“I Can’t Get Over That My Wife Had Sex Before We Met”
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New therapist.
You are fixating on one thing. One inconsequential thing. She chose you. Married you. Is having a child with you… and you are wrapped up in the men she didn’t choose.
Unless your wife runs you and calls all the shots, she doesn’t feel like she married a boy. She is hoping to hell and back she married man who will be a good role model for her child. Who will teach her son not to judge women over their sexual history and who will teach her daughter how men are supposed to treat her. Get out of your head. It’s like you are hiding behind this issue. This non issue. Ask your new therapist why you would do that.
I’m going to take the contrary view and tell you that you need to stop biting your tongue. This is a VERY big secret to be keeping from your wife. It is something which you say has dominated your thinking for 7 years and that you are unable to control. She had a right to know you were thinking this before she married you and certainly before you and see produced a child together.
And.. be honest with yourself, her, and us. You have not bitten your tongue all these years to protect her, spare her pain, make her life easier, whatever. You have bitten your tongue, because you fear that if she found out what as ass you are, that she would walk away from her. You stole her choice on whether or not she wanted to date, live with, marry, and bear the child of a man who sees her sexual activity prior to even meeting you as some sort of unsavory whoredom.
Actually, re-reading your letter, I’m not sure whether you are upset that you didn’t get to marry a virgin, in which case why did you have sex with her prior to marriage, or you think your virginity prior to dating her now entitles you to extra-marital sex partners. It doesn’t, by the way.
Yes, your therapist is an unhelpful jerk and you need a new one.
But I go back to may original comment that even married, even in her pregnant condition, your wife deserves to know what you think of her sexual past and how much you dwell upon it. Then, she can choose to either walk away or stay and try to help you resolve YOUR problem. She has done nothing wrong.
I’m surprised you decided to date and marry a woman three years older than yourself, because usually guys who are wrapped up in the cult of virginity or fear their performance won’t be up to par, seek out significantly younger women with little dating/sexual experience. Your going older suggests that in the back of your mind you were actually seeking an understanding sexual mentor. So, why the change in attitude?
Don’t listen to Ron. Your wife is pregnant and doesn’t need this stress on top of everything. FIRST, talk to a new therapist. Don’t unload your not-well-considered issues on your wife unless you want to hurt her badly and make her feel crappy about something she can’t change. You seem to realize your negative feelings about this issue are not reasonable or helpful. Do you have a happy marriage otherwise? If so, figure yourself out with the help of a therapist instead of blowing up your wife and unborn child’s world.
First, LW, get a new therapist. You need a therapist that you can be totally open with and for whatever reason you feel like you can’t. Even if what the therapist said made sense to anyone else, it didn’t to you and you don’t feel like you can question that. None of us can say what exactly is feeding your feeling of insecurity, you need someone who can draw these internal issues out of you and give you the tools to deal with it without it imploding your life.
Second, please for the love of all that is good don’t throw this on her while she’s pregnant! There’s no perfect time to bring this up, but bringing it up in this extremely vulnerable time for her would be cruel. Feel your feelings, talk to a shrink, figure out what’s at the root of this, but don’t lay this on her, especially when you don’t know what exactly is driving these feelings.
Yeah, I’ve gotta disagree with Ron as well. While I was reading your letter it did strike me as really messed-up that you’ve been keeping this a secret from your wife the entire time. Generally I would advise you to tell her. But don’t do it while she’s pregnant. Pregnancy is a very stressful, vulnerable time for a woman and she needs to feel like her partner is there for her. Not like he’s ready to jump ship to sow his wild oats.
Like everyone’s saying, find a better therapist first. Work on this yourself first. If you can’t get past it, I do think you should tell your wife, but at least wait till she has the baby and is comfortable caring for it. Then she’ll have the headspace to deal with your issues. But you should try to get over it yourself first, with a good therapist.
Yeah as someone who’s pregnant, I’m generally in the “don’t tell her now” camp. You’ve kept it to yourself for 7 years, what’s a little while longer?
She has enough to deal with being pregnant, then labor, then newborn to not need to have the entire foundation of her marriage in question, too. And that’ll give you time to work it over with your (NEW) therapist and then maybe by the time you do discuss it, you’ll have a better handle on what the issue is and how to work through it.
So…would you say the “pain” of never having sex with anyone who isn’t your wife is bigger or less than the pain you would feel if you didn’t have your wife or child?
Better therapist, STAT. Do not tell your wife right now.
Do not destroy your family because you think you need some strange. There actually was just a study showing that it is not “man’s way.”
