how withholding intimacy almost ended my marriage
while i am typing my very first blog post outside on our back patio on this cool *almost* fall afternoon watching the hubs pull weeds in the yard, i keep thinking about what i want this blog to be + there are two words that keep coming to mind: real and relatable. i want this blog to be relatable but most of all I want it to be real. in a world full of filtered photos, I want this blog to be the original photo in your camera reel. the photo that definitely isn’t perfect and most likely still has your two year old’s food from breakfast on their face but that’s beautiful in it’s own way because it’s real. i could write about a million other things today but what i really want to write about is what’s been real in my life lately. i want to talk about sex. calm down, i’m not talking about walking you through every little detail of our sex life but just the reality of our struggles throughout our marriage and our sex life while having two little ones. okay i warned you, if you’re a family member or someone who gets uncomfortable hearing about the topic in general, move along.
That thing about opposites attracting? Definitely not a myth in our house.
anyone who knows my husband knows that he will most likely freak out that this is what i’m choosing to write about for my first blog post because he is extremely private about his personal life. i however am an open book and what you see is what you get. that thing about opposites attracting? definitely not a myth in our house. we are as opposite as they come. however, he also supports me in whatever i am passionate about, God love him. so here we go.
on the days leading up to and the days after our wedding we heard this phrase many times from other married couples as I’m sure many of you have as well. “it only goes down hill from here.” what kind of a blessing is that? seriously. we would look at each other, roll our eyes and think to ourselves that these people must not have ever loved each other the way that we did. we literally thought our relationship was a fairytale + that nothing would ever get in the way. let’s all laugh together at that.
after we got married life got busy. as i’m sure everyone’s does. we got pregnant a month after our honeymoon while i was working nights as a certified nursing assistant and also in nursing school + the hubs started his new trucking business. say what you will but sex was always our constant + our easiest way to really connect with each other. there was no way that having a baby, working nights, nursing school + starting a new business would get in the way of that right? wrong.
as our sex life dwindled so did our relationship. in my opinion the two go hand in hand (no pun intended). it seemed like the less we had sex the more issues we had and when you’re having marital issues the last thing you want to do is jump into bed. am i right? it was a vicious cycle. i would catch myself thinking “well if he doesn’t wash the bottles tonight, I’m definitely not having sex with him” or “if he doesn’t get up with the baby tonight, i’m not having sex with him for a few days.” i know that a few days may not seem like a lot to some people, but for us it definitely was not our normal. i know that i’m not the only one that has thought those thoughts or withheld intimacy from their partner, however i may be the only one that shares that information publicly for everyone to read. i personally wouldn’t want to read a blog post that was sugarcoated so i’m not going to sugar coat it for you.
anyone who knows me knows that i don’t really have a filter. i pretty much say how I feel right when I feel it and that’s just the way I am. it’s not that I’m picking a fight or that it’s personal in anyway, it’s just that i would rather say what I need to say in the moment than bottle it up + blow up later (the hubs is the complete opposite). the best part about me having no filter is that the issues in our marriage never go avoided or ignored. i am never afraid to voice how I feel and am the first one to say “hey I think we have a problem here.” we had countless conversations about how we would make time for just the two of us and things we could do to bring us all closer together as a little family of three. + just as our relationship and our sex life were getting back to their peak (or our normal)..
we had just gotten done with church and I was just feeling “off.” i made an excuse to go into Target alone while the hubs + sawyer waited in the car. i quickly bought a pregnancy test and headed to the self check out. as soon as I checked out, i ran into the Target bathroom to take the test. i know what you’re thinking. why didn’t she just take the test at home with her husband? you guys, sawyer was nine months old when i took the pregnancy test. this was not the plan that we had mapped out. i nervously waited the 3 minutes and there it was. positive.
my mind was racing as i tried to think back on how this could possibly be right. we were so careful. oh..our fun home lunch “date” three weeks prior.
i like to think of marriage as a rollercoaster. you go through highs and lows. it’s funny how just as our relationship and our sex life were reaching the peak, it immediately took a dive into rock bottom. don’t get me wrong, we were so excited about being pregnant. it’s not that we didn’t want more little humans (i think if we could afford it we would probably have like 6), it’s just that we weren’t prepared for it to happen so quickly after just having our first.
