorney a month ago, she recommended against it.

Learning to be Your Own Bridge

When you're down and out, when you're on the street,
when evening falls so hard, I'll comfort you.
I'll take your part, oh, when darkness comes and pain is all around,
like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.

-- Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Bridge Over Troubled Water

It is a lonely hour in my life, but it is also one of quiet resolve.

I pulled from the photo scan archives a picture I took up in southern Michigan in the early 90s. It is that of a local train delivering cars to an industrial plant. To get there, the train had to traverse a small bridge spanning the St. Joseph River. Clicking on the image will take you to a higher resolution version.



The scene is deceptively tranquil, but if you look at the foot of the bridge, you will see small buoys warning of the steep drop ahead.

The path to differentiation is learning that you are your own bridge over the troubled waters. I can, and will, handle this.

A Realization and A Declaration

Now I ain't sayin' it's right or it's wrong
But maybe its the only way
Talk about your revolution
It's Independence Day

-- Martina McBride, "Independence Day", Wake Up Laughing

This post is a recap of discussions and therapy sessions from the past few days and some of the insights that I drew from them.

With the kids away at my dad and stepmom's place over the weekend, my wife and I had two dialogues. On Saturday morning, we had a long, calm, unfocused discussion of various facets of our relationship. Then on Sunday morning, we had a followup discussion that started to overheat.

The joint counseling session on Monday addressed two areas of those dialogues, and then I reviewed the discussion with my therapist on Tuesday.

The Big Saturday Dialogue (or: Camel... I Think I'll Paint the Walls Camel)

We spent around three hours on Saturday morning and afternoon discussing relationship matters. I disclosed and clarified some things we had talked about earlier in the week. She didn't volunteer much information but answered questions that I threw out to keep the dialogue moving.

It was tough for me to keep everything in chronological order. What follows is a transcription of some information I jotted down later that evening so that I wouldn't forget things.

I restated that from my standpoint, I faced a very difficult pair of choices. One one hand, I faced the prospect of losing my marriage and day-to-day contact with the kids. On the other, I faced sacrificing my career and any hopes for a satisfying sex life.

I said that the concern about career was very real because of my age and our current location. Insisting on staying here while trying to foster real career growth would be like her planting a flower in sand rather than rich potting soil and expecting it to thrive.

I expressed concern that a failure to actually make a choice in my dilemma might result in the same issues coming up later, and that I might deal with them in less constructive ways like a mid-life crisis.

She said she was worried that if I did take the job out in the Silicon Valley, I would only see the girls two weeks out of the year and that I would regret it. She also said that she thought I would become a hermit out there.

She asked me if I would be happier if we just curtailed our lifestyle so that I could take a job that doesn't pay as much and stay here. I told her that I didn't think that was a good solution. In taking the offer from the Online Payment Subsidiary seriously, I was keeping in mind that this would be a long term investment to keep my career rewarding both financially and emotionally.

I said that I felt like I had sacrificed a lot in agreeing to move to our current location in 2000. She got defensive and said that it was just as much my decision as it was hers. I reminded her that the primary reason for moving here was her best friend, with proximity to her friends house heavily influencing the site location. I said that the decision to work offsite cut out any growth potential because my ex-employer's upper management didn't like to promote the telecommuters.

I said that her decision to refuse relocation because it would mean losing her support network of friends came across to me as a strong message. I felt as if her loyalty to them was stronger than to me. I said that said a lot about her feelings about the strength of our marriage.

She tried to defend her position saying that it would take a long time to develop another set of friends, and that she wouldn't be able to go to therapy because she wouldn't have anyone to trust babysitting the kids.

I said that I think she either misinterpreted or misremembered the remark about "living without truly feeling alive" as a desire to die or kill myself. She refused to budge and said she remembered me saying something about wishing I was dead. She couldn't identify the time frame for the remark, though.

I asked her about what her sexual thoughts were like before we met. For example, did she have fantasies? Did she explore herself sexually? She said that she really didn't think about the act of sex in her teens and early college years.

She said she fantasized about having boyfriends and sort of romance novel like sex, but nothing explicit. Interest in sex seemed to increase after she started rooming with two close girlfriends after her junior year in college. Both of those friends were very sexually active. This was just before we started dating.

Shortly before we started dating, she said that she "threw herself" at one of the managers at the restaurant where she waitressed because she said she had feelings for him.

