The Back Story…at least some of it

Context is everything. So, to keep my writings from being all porn and no substance I thought I’d talk a bit about how I got here. This post is certainly NOT HOT.

DH and I have been together for 18 years, married for 16. Two kids, one 9 and one four. I only mention their ages because that’s actually pretty important to the story here (I think so anyway).

I had some experience before DH(like dating a 35 year old alcoholic) but I was only 20 when we met..and I was taking care of myself. Mom died while I was in high school and Dad was an alcoholic. Putting myself through college and my family background kept me from being interested in a lot of experimentation. I was the first one in college (and my neighborhood) to make it to college, let alone a prominent school on a scholarship.

So, I didn’t party. I didn’t date much. I studied and worked. My second year I realized that joining a club or two wouldn’t kill me and went to check out a couple. I met DH. By week two, we were practically living together and we’ve been together ever since.

Every marriage has a few dips and turns but for the first time a couple of years ago, we hit a really bad patch. My father, who had lived with us for a couple of years, came out of remission with his lung cancer. Older son, who I homeschool, has special needs. We had a very active toddler and our aupair was leaving (and we weren’t getting another) In the midst of all this, DH had a midlife crisis.

It wasn’t the kind of crisis where he was sexually unfaithful. Instead, he put himself ahead of his family and took a demanding job 100 miles away. There was never a question of us moving: my father was in treatment for his cancer and our son needed the services he was getting and would not get them in the middle of nowhere. In spite of all the challenges our family was facing, DH took that job and even bought a house there.

DH held that job for a year during which my father continued to sicken and die. Our kids missed their father in spite of my attempts to go to the small town during the week sometimes (if my father’s health allowed) and DH being home every weekend. We were all unhappy. And DH was the unhappiest of all.

He was very angry with me. I abandoned him (in his mind) and wasn’t committing fully to him. In my view, he’d totally lost the plot. I grew up in home where the dad was a narcissistic prick and now DH was acting like one too. The kids bugged him, I didn’t have sex enough with him (hard to do when we lived 100 miles apart) and I was spending too much time with my dad.

Leaving that job required us to move over 1000 miles away. That was one year ago. And we’ve spent much of the year trying to fix it. My desire for him was dead. I didn’t stop loving him but I wasn’t interested in sex AT ALL. If you talk to him today, DH will still defend his feelings from that time. To him it was more important to be making bank than taking care of his family. I saw a side of him that scared me. Like ASM mentioned in her blog when she found out about her husbands infidelity, its like an innocence is taken away. I’ll never go back to that place where I knew DH valued our family the same way.

This past year has been about communication and rebuilding and resulted in me feeling sexual again. Older kids, no longer caring for someone…this all helps. But the thing that I think makes me feel really interested in all sorts of sex is knowing that our marriage foundation is strong.

There is no way that opening our marriage a year ago would have been a good thing. When the wounds are so raw, the communication isn’t really honest no matter what anyone else says.

DH isn’t interested in sleeping with other woman and I have to confess I’m not all that interested in messing around with a strange penis. But I do like the idea of exploring women and DH is fine with that.

We’ll see where this goes.