Dating : After an Argument, I Gave My Husband All My Stories… Here’s Why

I wasn’t ready to share them, but an argument forced me to realize that it was my only choice.

“Don’t go …” I told him as he stood in our bedroom doorway. I could feel every inch of my skin tingle. The weight of the words heavy in my chest. Our children were downstairs and could probably hear everything, but we were past the point of caring by now. This was all or nothing territory.

I didn’t expect this argument. He said he wanted to talk about his fantasies and sex. Talking about anything, not just sex, is hard for me, but it makes him happy, so I wanted to give that to him. I lay on our bed with my back propped against my pillow; he slid in place beside me.

As he spoke, I quickly realized this wasn’t the fantasy talk I was expecting. “I wanted to tell you…” He said without looking at me. “…the sex was great on Father’s Day, but… I was really disappointed.”

Here we go again, I thought. One of our patterns is that he perpetually feels disappointed in our sex life, and that has always been painful and confusing for me. In my mind, I’ve bent over backwards (sometimes literally) to give him the sex life he wants. Some of the things were completely out of my comfort zone, things I just wouldn’t do today. But I always listened and tried my best to do what he said he wanted, even if that meant totally ignoring my own wants and needs in the bedroom.

I felt that familiar pang rise in me, a mix of panic and sadness, a sharp pain in my arms and wrists.

“I want to feel loved … I want to know you … I want you to be open and honest with me.”

I breathed deeply, let my panic go, and just listened, but one thought pressed in on me, hard … I don’t trust you. When he paused, I spoke. I explained that if he wants me to be open and honest, he needs to know why I have so much trouble, and it’s not only because I’m closed off. I am, definitely; I own that. But part of it, a very big part of it when it comes to him is that when I feel vulnerable and exposed, he pokes at my delicate parts. He doesn’t make it safe to let him in.

At times, I’ll tell him my true and honest thoughts and feelings about life, children, politics, sex, us, him, and he’ll huff and get angry. At other times, he won’t acknowledge what I said as valid or interesting and then he’ll respond in a way that sounds to me like he’s arguing against what I said. “Well, actually…” he’ll say. And the result is that I don’t trust him. I don’t feel safe to be myself with him. I don’t feel truly and completely loved or even liked by him because he doesn’t know me, because despite his questions and pleas to know me, he often responds to my offerings in a very defensive and unaccepting way.

True to our form, when I said these things to him, when exposed myself, my actual true thoughts and feelings, he huffed and became angry, and the circle began. That’s when he said he needed to go make dinner and started to leave.

“Stay,” I said. In the past, I’d cry and plead and practically sell my soul to the devil in order to “fix” it. I’d flip on myself, throw myself under the bus, anything to get out of this “jail time,” the cold war where he’d withhold all forms of his affection. That wasn’t happening today. If he walked out, that would be on him. “It’s easier to walk away because this is the hard part,” I told him. “The uncomfortable part. But this is when we need to stay and put the work in.”

He stood there a moment. “I need to cook dinner.”

“Dinner can wait. Our marriage is more important than dinner.”

That’s when he closed the door and stood at the foot of the bed staring at me. “Do you want to sit?” I gestured to the foot of the bed. He was breathing heavy, nose flaring, shoulders tight, hands not quite forming fists. I wanted him to calm down, to not be angry, to just listen to me giving him me. “I’ll stand.”

Most of the next hour was a confusing back and forth. I felt like I was lost in a forest, every tree looking like the last and having no idea how to figure my path out. That’s the way most of our arguments are. I guess it’s the nature of the beast.

Eventually, I stood up. “Can give you a hug?” He pulled away and my heart sank. “OK, fine,” I said and took two steps back. I just didn’t want to fight, and I could see he felt as hurt as I did.

Then something suddenly washed over me. He kept saying that I’m cold towards him. “If someone likes gummy bears, you don’t have to talk them into eating them. You need to talk yourself into sharing things with me, into having sex with me.”

