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OK, so we are only a couple of weeks into our real R. We've been in and out of limbo for the last few months, but 2 weeks ago I committed to R properly.

I need some advice about reconnecting with your BS sexually. I sometimes wonder whether I am progressing and then think back over conversations we've had about reconnecting our affections. I remember crying as I tried to explain that I found it increasingly hard to reach out and hold hands or hug etc. Now that stuff is coming more easily and naturally. But my BS and I are aware there is a huge sexual barrier between us.

I know this is all really early days in some respects, but we did make love last weekend. It was good too, but like before the A.

But I still find myself really disconnected from our sexual relationship and I don't how to address this. I'm talking to my H about it, but this scares me and him too I think.

How long do you let things go on without forcing the issue up between you, so to speak, to reconnect naturally? or maybe this is something we should be trying to pursue more actively?

Any help or words or wisdom would be appreciated. Thanks.

[This message edited by OktoberMest at 5:00 PM, December 22nd (Thursday)]

What is your issue, exactly? Not feeling worthy? Guilt? Mind movies? It's hard to help if we don't know what it is that keeps you closed off.... can you offer some insight on that?

Calm..Cool..and Honest Communication will help, but the real defining factor is that 4 letter word TIME.

You have spent a great deal of time in your affair..you are going to have to put in almost double to quadruple time in fixing this.

Sex is going to be rough for both of you. You may be having mind movies as well as your BH.

As long as you and LH are communicating effectively...(no arguments) then this can be done and you will have a stronger marriage this time.

Communication and time together will help this. Sex may be a physical act..but it also has a mental and spiritual capacity.

Right now..both of your minds and spirits need great healing.

Once that healing takes place..sex and everything else will fall into place. Talk it out. It may hurt..but it will be far worse if it's not discussed.

Tell him honestly what is going with you.

I will tell you as a man..his mind is always wondering..Are you thinking of him or the OM?

He is thinking what did he do wrong to cause this..even though he knows he's not to blame for the affair itself.

Be honest about love-making,

Questions about what you and OM did will always be in his mind...so be more spontaneous and creative with your BH.

Remember..reconciliation is a marathon..it takes time for all of this to be reconciled.

I have been reconciled for nearly 10 years..things still arise from that time period in conjunction with my wife's self-esteem.

Affairs changes marriages forever..remember that. Be patient in all aspects. Especially sex

I should make clear that the problem is really me putting up a barrier rather than both of us I suppose.

I think that both of us are struggling with the fact that it's me having a harder tome reconnecting to him than him to me. It was him that instigated the love making and while I was a willing party, he is frustrated by the move.

I feel secure in his company and at times it would be so easy to believe none of this had happened, then it all comes flooding back.

I suppose he's so frustrated and I'm so confused because I didn't have sex with the OM. The physical affair was very brief, spending only 8 days in company together, and the only sexual contact that ever happened was kissing when my BS caught us.

The A was emotional and I became very involved emotionally not physically.

I feel a lot of guilt about the situation, but there are no mind movies, there's nothing to play out, for which I'm grateful.

I've wrecked such a precious gift of trust in our marriage and frequently don't feel I can forgive myself for becoming involved outside my marriage.

The romantic side of our relationship had suffered pre-A so we'd already entered a habit of not making love and now I'm scared that habit will persist if I don't push on with the sexual side of the relationship; and I'm scared that I feel detached from this area of the relationship too. It'd be far more comfortable and safe to not push our relationship in this area while we are healing our hearts and minds.

The sexual side is so integral to the healing for my BS though and I know he is feeling so rejected. This makes him doubt whether I have broken NC again (which I haven't) and I'm sure it must make him doubt whether I'm lying about how sexually involved I was with the OM (I'm not). He's given me many opportunities without recrimination to tell him whether we slept together or not, so I have had no reason to lie about this.

I am trying so hard to be honest with my H about my feelings, but I know ultimately if I can't get over this it's a deal breaker. I'm really afraid I'll take too long to heal enough to be ready to instigate intimacy in this way and he'll leave, but equally scared if I push on without thought to my emotional state (pretty messed up and depressed right now) that I'll end up resenting him and feeling bullied; which is how I felt quite a lot at our first attempts at R.

