My situation - apologies if this turns into a long post

Thank you for taking the trouble to reply. I agree that our relationship is fragile at the moment, with poor communication at the heart of it. The menopause hit her very hard and her hormones and emotions were all over the place for three or four years. She cut me off from sex completely during that time and that further fuelled my PMO habit as well as hurting me emotionally. When she finally started to emerge from the menopause nightmare about eighteen months ago, she regained her interest in sex and when we have sex now it is great - mutually satisfying and tender. I can honestly say that bringing her to O is the most rewarding and emotional experience I could wish for. If I had the choice of an O for me, or one for her, I would choose hers every time, even when I am feeling as pent up as I am at the moment. I truly love her. I quit PMO because I am not getting any younger and feared that if I continued to PMO, I would compromise my ability to satisfy her. It also made me feel shame and wasted a huge amount of my time.

This morning was bad and I don't think she knew why she was so low. We are spending quite a lot of money at the moment on new furniture, decorating etc. I am naturally more cautious than she is with money and she is much more particular about the way the house looks than I am. I suspect what was going through her head was 'What if I make <ANH> spend all of this money and in the end I don't like the new look.' I also suspect her hormone levels are still up and down and sometimes that makes it tough to take a cool, rational view. If every day was like today, I would be thumbing through the yellow pages looking for therapists right now. Happily it was the exception and mostly we are still on an upward direction. My hope is that with PMO behind me, the menopause behind her and better communication, starting with the 5 love languages, we can continue that upward trend and strengthen our 30 year relationship. If the bad days start to outnumber the good, then I will take your advice and look for outside help.

Thank you again for you kind words of support.

ANH

 

Thanks for the post Sadgirl

I don't think that my past P use is the cause of her current low mood (see my last post, above). Unlike most here, we have not had a recent showdown about P. It is not something we have discussed for probably ten years. The impetus to change at this time came only from me and at the moment she doesn't know that I have quit for good and am on NOFAP - I plan to tell her when I hit the 90 day mark and have an achievement worthy of the name. Having said all that, sex has been one of the few consistent areas of tension in our long relationship - and mostly arising from my wanting it more often than her, setting up the classic situation of her being unhappy because she feels pressured and me being unhappy because I feel rejected. So there is still something there that we need to resolve as we continue to work at our relationship. It may be that if we dig into it far enough - 10+ years back - that my use of P, or my interest in certain fetishes are a small or even large part of the problem. It may also have something to do with her being unhappy with her own body - she weighs more than 100lbs more now than she used to. I know she feels unattractive even though I think she is absolutely gorgeous and tell her so and she excites me like no other.

So I agree with you, Sadgirl, improved communication is vital and that is my goal starting this week with the 5 languages of love.

Thanks again for your thoughtful support.

ANH

 

Went to bed early as I was tired from lack of sleep the previous night. As expected, no visit from wife so now 10 days since we last had intimate time. Craving a touch, a kiss or a cuddle initiated by her.

Unfortunately I woke at 03:30 and was unable to get to sleep again because there are so many thoughts running around in my head.

My wife is still asleep as I write this and will probably still be asleep when I leave my house to take our daughter to an activity that she is doing this morning. I hope that when I get back my wife has woken up and is in a more positive frame of mind than yesterday. I found the distance between us very hard yesterday when I feel the need for touch.

ANH

 

Well, dear readers, after a couple of gloomy days in which this seemed like a very hard road, yesterday was the best day since I started NoFaP and in fact the best day my wife and I have had for months. This is going to be a long post but a very happy one. Please read it if you have time, but you might want to get yourself a coffee first! If you are too busy, but still interested, skip to the summary paragraph at the bottom.

I had to act as Dad taxi for my daughter taking her to a bush craft camp, coming home again and then 90 minutes later departing to ferry her and her friends to another destination before driving myself back home.

During the 90 minutes at home, my wife got up and it was immediately clear that the depression of the previous day had vanished overnight. She was back to her usual lovely self. Alone in the house, I fixed her breakfast and we chatted. Boosted by her good mood I decided to talk to her about the 5 love languages. She had heard of it and was receptive so I told her that i had done my own assessment and suggested she did hers and that we could talk about it later.