I said that I felt like she tried to use shame and guilt to control me and to shut down discussions of our sex life. I pointed to specific examples, like the whore in bed charge, and the wanting it five times a week accusation. I said that she seized upon pieces of what I was saying, then exaggerate or distort them to put me on the defensive. I said I couldn't understand why she was focused so heavily on masturbation during the last session.

She said she wasn't distorting things and that she had a right to bring up masturbation because I was saying things that ran counter to my prior admission of sexual addiction. She said it sounded like I was trying to minimize the significance of my behavior, and that made her concerned.

I said that I wasn't looking for just a whore in bed, and it wasn't about having a whole lot of sex. I do want a partner who is equally involved in the act, is willing to communicate desires openly, and is willing to be creative to keep things from getting boring.

I said that early on in our relationship, I believed that if I tried to make things as pleasurable as possible for her, her interest in sex would increase. My diagnosis as a sex addict made me feel less valid with regards to what I wanted. I managed to come up with reasons to hope that her desire would one day increase.

If not sexual sobriety, then perhaps giving her the things she wanted, like a house and kids, might make a difference. When she complained of pressure, I gave her time and space, leaving the role of initiator to her. I even clinged to her old friend's advice that once my wife moved into her 30s, things would improve. None of that ever happened.

I asked her which she would prefer: Being able to increase her sexual desire for me or me decreasing my own desire so it wasn't an issue. She skirted past the question, but she did say that even if I did do things that made her feel close to me emotionally, she couldn't guarantee that her desire would increase.

I said that I started to develop an awareness that she just wasn't interested in my sexual satisfaction back in the spring of 2004, just before we were to do the IVF/ICSI that would bring us our second daughter.

A couple days before I was to give up my sample, I needed to "clean out the pipes" as they say. Given that she had issues with masturbation and that I wanted to feel close to her, I asked her if she would be willing to help out with her hands. She said that I could take care of myself. At that point, I started to feel abandoned sexually by her.

I said that her lack of effort, from the partial reading of Sex Starved Marriage to her eventual cessation of individual therapy, made me feel like she wasn't really committed. I said that in reviewing past events throughout our relationship, I wondered if her low sex drive was something that was irretrievably fixed.

She asked me what made me wonder about that. I told her that it went as far back as when we had started to get really physical in the relationship. I recalled her having to stop heavy kissing to go vomit. She said I was overplaying the significance of it, and that she was just really nervous.

I said the concern continues to this day with her unwillingness to touch my genitals with her hands. She said I didn't give her enough credit for at least trying to pleasure me with my pajama pants on back in February. I replied that most women who have been married for 11 years would not have troubles touching their husbands penises.

She brought the focus back to the addiction stuff, saying she couldn't understand why I was seemingly contradicting so many things I had said from past therapies.

I said that I didn't believe that I fit under the label of a sex addict in the sense of people whose sexual activities get them in trouble with the law or create serious health risks.

My compulsive sexual activities from the early to mid 90s were better understood from the perspective that I was using in my current therapy. I didn't have a solid self to keep me going through times of high anxiety levels. I relied on masturbation and pornography to keep the anxiety in check.

The 12-step programs might have stopped the behavior, but they didn't really help me develop the ability to self soothe in the face of anxiety. Moreover, they reinforced this notion of me being forever cursed with some sort of disease. She said she didn't buy the argument.

I talked some about how I had changed over the years. I said that when we first started dating, I was just happy to belong to someone, and was so bent on having what looked like a successful relationship, I overlooked the fact that I was suppressing a lot of who I was for the sake of harmony.

With the latest round of therapy, I was beginning to see that I had some value as an individual human being and I was much more capable of handling the stresses of life. I honed these skills with self confrontation and the job search. The ability to self validate enabled me to cope with life much more realisitcally than the recovery literature did.

I tried to get her to think some about the origins of her dysfunctional communication behaviors, but I didn't say that right at the outset because I knew she wouldn't go there. I led off by recalling some of the things we had talked about during the marriage counseling in August of last year.

I mentioned some of the things that she said made her unhappy with her dad. I asked her what it was like when she had conflicts with him. She said she couldn't remember specifics. I asked her whether he handled confrontation or dissent very well. She said that he didn't do well with either. I asked her whether those experiences might have had an impact on her. She refused to explore that any further.