So confused...

I know you feel like he is bullying you..but in a way he is being bullied too.

Emotionally bullied and emotionally deprived...

All in all it takes time. You have to withdraw from those feelings you acquired by allowing the OM to fulfill emotional needs.

You looked to him as some sort of hero when he was actually a villain you were in cohorts with to sabotage your marriage.

You have to start forgiving yourself so you can help your BH heal.

Reconciliation takes effort on both parts..but it is the WS who must do a lot of heavy lifting if you want to save your marriage.

You may not have mind movies..but I bet your BH does. Otherwise he would not keep asking you if you actually had sex with him.

He still doesn't believe he has the whole truth based on your current state.

You being withdrawn from him will only keep fueling this.

You have to get your mind in this and your body will follow..right now it seems your mind is still in the affair which is somewhat expected

NC will help with this and being proactive doing things your BH likes.

He is already trying to fix his part...I can see that..you need to do yours or your marriage will fail.

FRM you're so right in a lot of ways. I have asked him about the mind movies and he's said no he doesn't have them; he doesn't see me and the OM together, just movies of me alone lying to him.

He's so good at stepping up and taking the weight of the healing in the R so far, he's always so far ahead of the game it's embarrasing that I'm running to catch up a lot of the time.

I know if I don't pull my act together in this area he'll wake up one day and realise that it doesn't hurt so much and he's been the one starting all the R acts and he'll go.

It's not that I don't do anything, but it's not proactive enough..

It's our 2nd wedding anniversary today and a difficult day for us both. I'm going to try and make him the centre of the world and feel glad he gave me another chance and a glimmer of hope that we might make our third...

Thank you for the support. :) Happy Xmas Eve.

Hi Oktober,

It is tough to enter into R, after the lying, after the limbo. Since you had an EA, then you are also likely having a difficult time getting OM our of your head.

There are a couple of things to think about.

First off, is your BH here on SI? If so, then he may be getting information that an 8-day PA with only kissing is very rare. The way you say it, you were in the OM company for 8-days. Does that mean you took a trip? Or did you BH take a trip? or just plainly that the physical component of the A consisted of 8-days where you and OM kissed? I know that if I would have been in the company of the MOW for 8-days, something more than kissing would have happened. So, there is sort of a "logic" component to the story that is not making sense you to your BH regarding the 8-days and the kissing only part of your story.

Second, since there was a strong emotional component to your A, you are probably facing some level of fantasizing about the OM when you are with your BH. Especially this early. This isn't to say that you don't find your BH to be an attractive man, but you are fresh out of a time period where you basically were spending most of your day thinking about the OM, how you wanted to be with him, how you wished you could escape together, all of those fantasy stories...and now instead, you are having to deal with the fallout. Regardless of how the end of the A happened, if you were really that attached to the OM emotionally, you are dealing with some very strong memories, coupled with not having had enough time to begin working on yourself to get to the root of why you are having a hard time letting go of those memories...it is just going be very difficult for you right now to connect to your BH.

So, rather than feeling emotionally bullied by your BH, maybe think of it more as you are really committing to your BH, instead of doing what he is expecting of you. Do you see the difference?

Another thing is that often something will happen with a couple just starting R where they basically go at it like rabbits for a couple months or so. It is called hysterical bonding (HB) and, while it is a fun, weird time, it can also be confusing and make you feel like there is a lot of pressure on you to be present during sex with your BH. Well, you may have difficulty being present at first, because of your emotional tie to the OM, the tie that I think you are trying to bury instead of work through.

It's your second anniversary? How long have you been together as a couple? Because a loss of intimacy this soon into a M seems a bit soon too. The honeymoon phase lasts for a different amount of time for each couple, but 2-years seems a bit quick. What was your role in the loss of intimacy? What was your BH's role? And what is your definition of intimacy? What is his?

Sorry to question you on the 8-days/kissing only aspect. The trend here at SI is that it rarely stops at kissing. Not to say your didn't just stop at kissing, just that it is not a common story.

