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Post by cindyandben on Dec 17, 2007 12:30:29 GMT -5
I want my husband to ask this question himself, but I am curious as well. What about desiring me, his wife? My husband is worried that sobriety will mean that he cannot legitimately have sexy thoughts about me, or be pleased when he has pleased me. I have predicted that the answer from long term recovery veterans will probably be that non-objectifying desire for one's legitimated partner is likely to be ok, but I am interested in other's thoughts on this.
When he can get on the computer before midnight, he will post for himself. (I cannot help noting that in the past, he has had no trouble staying up late to download pornographic photos and video clips.)
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Post by zerotolerance on Dec 17, 2007 14:18:32 GMT -5
My guess is he views it like the way he has been doing it is right, or like p, or from an objected view point per se. AS IF that is the ONLY way, or the right way, to have desire for a woman. It's all he knows. So he can't imagine any other way, at this point. We don't know what we don't know, and he don't know how to not view it through an objectifying lens. That's one of the only lens he has. You can't see, nor even imagine, non filtered thinking through a p filtered view of the world.
There are place in everyone's recovery where we only know where we've been, not where we are going. Sometimes we've shed our old self, before growing our new one. These stages feel like voids when we are in them because we just can't imagine getting out. We feel empty, because we've lost the old self, or elements, and we haven't grown our new and improved selves yet. The feeling is horrid, and scary, and full of fear and doubt. At first, in early recovery, it requires leaps of blind faith, sheer determination not to stay where we're at, nor to go back to what we knew before, in order to go through it.
It's easier not to try to imagine. Besides, that's just a waste of time at this point. He won't know what it will look like until he gets there. That's the only way imo. Otherwise it's just like us trying to imagine being martians, and living in a world we've never seen before on Mars.
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Post by Mayberry on Dec 17, 2007 21:40:58 GMT -5
[trigger]My husband has gone through some of this self-doubt (we had, BTW, an intentional period of abstaining from intimacy of about 3 months while he sobered up). There were lots of dropped comments about "I'm sorry" when he admired me aloud or touched me in a more-than-friendly fashion. That said, he was (is?) still struggling to find a more balanced showing of his affection: he goes pretty easily into what I'd describe as "humpy" behavior that really, to me, felt like it had very little to do with me and more to do with, well, "humpy" behavior. We are slowly finding a good balance between these two sobriety extremes. I try to tell him that his genuine love, affection and interest in me is (more than) welcome, but I need to know it's really *about me* and not that he's "horny". That's more about my recovery, perhaps, than his...I need to know that he wants and desires *me*...basically, at present, I need him to approach me with about zero degrees of turned-on-edness in order to feel safe, myself, responding to him, as I am deeply suspect, based on our past sexuality (the pornster sexuality) of just about anything else.[/trigger]
I don't know if that bit of sharing helps you or not, but the bottom line, for me, is that I strongly suspect that he better darned well desire his wife--that is, IMO, what the whole shebang is about--the two of you, tuned in and turned on to each other.
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