Rebooting and Cleaning up in a Marriage

Some women have that outlook on men. My mother is like that, not just with my father but with me as well. Whilst I think it is the man's role in the household to provide, it shouldn't be the only way in which he is perceived to hold value. So I could understand you feeling funny about that.

 

If she put up with your addiction she's not into it for the money. You don't act like an emasculated simp when you're not tugging the willy all the time. Consciously or subconsciously women know.

 

You can't really be fully prepared for children, it will challenge and grow you in ways you cannot imagine now! Start by trying to put your wife's needs first through pregnancy and post-partum, and love her and your child unconditionally. There is a father/husband support group called Dad Edge that I found very helpful during some crisis times. It would be great to be preemptive but you will have the best questions after going thru life circumstances, rather than before. Hard to hack that.

 

With regards to MO, I'm sure your wife could help clean out the pipes, as you put it. Hell, this is practically the only scenario where you can go to her and say, 'the doctor says we NEED to have sex'.

With regards to planning, there is a certain requirement for necessary space, equipment, logistics, etc. Is there a room/space for the child, crib, changing tables, nappies, muslins, clothes, etc.? Beyond that, you need a car with a good-rated car seat, a pram/buggy, etc. You also need a plan if your wife works for when she stops work, for how long, what to do in case she doesn't feel like returning after x months (very common). You just need to make sure you can meet your existing commitments and adjust everything accordingly.

With respect to dividing the labour, a lot of couples go in with the ambition of doing 50/50 in terms of child-rearing, but I personally think that's naive. Especially if you're breastfeeding, it's just not time-efficient for the man to be as involved as the woman in the early months/years of a child's life. They are better at it, the kids like them better, they like looking after them better. This is just my experience, but you're better off delineating roles along traditional lines, i.e., you work, she raises the kid, up until at least the point where she returns to work. I'm not saying do nothing, but do not commit to 50/50, that's a mistake in my view.

Beyond this, there are questions pertaining towards their early lives that you might not have thought about. For instance, along what sort of values are you raising the child? What's their faith, what sort of morals do you emphasise, are there things you want them protected from? What about screen time, do they get to watch tv/use an ipad, if so, at what age and how often? Do you take a firm approach to discipline (e.g., smacking) or a 'gentle parenting' approach? What about childcare and schooling, grandparent/family involvement, their diet, etc. These are things that parents tend to argue about in the early years, so you want to do your research and agree terms beforehand. Get the stuff you care about most agreed and out the way, that way you've always that agreement to fall back on when difference of opinion arises.

This might seem like quite a businesslike way to go about planning for a child, but trust me when I say you want to negotiate favourable terms for how a child ought to be raised and your role in that.

 

Money and work definitely goes way up the priority list when you're expecting a first child, makes sense to prepare for that. With regards to PMO, everyone handles stress differently, but for me it distracted from PMO urges rather than drove them. You don't have time to jack it, you've got bigger fish to fry.

 

This is something I've been in the midst of for the last 4 years. You can do it. I do think the best order of operations is to remove the compulsive addiction issues that PMO cause first, because it will make things much better.

Every person is different of course, but pregnancy will likely cause your wife to either want lots of sex or none at all. That is extremely hard on someone dealing with this PMO addiction. It's easy to accept the high libido, not so much the other part. My wife's first pregnancy was also very different than our second in how she felt throughout.

There also are several phases that you will be faced with. First, a postpartum period where your wife's body will be healing. If you've already dealt with PMO addiction this will be a lot better than if you are still struggling with it, because sex will be off the table for a while. In my experience, childrearing almost extinguished my wife's libido instantly for many different reasons, and it's never really come back like it was before. This has been very hard for me. Being rid of the chemical imbalances of the brain will definitely help you in these times.

Then comes all the stages of child development. For my wife and I this has been very taxing on her. She doesn't handle the stress of a toddler in the "terrible two" stages very well. Relying on breastfeeding alone has been too because she's the only one who can get up to feed the baby. Trying to be a supportive partner/father while also running a small business is definitely a huge challenge. So often I feel torn so many different directions that I can't hardly think straight. Doing so while also going through this nofap journey has made it much harder yet! It sounds like you are on the right path man keep going!

 

I want to say- I breast fed exclusively and my husband was amazing! He got up, changed the babies and brought them to me in bed. He was an equal partner in breast feeding to me. I was so exhausted and just him doing this really, really helped. He took 6 weeks off work and I didn’t do much at all during that time. He was tired too, but he faithfully got up every 2 hours to bring the babies to me and if they didn’t fall to sleep immediately he took them and rocked them. I will forever cherish and be grateful to him for this. It is probably the only time in our marriage that I felt truly cared for. He could’ve slept while I got up and fed them but instead he sacrificed and was there for me.

 

Sorry to hear things are rough right now.

One thing you have to convince yourself of though is that your relapses outside of the clinic setting are not linked in any way to your MOing necessary for your fertility reasons. They are completely separate in that your relapse is fully in your control whether you are MOing at clinic or not.

I'm sure that it's causing you lots of chasers that are hard to deal with. That's where you'll have to start focusing though to get your streak going again.

The mind likes to play tricks on us on this stuff to lessen the dose of reality that we still are fully in control of our actions. Keep that focus on not relapsing outside the clinic, that's where you have to put your efforts.