A Letter to My Wife on Valentine’s Day
Sweetheart, as we lay together talking in bed, something struck me that didn’t become clear until much later that day. A question, one that I don’t know if you have given any thought to in a long time. The question is, “While you tell me that you love me, what is it about me that you love?”
Years ago, early in our marriage, the answer seemed obvious to me. We completed each other, we had fun together and were best friends. What is it that keeps us together now? Is it love, or just fear of change and being alone? I am beginning to think it is the latter more than the former.
Something that I have come to notice over the past year or so is that you are constantly talking about what someone or another said at work, and such. You have friends at work that you talk to and share with. For whatever reason, that is something I don’t have. I have no friends, no one to talk to, or pal around with. In fact, the last friend that I remember having, and I am talking about someone I could talk with about anything, was James.
I have often wondered if it was your discomfort with James being in the house that was the actual reason that you had me ask him to leave, or if it may have been your Mother. Looking back, I can see where this would have been a situation that would have given her pause, and made her uncomfortable. At any rate, being made to tell your best friend that he was no longer welcome in your home was something that, while I was willing to do for you, I think I have resented for years.
On reflection, that may have actually been the turning point in our sex life. You were already pregnant, and had a hormone soup running around in your body so it really wasn’t until after the birth that the change manifested itself in our lives. No longer could we play together sexually. I was beginning to get the feeling that any request from me was seen as perverse by you. As she grew, Becca was used as a reason to not engage in any sexual activities. Our door could never be closed it seemed. We had no privacy in our own home.
Our sex life it seems has become more repressed over the years. Movies we once enjoyed watching together were banished from the house. There was never any time for play, and on
the off chance that you might want sex, I felt as if Iwere ‘on-call’ all the time. Promises of sex were constantly being made then broken. While it may not have been evident to you, it actually came to be something of a contest for me. You would say that you ‘wanted to spend time with me this evening’, and from experience I knew that it was unlikely to come to fruition, so it came to be a guessing game as to what the excuse would be this time. How many times did you ‘wear yourself out’ doing housework during the day to the point that sex was out of the question that evening? Even more frequent than that though, was the big meal that you were preparing for your darling husband. The meal you stuffed yourself on, even knowing that it would make you so sleepy you couldn’t function. Food, for you, was always a good substitute for sex.
I knew that you putting sex off to a time when you had time to prepare for it meant that it wasn’t going to happen. Even as far back as when I was working at Winston’s this had become the norm. Looking back, I must have seemed like the biggest stooge of all time to keep falling for the same gag over and over like I did. Funny, I wasn’t really falling for it. I saw through it and just sort of laughed it off, knowing that when you said we would get together this evening, that sex was certainly not in the offing for the day.
More Later::The Perv