I asked her if she hated me for anything, noting that when one buries away hatreds and fails to acknowledge them, they can result in behind the scenes fighting. She said that she felt like she hated me when her brother was dying back in 2003. I remember her talking about her unhappiness with me about that in marriage counseling.

I thought for a few minutes, and then asked her whether it was my reluctance to be bedside with her and the rest of her family when they turned off her brother's life support to let him die. She said she couldn't remember exactly what it was, but that her best friend and her husband, who had spent time at the hospital as well, noted that I was acting like a self-centered jerk.

She said that she felt like I had abandoned her. She also said that she regretted going through with the IVF/ICSI that next year because she said she felt like I had "checked out" of the relationship by then.

I asked her if whether she had thought about what life after a divorce would be like. Did she see herself finding someone new. She said she didn't see herself going to bars. I said that I didn't foresee her doing that, either. I did picture her getting involved with a church and meeting someone that way. She said she'd probably just focus more on the kids.

I asked her if there was anything else she wanted to say. She started crying and then thanked me for "giving her the girls".

We wrapped up the conversation and went out for lunch. Later that afternoon, my wife went out for a couple hours to shop for paint. She came back with a couple gallons of a color she said was "camel". She wanted to paint the living room while the kids were away, and that she didn't need any help from me. She worked on that from shortly after 6 p.m. until 1 a.m. on Sunday.

Around 9 p.m., I went to a nearby coffee shop to ponder our discussion, jotting down as much as I could recall onto a notepad.

The Brief Heated Sunday Dialogue

On Sunday morning, I reconnected with my wife after breakfast, asking her if she had anything to say about yesterday's conversation. She said that she still wasn't convinced about my refusal to label my sexuality as pathological.

She said, "I know you're a smart person, and you can come up with ways to minimize things and come up with excuses for why you could start acting out again."

She said that she was worried that the frequency of my masturbation was going to lead to something unhealthy. I asked her what she defined as "unhealthy". She then dug up things I had said back in my early days in recovery, when I drew up very stringent requirements about what I could not do sexually.

That included things like masturbation and went as far as triggers like looking at other women for "too long" (one of the 12 step programs on sex addiction recovery institutes a 3-second limit rule).

I tried to bring the conversation back to the question. I said, "That's no my point. Stick to the question, what unhealthy behaviors are you worried about?" By then, she was starting to tear up and said that she didn't feel comfortable continuing the conversation.

I said that it bothered me that she tried to use guilt and shame to make me feel bad about myself sexually. I said that questioning me about frequency and instances of masturbation was "just plain weird".

I said I felt like she wanted it both ways. She wanted me to stay in a committed relationship and give her the things that she wanted, but she wanted to reserve the right to repeatedly punish me for things that hadn't happened in over a decade.

She then said she didn't want to discuss it further. I knew that unless I put together a comprehensive, rigorous defense of my stance for the joint session the next day, that's all that we'd be talking about.

The Monday Joint Counseling Session

At the joint session, it was my turn to lead things off, so I talked about how we had spoken some over the weekend, noting some of the points that I had scribbled down on Saturday night.

I then brought up my wife's remark about feeling abandoned during her brother's death. I said that I didn't realize at the time just how deeply my conduct had hurt her.

I then said that my reluctance to stand with her bedside wasn't because of a lack of empathy. It was because I couldn't effectively handle all of the anxiety around me, especially her mother's severe distress.

I said that my emotional immaturity at the time made it impossible for me to deal with the situation in a reasonable manner, so I cut myself off emotionally. I realized that I could have dealt with the situation better by being more resilient in the face of everyone's anxiety, and I apologized for acting so poorly.

I brought up the negativity that my wife uses in talking about sex, citing the "whore in bed" remark. Her therapist asked my wife to clarify. She said that by "whore" she meant that I wanted her to talk "dirty" to me during sex "all the time". She complained that it seemed like I wanted her to do so much every time we had sex.

We got on the subject of sexual addiction. I handed out copies of the statement I prepared and had everyone read along, so there wouldn't be as much information overload. My therapist added some clarifying remarks about Bowenian Family Systems Theory and the notion of differentiation so that my wife's therapist would understand where I was coming from.

My wife's therapist said that it sounded like I had put together a well thought out basis for my claim, but she was worried that I might become complacent. Even if I did manage to avoid acting out behaviors after all these years, she said that I could be vulnerable to a slip or relapse if I were to go through another stressful time.

