Married without benefits

Today is my 29^th wedding anniversary….. too bad my husband lives in a neighboring city.
----We are married without benefits.

 I invited him over to have dinner with us tonight to kinda celebrate that we are still married....that we haven't given up....yet.....

I know of another couple that also married in December. They celebrate each year by giving each other Christmas ornaments that represent the year that they just had together. If my husband and I had this tradition, we would have to give each other BLACK ornaments this year.

 It has been a bumpy 29 years. Pornography is destroying our marriage. I keep thinking that the problem has been eradicated but like the weed Morning Glory, it keeps growing back and chocking all the happiness, trust and love from our marriage.
My husband is not bad man, he is just sick and when other people are around sick people they ALSO get sick. My family needed some space between my husband so that we could begin to heal.....
I have been soo cold ever since I asked him to move out.------- I miss his warm smile and his warm sense of humor and how he always took my arm when were walking on ice. I miss his laugh. I miss his eyes. I miss having a soul mate to talk to. I also miss cuddling with him in bed at night. .

I couldn’t pile the blankets high enough on the bed to keep me warm so I went out and bought an electric blanket....... Then I missed my husband around again.... to set it up!

The directions were in Spanish but there was a picture. I just had to plug a chord into the bottom of the blanket, feed a couple of tangled chords under the foot of the bed to the head and place a control on each side of the bed. Viola! I plugged it in, turned on the control on my side of the bed and waited……..

 No heat.

 I turned it up higher. No heat. I checked the other side of the bed ……..and it was HOT!

WHY is it that the controls were affecting the WRONG side of the bed?

How symbolic!

He acts out. I am in trauma.

He acts out. My hair falls out in clumps.

He acts out. I cry till there are no tears left.

I am reading the book Boundaries in Marriage by Cloud and Townsend. In it it says, “…….things don’t change in a marriage until the spouse who is taking responsibility for a problem that is not hers decides to say or do something about it.  This can range from mentioning how her spouse’s behavior hurts her feelings, all the way to setting a limit on the behavior. This helps place both the sowing and the reaping with the same person and begins to solve the boundary violation.”

That’s what I need to do. I’m going to flip the blanket and set some boundaries.
My controls will affect my side of the bed and his controls will affect his side of the bed....hypothetically of course since pornography has stolen my husband and I sleep alone.

Next year will be our 30^th wedding anniversary. I hope by then we will both be in a healthier and stronger place....and that we will be married with benefits.

--Daisy