Why now?

You broke my heart.

You married me, with the promise that you would love me completely, and forever.  But at the first big challenge that life threw our way, you stopped.

You were supposed to love me but instead you hurt me more than I ever thought was possible.

We couldn't have sex, I understand this was disappointing for you.

It was for me too.  I too had not factored this into my life plan.  When I conjured up my fairy-tale, there was no sexual dysfunction in it.  Nor was there a husband who would withdraw into himself, unable to support me while I systematically worked through my problem completely on my own.  I didn't choose this, any more than you did. 

Marriage is an agreement that two people make.  Part of that promise is that whatever happens, they face it together.  Detaching emotionally from the other person as soon as they prove to have a faulty part is not part of the understanding.

All those annoying habits I had that bothered you so deeply in that first 18 months.  The way I fiddled with my hair.  The way the shower was never quite sparkling when I cleaned it.  The way I became defensive when you criticised everything I did and tried to change me.  Those were all turned into character flaws......reasons why you couldn't love me.

It took me this long to see that all those things, all those flaws of mine that supposedly destroyed your love for me, they were just an excuse.  Your way of telling yourself that you weren't the bastard that fell out of love with his wife because she couldn't have sex with him. 

You did it subconsciously, not on purpose.  But knowing that is of little comfort to me.

That is why trying to work with me now, to make this separation an amicable one is of no significance.  That is why I cannot treat you like a friend.  If ever we were to work as a team, it should have been in that first 18 months, when it might have made a difference.

We could have conquered this together, as husband and wife.  We could have been drawn together by this, instead of apart. 

You could have.......should have....... loved me.

But instead, you broke my heart.

Loop

Source

There are days when I am a cassette player.  When I was a kid we had a really old one, a bit of a fossil really.  It would get stuck and the tape would skip back and forth.  The same line would be sung again and again, like an obsession.

It often starts with a memory.  Me, picking a fight over something silly or asking him not to do something that he wanted to do.  At times he would be so stoic that his lack of reaction would cause me to continue to argue my case, well beyond what was necessary.  And he would continue to withdraw, fuelling my irritation further.

Other times it would be a revision of what happened in that first eighteen months.  The vaginismus that I started self-treating eight months into our marriage (but what if I had started earlier?).  The six to eight months of treatment that saw me cured (but why didn't I do it faster?).  The multitude of other excuses he produced for why he couldn't love me (my annoying mannerisms, my lack of 'self-awareness', my failure to clean the kitchen adequately for godssakes).

On the good days, the rational part of my brain wins.  The one that knows that the fights I picked were minor, usually justified and fairly on par with those in other people's marriages.  That I (mostly) reacted in a healthy way to the situation at hand. 

Miss Rational knows that dealing with a sexual dysfunction is easier imagined in hindsight than done.  There is the shame, the crippling feeling of inadequacy, the hope that one day it will all just work, somehow.  And all of that comes after the realisation that something is actually, seriously wrong. That this is not normal.  If a woman gets past all that and draws together the courage to seek treatment, there are the medical professionals, many of them who know very little about the condition much less how to diagnose it.

But there are also bad days.  The times when my mind is sucked into the vortex of regret, self-doubt and endless questioning.

 Those bad days, when rationality takes a back seat,  are the ones where for the entire day, one or two thoughts run in a loop in the cassette player of my mind.

If I had fixed this earlier....if I was what he wanted in every other way, he would have loved me.