I am experiencing it now. I haven’t had sex with my husband for over 10 years. Sometimes when I talk he turns up the volume. I keep hoping he will find someone else as I am too gutless to end this train wreck.

Indigo, I am going to give you praise for finally realizing what you can control and what you can’t control. I had to look into my own codependence to finally understand my own negative choices in life. I used to try to change everyone but me. Now I believe we can only change ourselves. If anyone else is going to change, they have to want to change, and have to do their own work to change. This sentence you wrote spoke volumes to me “I truly believed that his lack of love for me was something I could fix my changing myself and my actions.” BINGO! This is often the lesson of our lives. I thought I could change others and make them appreciate me, love me, find me valuable and only then would I feel good about myself. I was always sort of in limbo. Then I started working on finding myself valuable and like you said, found a freedom of sorts.

You also wrote: “It’s been two plus years of me being told (by my partner and therapists) that it’s my job to be patient. ..to give him time.” You wrote about trying not to be overly emotional, whatever that means. Sometimes any emotion, whether realistic in the situation or not, is seen as not acceptable by our partners, parents, friends, etc. They do something ugly to us and we are not allowed to get angry, for example. Or the pet dies, and we are not allowed to be sad and upset. Sometimes people do have fluctuating and over whelming emotional outbursts that they can’t control and this can be more of a mental health diagnosis. Not saying this is you in your situation but I have known many people who either have fluctuating and out of control emotions or absolutely no emotions. Either one is difficult to deal with or live with.

But I think two years is long enough to know something is, or is not, working. And by this I mean whatever goal we are working towards or whatever technique we are using – at some point it is clear we either have success or failure. So perhaps now is the time to focus on yourself and the new baby instead of focusing on him and his issues. This will give you a break from trying to “make him love you.” And by stopping the focus on changing him, you can relax into meeting your own needs and the needs of the new baby.

I was also married to someone who could not give love for close to 30 years! I knew in the first year I had made a mistake but shame kept me bound to him and my own self talk that everything was okay. His issue was different from your husbands but the lack of ability to love another or give to another was always there which I denied to myself. I had a bunch of kids and choose to stay long enough to get them raised so that they would not have weekend visitation with this man. I had good reasons that I won’t go into here but those years were both long and difficult and at the same time, there were rewarding moments, fun moments. So yes, I had a lot of years where my love was dying and then did die with this man. Years I planned my escape and he never knew because he didn’t listen to me, refused to accept my boundaries, and was narcissistic. He never noticed, he was busy doing his own thing. Sometimes I think I made a mistake waiting so long to divorce and other times I think how screwed up my kids would have been if he had been in charge of them on his weekend visitations (think neglect, substance abuse, anger management issues). When I was pregnant with my third is when I realized the extent of his “flaws” and that the marriage would never be good but I still tried to change him for another 15 years probably. I was a slow learner. But once I stopped trying to change him, and I worked on fixing what I needed to fix within me, then I did find a freedom as you wrote. It was freeing to focus on me, on my kids, and what the rest of my life would be like. I also had many times of anger at his dysfunctional behaviors and sorrow that I was going to divorce him and he had no idea because he wasn’t listening or being present in the moments I talked to him about our problems. Journaling my feelings helped in the harder times.