It didn't occur to me until later, but I should have informed her that the past year has probably been one of the most stressful times in my life. If I was going to crack, I probably would have by now.

I did mention that I had not tampered with the porn tape collection that she was supposed to take to the video store for buyback, even though it had sat in the back of her minivan and in the garage for over two weeks. I said that if she really was as worried about my addiction as she says she is, I would think she would want to get rid of them sooner rather than later.

She also brought up the importance of involving the "whole family" in the recovery process. She asked my wife about her recovery work as a codependent. My wife talked about the few times that she went to CODA or S-Anon meetings, but admitted that she had not done much work in this area.

She said that when I masturbated in bed while she slept, she could sometimes tell that I was doing it, and it made her feel icky inside. She said that sometimes she wanted to leave room. I said that if it bothered her, all she would need to do is say something to me, and I would do it somewhere else. Her therapist chimed in, emphasizing the importance of talking and communicating.

The session concluded on a much less negative note than the last time. I walked my wife to her minivan after the session. She told me that she still didn't fully believe my arguments about sexual addiction.

Later that day, I did some more digging about what Schnarch has written about sex addiction and turned up another passage from his more scholarly book Constructing the Sexual Crucible.

He takes a scathing look at the whole field, arguing that treating unchecked sexual desire from the standpoint as a disease rather than a lack of emotional maturity actually encourages poor differentiation.

His citation of a passage from the seminal work on sexual addiction, Patrick Carnes' Out of the Shadows reminded me why I was so willing to give up so much sexually many years ago. It talks about setting boundaries based on the reaction of the partner, and that's exactly what I wound up doing. For example, if masturbating made my wife wig out, then it had to go.

The Tuesday Individual Counseling Session

My private therapy session was a good digesting of the joint counseling session.

I started off by noting what I had found in Schnarch regarding sex addiction treatment and emotional fusion.

My therapist said that my wife's monitoring and cross examination of my masturbation was intrusive and controlling.

We distilled from my wife's focus on sex addiction that she has an unwillingness to trust me. Moreover, her lack of effort in doing some form of recovery work showed that she didn't have any desire to deal with it, either.

My therapist asked me if I knew whether my wife had undergone any major traumas or grief around the ages of 6 - 7 or 13 - 14. I said that I wasn't aware of anything. Up until last year, all of her grandparents were still alive. The first loss of kin was her uncle, which happened in 1993.

We talked about her friendships, both her bondedness with the best friend and the preschool mom as well as friends that had come and gone. She wondered if my wife had a tendency to focus so heavily on one particular person as a friend that it drained the friend's energy.

I said she had two best friends in her school years. One went back as far as kindergarten, and the other might have been established in middle school. The kindergarten friend roomed with her the first year of college, and they stopped being close after that. The other friend is her lesser best friend who lives about an hour away. They're in close touch, but not as close as it has been since her friend's marriage turned really rocky.

I did notice that the best friend, for whom we had moved here, was on the wane. I attributed that to less availability timewise since she now works at a part time job. Up until 2006, they saw each other almost every day, talked on the phone several times a day, and there were several times a week that they would either eat at our house or we would eat at theirs. When I asked my wife about the decline a few months ago, she said she had "become tired of feeding them all the time."

From that, I surmised that she's not so much the vampire because she's the one who usually got tired of the friendships.

My therapist said that from the joint sessions and my own accounts, it almost sounded like my wife would rather just have me be a sexless person. Someone to spend time with, raise the kids with, but not get physically intimate. I told her about how my wife dodged the question of whether she would rather see her desire increase or my desire wane.

The therapist then asked whether it was a question of my wife's unwillingness to work on the sexual part of the relationship or her inability to do so because of unresolved issues of just being intimate with someone. She said she couldn't quite tell from the joint sessions. She then asked me whether it mattered. I responded by saying that a compassionate person might be inclined to be more forgiving of someone who is unable rather than unwilling.

She said that it's very likely that I was a very different person when I met her from whom I am now. Maybe she hasn't grown in the same way, and so the relationship has become unstable.

I said that her unwillingness to trust in my sexuality, and her refusal to work seriously on her desire issues suggest that she does not want to make herself vulnerable. And without vulnerability, there is no such thing as intimacy.

