Note to the reader - Post has been updated since its initial release
It’s almost 10pm. Everybody is asleep except me.
I can’t go to bed, there are too many thoughts crowding my head like rush hour on a regular week day.
Lately it’s been almost impossible to find some time to sit down and reflect. Between work, school runs, drops off and pick ups, house chores and quality time with my daughter and/or boyfriend, I’ve got no time left for myself.
It’s been almost 6 weeks since I last exercised, I’ve been eating more junk food than I would like to admit and I am so busy taking care of everything around me that I’m neglecting the most important part. Taking care of me.
Being in a relationship is great, but sometimes the downsides are so strong that I miss my life as single mom.
Things between B and I have been evolving fast.
After I introduced him to my daughter there has been a slow but steady increase of his presence in our house.
We have been in no rush to move in together but as the relationship has evolved we have taken more and more steps towards merging our lives into one.
I like spending time with him. We see eye to eye on most aspects of life but since we started to date (almost a year ago now), there has been one single issue coming up time and time again: sex.
I find it funny (and ironic) that this would be the main (and pretty much only) issue between me and him.
In the past I have been the one having resistance to it and now, after having worked through many of my blocks, I attracted in my life a man who seems to have a completely different libido than mine.
Over the past few months we have talked many times about this issue and every time we have come to the conclusion that we should give it more time.
Lately though, I’m not feeling very patient anymore.
The more time passes by the more I am getting concerned about it, and the increased frequency of talks on this subject is starting to make me feel more insecure about the future ahead of us.
I’m not sure if having a daughter makes things harder or easier.
Sometimes it seems to make things harder because every step needs to be carefully thought and evaluated in order to protect her from unnecessary pain and drama.
Other times it seems to make things easier because having her pushes me to face issues with more intensity and with more determination than ever before.
Tonight I asked her how she would feel if B didn’t stay in our house anymore.
She looked at me, unsure of what I meant.
“You mean to never see him again?”
I shrugged. Maybe? I’m not sure.
She took a second to think, then she shrugged as well and said:” I don’t care. What is important is that you are happy”.
That brought tears to my eyes.
I hugged her tightly and brought her close to my heart.
Kids really understand love better than we do.
The up and downs of this relationship have affected many things in my life, work being one of them.
Since I started to date B. I lost a lot of my focus. My performance has gone down and I often make more mistakes than what I’d like to, due to my mind being in another place.
Being sexually undesired by the man I love made me lose confidence in almost all aspects of my life. It’s as if that lack of desire defines how valuable I am to the world.
I know I have a lot of body image issues and I know growing up there was too much attention on the way I looked, but I thought the last few years of growth meant walking away from that.
Right?
Wrong!
It’s so difficult for me to accept that the man I love doesn't desire me sexually.
I reviewed the email from J. and M. listing the requirements of a good attitude at work and I know I am not applying many of the points described below:
Be humble
Take care, be aware, stay connected to myself & my task
Be thorough
Be effective and efficient
Know my work-flow
Understand the principles that underpin my task
Often times I am not connected to myself or to my task. I walk into meetings without being fully prepared and I look like a deer caught in headlights when someone asks me questions about my presentation or my programs. When at my desk, I often jump from one task to the other without being able to fully focus and after hours I feel I have accomplished absolutely nothing!
Years ago I would have forced myself NOT to listen to the negative voices in my head and I would have flipped this situation in the matter of a few weeks through will power and hard work. But since I’ve embraced the narrow way my approach has been different.
I’ve spent a lot of time uncovering and analyzing my additions at work, my need for constant reassurance and validation (particular from men colleagues), the tendency to doubt myself and reach out for help before exploring all available solutions and the unshakeable feeling of being stupid and unworthy.
I remember watching “The voice” years ago and seeing this very talented girl singing a beautiful song. She had a powerful voice and judges loved her performance but she clearly didn’t feel the same way. Her confidence was under her feet and the more the judges tried to lift her up the more she shrank and push herself down.
“What a black hole” I thought to myself.
I felt no matter how much reassurance she was getting from the crowd and the judges, there was no way to lift her up and the more compliments she got the worst she felt about herself.
That’s exactly how I feel about myself sometimes.
I have been praying a lot about this self worth issue more intensely in the past few months and it’s been very hard to stay open to feeling my emotions without trying to fall back into addictions or self punishment or will power.
At last, this Monday I had a bad day at work.
I stayed with the feeling of unworthiness the whole day and as soon as I came back home I opened up with B. about my day, describing very honestly and very candidly how I have been behaving at work and how I feel about it.
I then talked about how I constantly compare myself to others and how in the past I have been constantly compared to other people around me. It was my mom’s favorite trick in fact.
Whenever something wasn’t the way she wanted, somebody else would be taken as an example of perfection and pride. And I, of course, would be the target of her anger and disappointment. She probably thought in her ignorance that she was motivating me but it did nothing other than making me feel horrible.