not only were we not mentally prepared to have another baby so soon after having our first but our house was a two bedroom house and it was way too small to raise another baby in. we had a ton of work to get done on our house before we could even think about selling it. so here we were with a nine month old trying to get our house ready to put on the market while also trying to figure out where we would live after it sold and what our next step would be. we ultimately ended up deciding that we wanted to move back to our home town where we both grew up. we knew that’s where we wanted to end up eventually but now that we were going to have two kids under two, we needed our family support system more than ever.
it’s no secret that if you know where our hometown is that it is ridiculous to buy a house in, especially for people our age. small houses are extremely overpriced and medium sized houses were barely even in our budget. we looked at a few houses and ultimately decided that if we wanted to really get what we were paying for we wanted to build a house. it took us awhile to find someone that could build for us in our budget but when one of the hub’s friends from school called + said he found some land that he could get for pretty cheap; we were so excited and we couldn’t pass it up. it took about a month or so to sell our house and then we packed up most of our stuff + put it into storage and moved in with my parents. this is where things got bad.
i mean, really really bad. here’s the thing you guys. we totally overextended ourselves and we were not financially ready to have a toddler, a new baby and build a house at the same time. the hubs was working way over time to come up with money for our downpayment, while going to school and working on our new house all at the same time. he barely even had time to sleep. he was tired, stressed and burnt out. who could blame him? + who wants to have sex when they’re tired, stressed, burnt out all while living at their in laws? no one. so we just didn’t. we pretty much stopped having sex for the remainder of my pregnancy and i blamed him. which in turn made me resent him because even though i knew he was personally struggling with all of the stressors in our life, i selfishly thought that he just didn’t want to have sex with me because i was the size of a massive blue whale. you all know those crazy pregnancy hormones. so i started withholding all forms of intimacy from him not just sex. again, a vicious cycle.
withholding any intimacy at this point in our already struggling marriage was the tip of the iceberg. before we knew it, it had been a month and we honestly couldn’t remember the last time we kissed or even hugged each other. which was not like us at all. not only did constantly withholding all forms of intimacy make our relationship tense, it also made all the little things that normally bugged us about each other become the big things. i would find myself being harsh + critical about every single thing that my husband did. the way that he did the chores, why wasn’t he doing chores, the way he parented our kids, the way he chose to spend his free time + the list goes on. trust me you don’t want to see the list.. it’s actually embarrassing how many things we would get mad at each other about. we couldn’t even be in the same room with each other for more than 10 minutes without getting into an argument. i vividly remember one afternoon when he was trying to help me fold the laundry (a nice gesture), i found myself actually getting extremely irritated about the way that he was folding the towels. i mean how dare he not fold the towels the exact same way that i was folding them?
“only 2.5 years of marriage and i was ready to throw in the towel.”
this was honestly our lowest low and we almost didn’t make it back up. you read that right. only 2.5 years of marriage and i was ready to throw in the towel. we were so miserable. i just could not see the end of the long dark tunnel that was our marriage. luckily my husband is extremely stubborn + loves me fiercely, so there was no way he was going to let that happen. relationships need intimacy and sex to thrive. it’s just like buying plants and forgetting to water them for months at a time and just expecting them to grow and thrive on their own. not going to happen. our relationship was a dead plant and that’s putting it nicely. so what did we do? we stopped withholding all forms of intimacy. we started “watering” our marriage again. we started being intentional about connecting with each other daily, we started going out on dates again (not just dates where we talked about the kiddos or scrolled on our phones) + most importantly for us; we started making it a point to have sex regularly again. don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of work. we are still doing the work every day, but before long our marriage began to thrive again.
so here i sit on this cool *almost* fall afternoon watching the hubs pull weeds in the yard daydreaming back to an hour prior. the kids had just went down for nap and there were a million things on our to do list that we needed to be getting done. wanna know what we did instead? i’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t the million things that we needed to get done.