That made me realize something big. As much as I have been reluctant to come right out and say to my wife that "it's over", I have failed to realize that her actions all serve a central goal, the avoidance of intimacy. She can disparage me by saying she doesn't feel close to me emotionally, but she doesn't see that closeness is going to take a lot of work on her part.

After realizing this, I told my therapist that it was tough to say that I was giving up on the marriage. She suggested that I reframe the issue. This wasn't necessarily giving up. It was also taking responsibility for developing my own potential. It was giving my wife the chance to lead a life where she doesn't have someone badgering her for something she can't or won't give. She encouraged me to think of other ways to look at this as another step in growth for both of us.

The lyrics at the beginning of this post summarize the state of my mind on this day. While I conclude with greater clarity that this marriage has reached a state of irrecoverable breakdown, it is not with rejoicing. It is a solemn declaration of conviction that I would compromise my personal integrity by any other means.

Sometime later this week, I should be verifying that the position at the Online Payment Subsidiary is still mine for the taking. Once that is done, I'll have a talk with my wife about my desire to dissolve this union. I need to make this known to her before the next joint session, which takes place on Monday.

Some Housekeeping Notes

I've made some updates to the Larger Voices Calling list of links on the right sidebar. I've added the blogs of those who have commented in this space recently and those whose blogs who have added links to me. I've also included some parallel blogs, including the complete Digger Jones media empire.

Further on down the sidebar, you will find that the feed list now includes links to the Atom feed that contains complete post contents and a feed for reader comments.

Finally, if you're curious about the photo in my Blogger profile, it's not the symbol of some esoteric cult. It is the herald (logo) for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a corporate entity that ceased to exist in February of 1968 as a result of its merger with the New York Central System.

If you wander about the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S., you'll find traces of this herald on overpasses and rolling stock. This particular photo is a detail of a boxcar that was sitting stored in a railroad yard in southern Indiana in the mid 1980s. I always loved the look of the keystone with the interlocking letters.

If You Read Only One Comment on this Blog, Read This One

A reader identifying herself as "Kristy" shares her own experiences in the Sexual Crucible. Read the whole thing.

My Wife's Recovery

Updated at 10:39 p.m. on 7/2/2007 to include additional information about my wife's time in counseling.

In the comment on the last post, Therese posts some good questions:

Did your wife have any help in dealing with it when she found out? Why don't you two have the same therapist?

It's interesting that you bring this up because her therapist talked about the importance of involving not just the addict but the family (read: spouse) into the recovery process. She's had several opportunities, but I don't think she's ever bought into the relevance of the Twelve Steps for codependency.

When she first learned about the phone sex, we were living in a community that did not have a 12-step group for codependents of sex addicts (e.g. COSA or S-Anon). I encouraged her to go to a more generic group, CODA. She went to one meeting, said that she didn't get much out of it, and then didn't go back.

She chose to cope with it by talking with her best friend (the one for whom we moved to our current location and for whom almost moved a second time). The best friend's husband had been diagnosed as a sex addict about a year prior for having had multiple affairs. The best friend eventually moved to an area where there were codependent groups for sexual addiction. Her response was about the same, she stopped going to them because she said she wasn't getting anything out of them.

After I left graduate school and we relocated in 1995, I learned that our new location had meetings for both sex addicts and codependents, so I encouraged her to get in touch with the codependent group. She went to the meetings for about a year. There were two or three other women who attended on a regular basis, and she formed a strong friendship with one of them. As that relationship strengthened, she and the friend stopped going to the meetings. When I asked her why she didn't go to the meetings anymore, she said that the literature didn't really mean much to her and that she got more out of just talking and venting with the friend.

When we moved to our present location, where the codependent groups are more abundant, my wife refused to go.

The reason that we have different therapists goes back to the first round of counseling back in August of last year. We went for six sessions. By the fifth session, we had come back from the brink of collapse and decided that maybe we should work on our own issues.

She continued to see an individual therapist for five or six more sessions, and then quietly stopped going in the fall. I started seeing a therapist in October.

She started seeing a different therapist in early April after we had a big argument about sex. This was at the suggestion of my therapist, who then added that we might start meeting jointly sometime in the near future.

Addendum: When I wrote this post, I neglected to include some information about my wife's time in counseling.

When she first found out about the phone sex calls in the fall of 1994, she saw a therapist for a few sessions through her employer's EAP.

As tension over the question to have children started to heat up in the spring of 1997, my wife started seeing an individual therapist. He also worked with her some with regards to the final slip in late 1997.

