Whoa! BIG question! I hope these words don’t scare you: you sound just like me. I did get a diagnosis to go with the feeling, fwiw.
I’ve told this story a dozen times before here, so you who have heard it can skip to the end, and you won’t miss anything.
About a decade into my marriage, my second child came along and my relationship to my wife started rapidly declining. Within a few years, we weren’t having sex at all. It seemed like we didn’t have a marriage any more—only a business that was responsible for two children and a house and a car. That’s all we did. Take care of things. We never went out. We never had fun. We never laughed. We never made love (maybe two or three times a year at the worst). I felt like I was all alone, on my own, with no connection to the world.
After a while, I started thinking about having an affair. I didn’t want to leave my wife because I loved her still, even if we were just a corporation. But I needed to be touched. I needed to be held. I needed to be taken inside.
In the beginning, I thought it was just sex that I wanted. I ended up advertising on Craigslist and that led to the most sordid experience of my life, which scared me to death. I didn’t recognize myself. I had risky sex with someone who was as far from a sexy woman as you can imagine. I took myself to the doctor and got checked out and was ok, and then I took myself to a therapist, and then I got my wife to join me.
Unfortunately, she hated the therapist, and then she had some health problems of her own, and we stopped getting help and I was on my own. But Askville appeared on the scene, and there I started meeting other women who seemed to mirror my situation. They had husbands who weren’t interested in sex, and who had emotionally separated from them. They wanted love as well as sex, and I realized, too, that I was fooling myself when I said I just wanted sex.
What I really wanted was love. Connection. That feeling of being known. Inside and out. And for me, sex is the confirmation of that feeling. That’s just the way it is for me. I need the physical connection in order to confirm or support or do something to the emotional and spiritual connection. Without all of it, there’s nothing really. Not for me.
I fell in love with six women in six months, and they fell in love with me, too, and I actually met one of them for a weekend. These relationships were roller coasters. I’d meet them and get to know them with an intense series of emails and phone calls and video chats and then I’d destroy them.
Not on purpose. But I’d get afraid. I’d start watching for any little sign of a problem such as someone not calling when they said they would, and then when they were ten minutes late, I’d freak out, and accuse them of jerking me around, and there was only so much of this anyone could stand, and the relationship would be over in another week or two. I’d have descended from euphoria to a depression I’d never felt before. And then it would start all over with someone new.
I don’t know where these women would come from, but they were always there. If I was psychologically open, they were there. They told me they liked my writing. They liked my ideas. They thought I was funny. They said all kinds of nice things that I didn’t believe for a second, although I was glad.
Because within each depression there grew a black hole inside me. It felt like endless empty space. It was loneliness and it felt so big, there was no way it could ever be filled. There was no way I could ever be ok with myself. There was something wrong with me and no matter how intelligent or witty or wise I might be, and no matter how many women loved me, there was no way that hole was ever going to be filled. But I didn’t know what else to do.
I started feeling like scum. I had a wife and I didn’t deserve her. I had two beautiful children and I didn’t deserve them. I was no longer doing any work at work, so I didn’t deserve that. I was pretty much worthless and I decided to tell my wife so she could divorce me. That way, I felt, I would help everyone out. No one would have to put up with me. I could leave my home and let my family be free of my worthlessness.
I could then be free to love someone else, although I knew that wouldn’t happen. If I wasn’t married, I was sure no one would be interested in me. I’d be desperate. The desperation would show. No one would be interested, and I’d be even more alone than before. I’d lose my job because I wasn’t doing anything. I’d lose my place because I couldn’t pay for it. I’d end up in a gutter somewhere covered with fish guts because I had nowhere else to go. I felt so bad that I think I actually half-wanted that to happen.
My wife, smart and loyal as she is, decided there was something wrong with me and took me to a shrink and got me diagnosed as bipolar. They gave me meds.
But the issues of loneliness and emptiness, even as the depression lifted, remained. My wife and I remained in therapy, and it helped us trust each other more and forgive each other a lot.
But I believe that the women who loved me when I was sick—if it makes sense to call that desperate state of being sickness—made a difference. They showed me that it isn’t a fluke. There is something in me that others like or want or feel comfortable with or something…. valuable to them. I had something to offer.
I don’t know what it is about me, but having one person say that I was valuable just wasn’t enough to make me believe it, especially when they weren’t loving me physically. And having women say they wanted to love me wasn’t enough because it wasn’t real. It was virtual. And yet, despite the virtuality, I came to believe there was something there. They were, I believe, attracted to me. I mean, why else would they do it? They didn’t have to? There was no contest. Nothing to prove.
Yes, they had their issues, just like me. Similar issues. Similar loneliness. But there are millions of men on the internet. They could have gone to anyone and they chose me.
Slowly, I think, this awareness that I have something to offer grew inside my awareness or self-concept. It began to help me with my sense of self. I began to wonder if maybe I was worthy of love or friendship or something better than my gutter, after all.
The conventional wisdom, I find, is that you have to work on yourself to fill that hole. No one else can do it. Perhaps that is right. Yet, if you don’t believe in yourself, I don’t think you can work on yourself. You just give up.
I think that other people can and do show you that you are worthwhile. They don’t like you for nothing, @partyrock. They don’t spend time with you for nothing. They don’t seek you out for nothing.
And you might think it is your body they want. You might subscribe to the guys are dogs philosophy and they’ll fuck any woman who’ll spread her legs for them. I don’t think that’s true. I think guys talk that way and they may even think that way, but I also think there’s a part of them that knows it’s bullshit. Guys want connection, too. They just don’t know how to think about it in many cases. They are often afraid of their own feelings of need. And like you, they often turn away chances to connect because they are so afraid of how badly it will hurt if it doesn’t work out.
I have found that I will do a lot more than is socially acceptable to find that connection. Even as I am loyal to my wife and my kids, I did stuff that most people would tell my wife to divorce my ass for. I did unforgivable things. And I would do them again, in the same situation. They worked, for me.
Your need for love and connection is very powerful. I can’t tell you what to do. I don’t know if what I did would work for you. I don’t know if it even works for me. But I found I could not fight myself. I had to try to get what I needed. Even if it meant doing things that people don’t approve of.
So. My little lessons from the experience.
1) You may want to consider going outside the boundaries of social approval. It’s that important.
2) You may want to let yourself really go for love. Stop holding back. One thing that helped me here was believing I could survive the depression when it didn’t work out. I was right, but I also got a lot closer to not surviving than I ever would have believed.
3) You need help from your “friends.” Every bit of love makes a difference in how you feel about yourself over the long run.
4) Another thing I learned in this process is that I can’t afford to judge myself. If I judge myself, I judge myself badly, and in doing so, I destroy my own sense of self-worth, and that opens the door to the final solution. That’s just me. My brain has a chemical imbalance so maybe I react much more strongly to negativity than others. I don’t know. But there’s no percentage in judging myself. It always works to my detriment—at least with respect to the black hole.
My advice is that you take this very seriously. This is the most important thing in life you have to deal with. This is your life and the meaning of life that you are dealing with. Do what you have to do in order to make your life what you want it to be. This does not mean abandoning principles or hurting others deliberately. But there may be collateral damage. Clean up your own messes, but don’t let the possibility of collateral damage keep you from trying to save your own life.
That’s pretty drastic advice. That’s based on my life. Hopefully, your situation isn’t as drastic as that. Hopefully you don’t even see anything in common with me and I am the one who is reading too much into it. I hope so. In that case, just enjoy this as a morality tale that doesn’t apply to you.
Good luck.
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