I need help - (very long)
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| Tue, 08-10-2004 - 5:07pm |
More background: I’m American and SO is from Eastern Europe. He grew up in an environment where the women took complete care of the men and home and the men had no responsibility except their jobs. Women worked too, but their 1st priority was the man. Here, it doesn’t work that way because I work full-time and he has to help out. He takes out the trash and makes the bed and helps fold clothes sometimes – things he never did once growing up. He hates anything involving the kitchen.
Last piece of background: I was laid off early 2003. I was given a great severance and since there were hardly any jobs available and I knew that I wanted to change direction in my career, I decided to take off the year to figure out what to do. I paid all my bills with my money, but SO was still stressed because the idea that someone is without a job makes him nervous. So he always was annoyed and pushing me to go back to work. I started a really good new job in a new career in May. But in the summer, I have to work 9 hour days which meant that for 3 months, SO had to be partly responsible for getting our DD ready for pre-school, taking and picking her up every day, and give her dinner 4 nights a week. Although he said he understood why this needed to be done, he always made little comments about the dinner part and was clearly annoyed about it. I have been reminding him that he was pushing me last year to work and this is what it is like when the mother works full-time. In addition, I got a hernia last Feb and cannot see a doctor until end of Aug due to no health insurance until this month. I usually come home in some pain and needing to ice down so I admit that since I started working I have been very self-absorbed with the new job, learning a new career, and health problems.
The problem: Last Fri he told me that for the last 2 months he has been feeling very disconnected from me and just been thinking and thinking about it. He is very unhappy. He feels that we must have never been connected or we wouldn’t have gotten disconnected. He is falling into old patterns. I said that I know that I have been pretty self-absorbed this summer with everything going on. I also said that I know that I never went back to being affectionate after our stressful years and that I had been thinking about this and wanted to change but it was difficult to change an established pattern. I told him that he should have told me as soon as he became aware that something was bothering him and we could have addressed it and I would have tried to become more affectionate and maybe that would have made him feel good and he wouldn’t have become disconnected. I said that we have a DD & we should have tried to make sure we did everything possible before just breaking up. I then simply said for him to do what he needed to do, but that I hoped that he would give us sometime to see if we can address this problem. Then he left for 24 hours because he needed space to think. He came back and said that he wanted to try to see if we can work things out.
So now, he is home but things are naturally very tense and stressful because he has pulled completely away from me. I don’t know how to try and reach out to him. I am willing to make the effort to break my unaffectionate pattern, but I am afraid to cross his boundaries right now. I feel like he still needs some space and that he is not comfortable with getting too close to me.
How can I reach out to him without making him uncomfortable? This really hurts right now and I feel like he is totally turned off to me so I don’t want to look like a fool and I don’t want to go where I am not wanted, but I do want to make some kind of effort to see if we can heal things between us. I need to know I tried for myself as well as my DD.
One thing I know is that the way he handles conflict will happen again, so if we can get through the next 2 months and get a little closer again, I am going to insist on couples therapy.
Any help is appreciated because I need to know that I made an effort to work on this relationship! I thank you if you took the time to read this long message!

No, we are not married.
It is very hard to be affectionate to somebody when they don't seem to want it - which is where he is at right now. He wants to see if we can get past this, but I am not sure how that can be accomplished if he has disconnected from me. How do you walk over to someone and hug him when he doesn’t want it right now?
I know that in the long run, only counseling is going to save us because this is not going to change unless he learns how to communicate. I just wish I knew how to get us past this bump so that counseling will work. He won't do counseling right now and I can't force it. If things become less stressful, then I think he will be more open to counseling. Otherwise, I know that this relationship is never going to work.
You are right that I should feel free to just be affectionate when I want. I should have been more affectionate earlier when the boundaries were more of my own making. Now he has put up a block and I just want to figure out how to get a little closer now so that we can take that step. I need to try for my dd’s sake because she really loves her daddy and having both of us in the house. If this ends, I just want to be able to look her in the eye when she is older and be able to honestly say that I tried everything to make it work and it wasn’t possible. Because I had become so unaffectionate, I feel like I can’t do that right now. I just want a chance to try to be the person I want to be and see if that wouldn’t have made a difference. If it would have made him feel closer to me and then he might have been more interested in facing some of his issues. Or maybe I just waited too long and now it is too late?
This hurts.
Carrie