I was brought in to several sessions at the request of her therapist, whom I found to be quite fair. There were times when he said things that my wife strongly disagreed with, and in one session, she just sat there sulking quietly, answering questions tersely, but not really involved.

During the first try at IVF/ICSI in 2002, our fertility clinic paired us up with a counselor for a couple of sessions.

Sexual Addiction Revisited

Those of you who have read the background material on this blog know that the relationship between my wife and me was damaged early on by clandestine, compulsive sexual behavior. I spent several years in therapy and in twelve step fellowships to recover from this behavior.

Although I have refrained from this for about ten years, my wife still has issues with it. It has become much clearer now in the wake of one of my disclosures from the first joint session.

I no longer considered my sexuality to be pathological, and I began to reassert my right to pleasure myself sexually.

My wife raised her objections during the second session, and she continued to express skepticism over the weekend. She has trouble believing me, she says, and I have a feeling that unless I address this issue head on, it will be the only thing that we talk about during today's session at noon.

With that in mind, here is an attempt to put my assertion on a more rigorous footing.

Let me make something clear from the outset: my clandestine, compulsive use of phone sex services and pornography, were not healthy. They damaged the trust between my wife and me. They set us back financially for years. I wasted way too much time on them. They impeded my emotional growth.

The last nine months of therapy have led me to revisit the diagnosis of these behaviors as an addiction. While the time I spent in therapy and twelve step groups in the early years did help me to stop the behavior, it left me with a negative view of my sexuality because every sexual thought or deed of mine now had to be viewed through the prism of being chronically diseased.

Moreover, as time passed and I ceased these behaviors, I realized that the sexual relationship with my wife worsened. Even as we moved past the two choice dilemma of children, sex became less frequent and increasingly disengaged.

In 2002, over four years since my last slip, she said wanted me to stop initiating sex because she said she felt pressured to have sex. With the ball in her court, a monthly activity degenerated into a quarterly activity that was just an offer of a "quickie". We went through an 18 month period where she was so absent from the activity that I couldn't maintain arousal.

At the beginning of 2006, I tried engaging her on a more emotional level. After years of resisting, I signed us up for dance lessons. While this seemed to boost her willingness to initiate sex, it was still mostly "quickies". By the summer of 2006, I was losing my patience and started to push back against what she was willing to offer. She resisted foreplay, and when I asked for an explanation, she couldn't offer one.

By the fall of 2006, I was beginning to realize that forcing the issue with her wasn't doing any good. No amount of communication exercises with a marriage counselor was going to make any progress because my wife didn't want to talk about it. She's become very effective at shutting down uncomfortable discussions with guilt and shame. If you take a look at some of her statements from prior sessions:

• You just want a whore in bed.


• You just want to snuggle with me naked all the time.

and some things she's said in private discussion:

• I felt like having sex last night, but because I didn't feel emotionally close to you, I wasn't going to do it.


• You just want me to give you sex five times a week.

it's easy to see that she uses negative characterizations and exaggeration to put me on the defensive, inducing either guilt or shame in me.

It's worked fairly well over the years because my sense of validity was tightly coupled to her expressions of approval and disapproval. Bowenian family systems therapy would describe this dependency as a poor differentiation of self. Therapist David Schnarch calls it emotional fusion.

No amount of communication exercises can overcome this barrier because one side can always shut down the other by manipulating the image of self that is reflected back. Statements of the form:

If you were just a better person in some aspect of our relationship, I'd have more desire for you.

are really effective at making the other person feel bad about one's self.

The latest round of individual therapy has been about raising my level of differentiation so that I am no longer stymied by this.

Differentiation is the balance between individuality and togetherness, and the imbalance between them is driven by anxiety. Movement towards individuality is driven by a fear of engulfment, and togetherness is driven by a fear of abandonment.

From this standpoint, it becomes clear that I have based a lot of decisions on fears of abandonment. Neither of my parents were deeply engaged in my life. My grandparents stepped in to fill the void, but they had a poor sense of boundaries and used emotional cutoff to punish noncompliance. My mother left the marriage and moved away in my early adolescent years.

Throughout my childhood and teen years, my mother had a low tolerance for the expression of anxiety and fear. She dismissed my anxieties as invalid, offering only glib reassurances that a better future awaited if I only did the right things (study hard, have a successful career). Approval seemed to only come when I did those things.

