Truthful Tuesday: Depression and Disengagement

I would say a lot of my feelings were from a longing to feel loved unconditionally and I felt I was missing that so my homesickness and increased desire to see my friends and family had to do with a lack of feeling loved in my own house.  I am in no way saying this is what was happening on my husbands side, but because we had let Silence become a bedfellow in our marriage we couldn't see or hear the others cries for love.

This disengagement happened over a long time, and it was both of us.  I am a talker, and I like to talk out problems and I can be a visionary where I see where we need to be but I don't always have a clear path to get there so I tend to just bulldoze my way through.  My husband is more of a thinker, he doesn't always know how and he doesn't like to express his feelings, he likes to think them out and then find a path to a solution.  The problem is I would overwhelm him with my communication and then he would stonewall me and not engage with me and would often get quiet, introspective, and I often felt like he tried to ignore the problem hoping it would go away.

We have worked through some really tough times in our marriage, money being the number one problem and my husband definitely had his pride hurt over some of the situations.  I get it, what I struggled with was that I would tell him I felt he needed to go talk to a counsellor and he never would go, he'd just try to change how he was feeling.  For short periods of time this worked but whenever he would shrug off my suggestions as non important he communicated to me that I was dumb to think that way or that my opinions didn't matter. 

So these started to lead to our disengagement, and I would say it was an 18 month process.  We just started living in the house, co-parenting but we did nothing together.  No dates, our last date had been the Garth Brooks concert, but that was even a double date since we went with friends, so a single date hadn't happened for such a long time I forgot what it was like to go on a date.  We were busy with kids and we had bills we had to pay off, so having extra money to go on dates wasn't a priority. I stopped asking for things I needed and spent a lot of time with girlfriends or doing my activities like crop club, soccer, paint nights etc, and I let him do his things, fishing, camping ice fishing whatever.

We often barely slept in our bed together because one of us would normally fall asleep in the kids bed and just spend the night there. We were very good at co-parenting, and alternating our parenting so that the kids were taken care of, but we were terrible at being married and putting our marriage first.

I struggle with asking for what I want.  I am seriously so used to people just providing me with love that to ask for signs of love from my husband was a foreign concept and it feels so awkward.  I know because I am now trying to ask him for love signs from him, if you've ever read the 5 languages of you will understand that my dominate love language is quality time, followed by gifts and affirmations.  My husbands language of love is physical, affirmations and acts of service. And this incongruent love language of ours is where problems really started.

I was not providing him with physical signs of love because I didn't feel loved.  I also have huge issues with me always telling him what I need because then how can it be authentic, and if I always have to tell him, will he ever just start doing it on his own? So we went on like this for months.

When he would kiss me, he felt I'd roll my eyes, and I am not saying I didn't it, but those acts of affection were things he wanted from me and he wasn't giving me what I needed.  I felt they were things we did so the kids would see that we "loved" each other.  And I know now that my husband was trying the best way he knew how, but he wasn't getting the right language to say that he valued what I needed or wanted.  That was where I was struggling.

So I started counselling and then we started marriage counselling, and I find my counselling much more freeing because I can say what I need to say without worrying about how I say it so I don't hurt my husband's feelings.  The marriage counselling is good because it's helping my husband find his voice, and sometimes his comments are surprising. I did not realize he saw things that way or that those were my non verbal communications to him.

So we are trying to re-engage, while addressing the other cracks in our foundation, but it's hard, and sometimes we take two steps forward to end up on the chute and slide back to space zero.  It took us 18 months to get here, I'm sure it will take half as long or as long to get us back to a place of connection, but in the mean time we are trying and that's what's important.