Just so you know, I spent a long time in limbo, only had an EA, with a couple of hugs, entered into R with the full intention of working on myself and remaining M, then had false-R after six months because I wasn't letting go of MOW mentally, and have spent the last year and a half working on myself and our M. Don't rush it. Be honest with yourself. Anytime you think about things and try to put some of the "blame" on your BH, then consider that maybe you aren't doing it right, re-think it, and try again. IMO, if during any part of R you find yourself blaming, or not taking responsibility, even in the most subtle way, then you aren't being honest with yourself. That was my litmus test, and continues to be even now.

Hi,

Yes my MS is here on SI and on other forums too. He knows and I know it's pretty rare to be dealing with the kind of A that I've had, but kissing is the limit of it.

I went away for a diving course with two team mates, one of whom I ended up bonding with and having the EMA with. So we were away for a week, in company, but spent enough time together intensively to get emotionally attached without having to have the reality check of my husband and the "real life" back home to answer too. I can honestly say sex had not been in the equation.

I didn't stop to think at the time about how attached I was becoming and while I knew I missed him and his company when I got home, I didn't realise the full extent of my feelings until the whole A was discovered by my H two weeks later, the first time the OM and I had met up since the week away. We only kissed the once, that was when my H caught us.

I no longer feel emotionally bullied by my BS. He's a good man and this feeling only happened in the start when I had repeatedly broken NC, so was well and truly still in the A so to speak.

My H was trying to do anything to get me to see how much I'd hurt and continued to hurt him and I was not ready to enter R but was saying I was...hurting him even more.

It does scare me that I'm finding it hard to find the way to work through the emotional attachment to the OM, and while it would be easier at times, I'm a trying very hard to be honest both with myself and with my BS with there feelings so as to NOT bury them. I know that ultimately that approach will not work and destroy our R and any chance of the marriage working. I find hard to deal with triggers on my side too, they seem to start a cascade of emotions still so raw and I wish I could find a better way to control this. :(

About the M: we've been together just over three years and married two. We got engaged after 2 months and married the following year, so the whole relationship is new and we both entered into it very fast. He was married when we met, I had just started seeing a guy too. We both ended our relationships within 10days of getting together, but that's not a great starting point I guess. We fell in love so intensely we just removed all obstacles in our path to be together. I'm aware that this is soon in our relationship to suffer this kind of problem and that scares us both, particularly me too. We'd both allowed our lives to get so busy, even though we were together pretty much all the time, we were always in company and didn't stop to take time for our marriage and each other. We seem to have pretty equal roles in allowing this to happen.

We've been looking back at where things went wrong and letting our relationship suffer romantically this year was more critical than we both realised.

I've got a lot of stuff to think about and act on from these posts, thank you.

Happy Christmas all. x

So update...

We made it through Xmas day with only some stress from my family...usual stuff. Our time together was good. Anyway, I had a chance to think about some of the advice given in the thread and woke up feeling a bit more positive and proactive today. I initiated some fooling around in bed this morning which I think has had positive effects on us both today. :)

It's nice to have him ask how are you and answer good rather than ok. We've even undertaken a bit of retail therapy and bought a new tent and some sleeping bags that we can zip together...meaning we can still enjoy our love of the outdoors, but fix one of the relationship issues created by camping and now get closer in one big bag!!

I feel quite positive about this and even better I think my H sees it as a sign of ongoing commitment to stay true to us but progress with trying to provide for each others needs.

Anyway, thanks for the advice.

Glad to hear this. Reconciliation is hard work. It can be mentally and physically exhausting.

I have never had a baby,I've seen my wife have 2 of our 3 children. (Wasn't there for the first because I was in military training)

I witnessed the pain while she travailed through the miraculous event of childbirth..

Though it was grueling..the sound of the child crying brought great relief to her.

Then holding our sons and daughter in her arms brought the biggest smile from what was a cascade of grimacing and gnashing of teeth.

Reconciliation may be painful at times..but the end result of a recovered marriage will be a great joy.

Although things may not always be perfect..they can get very close...Happy Holidays to you

double post..sorry

[This message edited by floridaredman at 7:56 AM, December 26th (Monday)]