Don’t tell your wife now. You missed your chance when you were dating. It has nothing to do with her. It is strictly your problem. You fix it.
I agree with Ron that you should have told your wife about your fixation on this before marrying her. I disagree that you should tell her now. Not while she’s pregnant and not when she’s caring for a newborn and is sleep deprived, going through major hormonal changes, and basically has had her whole world changed. Adding this information would just be piling on and, like Portia said, cruel.
I also agree everyone saying that you need a different therapist or at least to speak up and ask what the heck he means when you don’t understand what your current therapist is saying. If I had to guess, it sounds like maybe he was dismissing your issue as not being unusual or a big deal. Given that you didn’t tell your wife about your concerns over her sexual history (or your lack of one), and that you didn’t ask your therapist to clarify what he meant, and your statement about feeling like a boy, I have to wonder if you downplayed how much this is weighing on you when you told your therapist about it? Do you generally feel like a child who is not taken seriously? Do you find that you have trouble speaking up for yourself in all areas of life, or is it specific to this issue?
As for what to do about this obsession, do you want to let it go? If so, it may take quite some time in therapy to unpack the root of problem (sounds like insecurity to me, but I could be totally off base), and maybe even meds. It’s my understanding that obsessive/compulsive thoughts and behaviors are often a manifestation of anxiety, but again, that may not be what’s going on here. That being said, you have to be able to function in day to day life while working on it. So what are you doing to redirect your thoughts when this comes to mind? It’s not always easy, but you do have the power to stop dwelling on it. You have to make a conscious choice to say ‘no, I’m not going to think about this right now.’ Then you choose to focus on something else – maybe every time thoughts about your wife’s past come to mind, you counter it with 5 things you love about her. Challenge yourself not to repeat items on your list. Or you can redirect your thoughts by singing a song, doing math problems in your head, envisioning the kind of father you want to be… anything positive.
The less you room you give for these negative thoughts to occupy your mind, the less power they have over you. Hopefully over time, you’ll find they rarely even cross your mind anymore. But you have to want to move past this. If you’re getting something out of the internal angst – if there’s a part of you that enjoys that feeling, then there’s nothing anyone can do to help you.
I know we are supposed to be kind and helpful but after reading all this it just sounds like excuses for insanely immature thought processes. If I found this out about my husband I wouldn’t want to be near him ever again. He just sounds like a butt. Therapy can help but he clearly has a core belief that I believe therapy will never solve. Deep rooted issues with women and their sexuality. I pity his wife.
Janelle —
And there lies the crux of the problem. He probably can’t fix himself. He says he tried, on his own and in therapy, and the problem continues to get worse.So, yes he should have told her about all of this very early in the relationship, but he didn’t and that can’t be changed retroactively. So when should he tell her. Yes it is rough, but should she be stripped of autonomy and just jollied along, until she realizes 5 or 10 years from now, after one or two more kids with this guy, that her entire relationship has been a sham and her husband basically resents and loathes her? That he views her as a whore who has trapped him perpetually as a boy? Should she have to, out of ‘kindness’ for presumed fragility, waste half her life on this guy? Or should he give her back control of her life and end this destructive charade? I agree, today is probably cruel, but she needs to be told.
I didn’t really all the comments, only some, so forgive me if I repeat some stuff or get off track. I’m confused about what part bothers you. Does it bother you that she wasn’t a virgin or are you jealous that she got to have other sexual experiences and you wish you had too? Those are two different things. You need a new therapist. He basically is blowing you off when you talk about that issue, and as much as you may like that he’s not challenging you on it, you’re never going to get over it if you don’t get some push back. Therapy is about going through the hard stuff that your brain would otherwise push down if someone wasn’t there making you talk about it.
My first thought was that this was about something else. After this many years, if you’re still wishing you had been with other people, it makes me think that you’re not happy with your wife. Like maybe you feel like you “should” be happy but aren’t, so you’re sort of creating this feeling to justify why you aren’t. Or something other than that. But to still be dwelling on this for this long means something.
In terms of telling her (I did read those comments), I’m torn. On one hand, yes, this is a bad time to tell her. But considering pregnancy will turn into an infant will turn into a toddler, etc., there’s not really a good time. Or if there is, it means more years of you stewing and her not realizing that you aren’t happy. I’d want to know if my husband felt this way, mostly because I would want to let him loose to go find his sexual experiences and let me find someone who actually wanted to be married to me. Maybe part of what’s eating you up is that you’ve been hiding your true feelings about your relationship for years?
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