Advice needed.
Having trouble with the same old conversation.
What is weighing me down these days is trying to understand what my husband has felt and is capable of feeling for me – in the past, present and future. Because obviously, the passion I felt for him was unrequited for a long time to a degree that I still find shocking. So I am trying to understand what he did/can in fact feel.
When I ask about this, I think I hope that he will say things about how much he loved me once upon a time, how much he loves me now that he sees me more clearly, how much he will be able to love me in the future once he deals with his issues.
Instead he talks about himself. How alienated he felt. How he wanted to come back to me in order to be the man he wanted to be. How he is trying to be a better person. All of which are important issues, but they are not on point to what is breaking my heart. And he gets frustrated when I try to redirect the conversation.
I am worried that while he wants to do everything he can to preserve the family and the stability of his home life, whatever love/passion for me he might once have been capable of got used up/washed away during the adverse events that plagued our life over the past 20 years. (It was as bad as a Russian novel, without the starvation.)
So the questions are: Is his inability to talk about how he feels about me an admission that he doesn’t have it/isn’t capable of great love for me? Is he just so absorbed by himself that he can only talk about his own problems/how he feels about himself? Or are we just having a failure to communicate/understand each other because we think about these issues so differently?
Thanks in advance.