I never developed good coping skills to deal with anxiety, and it certainly wasn't safe to make them known. Things only worked if I kept up the facade of perfection. I felt like an impostor who was going to get uncovered someday.

The teen years were awkward for me. Girls saw me as someone who was "safe", someone whom they could talk to, but not real dating material. I felt fundamentally unattractive. With hormones raging, and an aversion to consumable vices, I found masturbation to be a good way of escaping anxiety for a while.

As I moved from the teens into the adult years I continued to enjoy academic success. Anxiety is inevitable in such a situation, and deep down I had a nagging feeling that I really wasn't "good enough".

In this skewed view, I had escaped detection one more time. For each time I didn't get exposed, I feared that the fall from grace was going to be that much more painful. I never could quite come to terms with the notion that I might be truly capable of living up to my perceived potential.

Once in graduate school, I started to call phone sex services. In retrospect, I realize that my gravitation toward them wasn't due to some addiction to the sexual activity. One of the reasons that the bills got so expensive was because I would talk to the women for a long time, the majority of it wasn't about the act of sex. It was about trying to get to know the person. I got the benefit of approving interaction without the fear of rejection and embarrassment.

The reliance on sexual gratification for subduing anxiety continued even after I entered into an intimate relationship. Someone with a higher level of differentiation would have learned to deal with the axiety by developing better self soothing skills or maybe even avoiding a sexual relationship until he could truly keep the commitment.

With a sense of self that was shaped largely through the approval of others, rather than a solid core, I relied on deception to continue a contradictory lifestyle. I needed (my wife)'s approval and I wanted to avoid dealing with the anxiety of life.

When (my wife) finally became aware of the behavior, I soon entered a recovery program. Instead of developing the solid sense of self that I needed to become more emotionally mature, I got caught up in the twelve-step literature, taking it on as doctrine.

Working the program helped me refrain from the compulsive behavior in the short run, but I believe that a big part of the motivation was a fear that (my wife) would leave. After about seven months, I went into relapse because I was not addressing the really big issue, which was how to better manage the anxiety.

More therapy and some more 12-step work helped some, but real growth started to take root as I made some progress up the career ladder at my (ex-employer), moving from tech support into software development. Overcoming the fear of being a father and the lessons of parenthood have helped, too.

Still, I had a lot of doubts about my professional adequacy and my attractiveness. My wife's lack of desire didn't help much in this area. I was depending too much on the approval of others to develop my sense of well being.

I learned about Schnarch last summer after seeing him featured on a Dateline NBC episode about sexless marriages. I read his book Passionate Marriage, and another book No More Mr. Nice Guy by therapist Robert Glover.

Schnarch's work helped me see our relationship in a different light. It helped me to understand better the paradox a dead sex life in the face of increased sexual health. Glover helped me to understand the impact of early experiences on my anxiety and how my ways of coping with it were ineffective.

I started to confront my fears of professional inadequacy as a developmental task. I was becoming increasingly aware that my current employer was on shaky financial footing, so I had ample motivation.

My resume started to attract the attention of companies that I didn't expect, places farther away. I took a chance and started interviewing with them. It was a perfect opportunity to work on self-soothing skills. I managed to do fairly well, and I landed an offer with one of them. I was learning to self-validate and raising my level of differentiation.

Over the same period of time, I began to believe that it was okay to have sexual desires. I started to question the lack of sexual activity in my life. I realized that my wife had issues with sexuality that had nothing to do with me. They probably were present even before she entered into the relationship, and she managed to dodge them effectively by redirecting the attention to my sexuality, which was considered "pathological". Moreover, I haven't seen a sincere willingness from her to deal with them.

Over the weekend, my wife said that she thought I was just finding a way to dismiss my addiction as something that wasn't real. That's not true. Addiction or not, what I did back then was wrong.

The problem is that the viewpoint of sexuality as a disease doesn't help me to grow into a more differentiated person. Learning to tolerate and act in the face of anxiety does.

That same process that helps me to get through difficult interviews and land better jobs helps me to refrain from using pornography or even having affairs. I do it because I want to be a person who values both himself and his commitments.

The flipside of this is that having a solid inner sense self worth means that I am less willing to tolerate sexual laziness and emotional abuse from my wife. I can transcend the fear of abandonment and leave, if I believe that staying would compromise my integrity.