I then had to leave to be taxi man but was already feeling more optimistic as not only was my wife in a good mood, but we had started an open honest conversation about our relationship. As I left, she pointedly asked my what time I would be back and I said around 2. This meant that we would have from 2 until 7 in the house together, just the two of us, which is a real rarity during the day.

<Warning, potential triggers ahead>

When I got back at 2, my wife emerged from the bedroom dressed to kill . Without going into too many details, we were all over each other in a bout of passionate love making that started in the lounge and then moved to the bedroom. I had a rock hard erection, which is something that hasn't been true for many months and was able to enter her easily and stay hard inside her for as long as she wanted (she particularly likes my being inside her when she Os and I hadn't been able to do that for her lately). She O'd first and then we carried on in gentle prolonged love making until I O'd too.

<OK, safe again now>

As if that wasn't good enough, as we lay cuddled on the bed in the warm afterglow of sex we talked in an open non-judgemental way about our relationship and the 5 love languages and our results. Her top two are 'acts of service' and 'words of affirmation' while physical touch is lowest. Mine are 'words of affirmation' and 'physical touch'.

She said that she was aware of all the acts of service I do for her and grateful and didn't think I could do more. We agreed we should both verbalise our appreciation of each other more. We then talked about physical touch and she just admitted that she had never been a tactile person, while I definitely am. I told her that I understood but that it made me sad that she almost never initiates a hug or even touches my arm. She said that in addition to touch not coming naturally to her, she was always wary that I would interpret any hug as sexual, leading into the whole pressured to have sex/rejection tension. We agreed to try a new way of operating for a while to see if it helps: she promised to try to be more tactile with me; I promised NOT to interpret her touches as invitations for sex; if she actually does want sex, she will make it unambiguously clear - she is very good at that! ; we will continue with only her being allowed to initiate sex as our solution to the pressure/rejection issue which has caused us both distress in the past. I am hopeful that this will improve matters and very pleased that we are at last having open communication in areas we have always struggled to talk about before.

We got up and got dressed, had lunch together and then fell asleep cuddled up together in our garden lounger. When it came to the evening, we picked up our daughter from our friends' house. While we were they we had sparkling conversation with our friends in which my wife and I were both in great form. We then went out for a pizza as a family and our daughter remarked how much better I seemed than I had for the last couple of days. (I opted to explain it by citing the sleep I'd had in the afternoon, rather than saying 'that's because your mother and I just f*cked like rabbits).

So in summary.

A brilliant day with my wife's recent depression lifted
Best love making for months
Signs that NoFap is curing my PIED
Open positive communication with my wife based on the 5 love languages and
Some mutual resolutions to keep the improvements going.

Thanks again for the continuing interest and support of my friends here.

ANH

P.S. On our trip out for pizza at the end of the day, we encountered the usual scantily-clad women on their nights out. I found myself consciously averting my eyes. @Jolie would have been proud of me!!

 

Thanks for that. No she hasn't. She has a strong aversion to modern medicine and is a keen advocate of alternative therapies so she doesn't like going to the doctor, even for check-ups. She is even more averse to seeing a doctor at the moment because she knows they would tell her to lose weight as the answer to everything. For her, weight, body image and diet are highly emotional issues so I won't be blundering in with a message which, however tactfully put, might be perceived as 'hey fatty, you need to get your thyroid checked.' I love her to bits and want her to be healthy and that ideally would mean losing weight but I know that for her this is an emotional minefield and if I am going to help her, and not get us both blown up, I will need to tread carefully.

Thanks again. ANH

 

A quick update on yesterday. I was so upbeat after the events of Monday that I screwed up my courage and wrote a love letter to my wife, telling her just how much I love and cherish her. I committed myself to our new resolutions. I also decided that it was time to tell her that I thought my PMO had turned into an addiction and so, for both our sakes, I had quit for good, using this site for support, and had been clean for six weeks.

She took it well and thanked me. Yesterday continued with us both in a positive frame of mind. She even reached out and touched me a couple of times, which was nice. So all in the garden still rosy and I now have the ultimate AP for the NoFap process. I feel like I have bared my soul and made myself vulnerable, but in a good way. I am not going to fail now.

Thanks again for all your kind words of support.

ANH

 

Urges quite strong this afternoon. Probably the Chaser effect after the wonderful time my wife and I had on Monday. Found myself drifting towards P-subs.
Just given myself a severe talking to! Will immerse myself in worthwhile activities and wait for it to pass.

ANH