I wanted to disappear or run away from that psychological torture but there was no way out, so most of the times I would receive the hit, linger in self punishment for a few days and then I would work my butt off to prove the world I wasn’t that bad.
All that I have accomplished from childhood to my 30ies has been because of this drive to prove to the world that I am worth of respect and not a stupid person.
I told B. “I’m just tired of comparing myself to others at all times and always at my loss. Also, I’m tired of having to shrink down to avoid making other people uncomfortable. “
It all came out at once but this last sentence did it for me.
I finally felt my grief coming up and it came up strong!
I leaned on B.’s legs and cried for a few minutes until he started to reassure me.
At that point I decided to move upstairs and allow myself to release more of that grief, which I knew was still pretty strong.
I sat on the bathroom floor, wrapped my hands around my legs and gave a big hug to my young self. I told her I was sorry she had to go through so much pain and promised her I would not continue yelling at her like my mom did. She did not deserve it.
I felt better afterwards, but I don’t know that I have worked through all of it.
After the fact I was happy though.
It took me months, almost a year to finally touch this grief and I was happy I allowed myself the space and time to release at least some of it.
I’m scared of losing B.
I love him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him, but we still have so many unresolved issues that we haven't worked on and that affect our relationship.
When I first wrote this post I used the word "we" but what I really meant was "him".
Actually, now that I think of it, in the first draft of this post there was no even a "we". It was a straight "this is the laundry list of things he is doing wrong and this is why I am so annoyed".
After revision 2 the word "we" made its first appearance but with the nuance "to be read as mostly him", and now, finally, it's an honest "we" as in "me and him".
That's what I call progress, people. To say "we" and mean "we".
See...the issue with being a blogger is that you can write whatever you want and people will never know what is right and what is wrong. I wonder what it would be like if B. had his own blog where he talked about how annoying and nerve pinching I can be.
I can picture myself leaving a comment (longer than 2 of his posts combined) to explain why everything that he is saying is wrong, while my word is straight from the mouth of God.
Nah...I'm joking. I would approach it in "My cousin Vinny's style" and just leave a quick comment "Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you". (Shoutout to all My Cousin Vinny's fans out there).
*
Anyways...in all seriousness now, my biggest issue in relationships is the tendency to correct my partners' behaviors rather than feel my own emotions. I spend a lot of time and energy trying to make the other person realize their 'wrong doings' rather than focus on my own feelings and hurt. On the other side B. is quite in a strong denial about his current condition and he doesn't want me to push him in the direction of touching his grief or his anger. When I do, he pushes back and tries to keep me at bay (usually by going to sleep for hours) or, if that doesn't work, he will try to manage the situation so that the pressure will go down.
So for example, if we didn't have sex in some time and I asked him why he hasn't had a desire for so long, instead of asking himself deeper questions and work on his blocks, he will try to please me without actually feeling any desire, just for the sake of getting me off his back. If I feel his lack of desire and refuse to be with him even if I'd like to, he then feels frustrated because he feels incapable of managing the situation and he labels me as unreasonable.
When that happens, part of me feels hopeless about his resistance to go deeper, but I know this is also an excuse to not face the reality of our relationship. Being hopeless allows me to not act or take any difficult decision.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that no issue improves naturally if left alone.
We either work on them and get better, or stall and get worse. There’s no such thing as ignoring an issue and seeing it improve by itself.
B. and I have been stalling on this sex issue for months. Sometimes he is too tired from all the physical work he does during the day, other times there are other reasons but desire has no time. When we desire something strongly we work on it and we keep at it until we get it.
I don't see much motivation in B to change at this time.
When we talked about this issue at the beginning of the relationship he would always reassure me that he wanted to work on it and that it was a matter of time. In our most recent conversations though he has been more honest with me and himself. He finally admitted that this is not his priority and that he intends to make things better but he doesn’t know what the timeline would be. It could take a year or a decade…it’s up to me to decide whether I want to stick around to find out which one is true or if I want to cut ties and break free.
I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place and sometimes I wonder why the law of attraction brought me such a weird issue at a time where I thought my own sexual issues were mostly resolved (*self delusional alert here*).
There's still a lot of work to do, for both of us, and it seems like both of us are quite resistive to feel about it.
Another big block for me at the moment is also my desire to feel that I'm almost done working on myself.
I want to believe that since I tackled some big emotional issues, I should now be able to enjoy life without need for further growth.
I want to believe that the emotional cleansing process is finished because I am scared of the thought that growth is infinite.
But my law of attraction at the moment is quite clear. I still have issues with sexuality and worthiness as well as intimacy (both emotional and physical) with the other sex and I am quite sure that once I will be done with these emotions there will be more and more to still come out and resolve.
At the beginning of the year I vowed to dive deeper into every aspect of my life and
here is a golden opportunity to put some work in and grow closer to God. I got what I asked for…I can’t shy away from it now, can’t I? :)
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