It’s true. I’ve always needed to prepare myself mentally, emotionally. I think part of that is my need to be in “the mood.” Women generally need foreplay and romance, some precursor, to get them in the mood. But the other part… that’s all me and my past. I lost my virginity to rape and experienced other assaults over the years. There’s no way to make that not affect a person, especially in the bedroom, and especially when that person is as closed off, emotionally, as I am. I admit my responsibility, but I also acknowledge that I’m doing the best I can. If you force something open too soon, it breaks. It’s never been that I don’t want him, that I don’t want to give myself to him, it’s that in these intimate moments it’s never just him on my mind. I know he can’t truly understand the weight of that because he’s never been in my shoes. And although I’ve been open about it, saying it a few times really isn’t enough.

Standing there with him pleading to know me, to feel loved by me, it hit me like a 10 foot wave to the back of the head. Oh my God… he really doesn’t know anything about me… All these things I feel so loudly, all these things I feel are so blindingly obvious because they’re so all-encompassing in my life, he’s really not aware of… I just assumed that the things I did share would allow him to connect the dots, and I wouldn’t have to say in the middle of sex, “Hey, I can’t stop thinking about my past right now.” I really don’t want to say that! I don’t want it to be true… any of it. I just want to live my life. And yes, I guess I’ve been trying to fake it till I make it, as the saying goes. And maybe that’s not the way it should be with the one you love.

My mouth was probably hanging open, “I genuinely feel shocked,” I said. “Shocked… like when I got sober and found out you had no idea how much I had been drinking.” That also seemed so obvious to me. Drinking was part of my every thought during my active alcoholism. I planned every moment around it. And I was floored that he never saw. I thought he just never cared.

“I really don’t know how to let you in.” It truly feels like a foreign language.

He huffed when I told him my revelation. “It’s ridiculous that after 22 years you don’t know how to do these things.” That one hurt. Yes, we’ve been together for 22 years, married for 19 of those, but it wasn’t fair that he was blaming this all on me.

Ridiculous. I felt that panic and pain in my arms again, and I almost fell for it. I started to cry. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m just too screwed up to…” And he cut me off.

“What? I never said that!”

I took a deep breath. “Ok, but you said it’s ridiculous that I don’t know how to talk to you, to be open and honest with you, and that feels like you’re saying I’m too screwed up and I should be better than this …”

He back-tracked, re-explained, and in the middle of his rant, I picked up my cell phone and held it out to him. His face softened, like a kid being handed a random gift to unwrap on a Wednesday. “What’s this? Why are you giving this to me?”

“I can’t say what I need to say. But I can write it.”

“You want me to read your stories?”

I nodded and grabbed another tissue. I didn’t know if I was ready for him to read them. I let him read one a few weeks back and wrote a story about the experience (below). As you can imagine, it was painful for both of us, so I knew this wouldn’t be easy. I was ready to be closer, though, and this was the only way I could think of to do it.

I let him choose what he wanted to read first. He sat and read one poem and 2 stories including the one above and “Is It Too Late To Be Bisexual?” (below). I recently let my therapist read that one and decided with her that I wasn’t ready to let him read it until I talked more about it. Life seems to shift in a blink, though. We don’t usually see it coming, and it breaks us open. And it’s these things that break us, that crack our hearts open and give us the room to grow.

Of course, I didn’t want to talk about the story either, but there was no way around it now. He’s always known that I’m bisexual. He reminded me of that, reminded me of a time I met him on the train in Union Square and told him about a woman I saw at a coffee shop in SOHO, someone I was very attracted to. All these years we had only talked about my bisexuality as a fantasy, just as a tool for arousal in our sex life. Now, he was reading my true raw feelings, that I have a strong urge to have a relationship with a woman, and I always have.

“I’m just afraid I’m not enough for you and that I’m keeping you from living a satisfied life.” Now he had tears in his eyes.

I held him, reassured him, and we made love. “You have to tell me, OK?” he said as we laid side by side in the afterglow. “You have to tell me if anything changes… if you…”

“There’s nothing to tell… but yes, I will, I promise.”

He hasn’t read any more stories yet, but I’m sure he will. I told him that I want to be present when he does. It scares me. I still need to maintain some sort of control over these stories, over my past and my present. And I don’t want to be blindsided by his feelings.

So far, I don’t regret the decision. It hasn’t fixed anything; that’s our job. We have a lot of work to do. But it has brought us closer in the way I hoped… cracking us open, our hearts wide, giving us that desperately needed room to grow.