Thrills or boring marriage?

Dear Anne

I have been married for four years now to a man I've been with for eight. We have just celebrated my daughter's first birthday. During this year I have struggled with post-natal depression and troubles within my marriage. I have changed jobs and am now back nursing which is fun and enjoyable. I have come off anti-depressants which made me feel anxious and unable to think clearly. Everything is looking up. However I now feel trapped in a marriage with someone I love but where there is no spark. I long for the first thrills of a relationship again and have met a man who makes me feel these� thrils although only through talking. Nothing physical happened. I know nothing will ever come of it as we are both married but we both seem to crave this excitement. This has now ended but I don't know how to turn back to my marriage without feeling disappointed in life. At 28 I feel I have achieved my goals - marriage, mortgage and family - and the future seems full of boring sex, housework and no money. How do I stop feeling so sorry for myself and put all the energy into my husband without feeling so cheated? I worry too that this feeling will be repeated throughout our marriage and I will end up having an affair and ruining a lot of people's happiness. Julie

Dear Julie

I'm sorry this has been such a tough year for you. Change is often hard to handle but it sounds like you're beginning to pull through and get your life back on track. Congratulations! This is no small achievement and I hope you are proud of yourself.

I do understand that you loved the thrills you experienced with this other guy. Did it ever occur to you, though, that if you had moved in with him, after a while that relationship too would have settled into a routine? The thrills you describe are part of an initial reaction. They're the first stage of a relationship. As such they can't be sustained. While they're intense, they're actually fairly shallow. Nature designed them as a way of getting couples together. The being together part is up to you.

Yep, when you have a small child, your life is restricted. You can't go out spontaneously any more. You're probably tired during most of your waking hours. It may seem as though you have at least another 16 or 17 years of caretaking before you get your life back, which is a depressing thought. You have financial worries because for a while you've had to give up your job, which also meant a drop in income and a loss of those old familiar sources of stimulation and fulfilment: work and colleagues. There are people who find housework interesting, but they're seriously outnumbered by the rest of us. Life can't be all joy and rainbows. Sometimes we have to go through the drudgery to remind us what a nice change pleasure is. Planning a small reward for having completed the boring chores is helpful. But that's just a bagatelle. Let's look at the real problem.

As a young mum you're probably feeling sidelined, as though your only value were as a wife and mother rather than as an interesting person in your own right. This new guy reflected your own worth back to you. It's as much that sense of vitality and inportance as his presence that you miss, don't you think?

Unfortunately, if you continue to hand over to others the task of making yourself feel valuable and lovable, you'9re likely to carry on repeating the almost-affairs until you do let yourself fall into physical adultery. You may have believed that it's somehow your husband's fault that you feel boring and you have a boring sex-life, but you're at least 50% of this relationship. That means you have as much power as he does to change things around. You're responsible for how you feel. You're responsible for making your life interesting, fulfilling, rewarding. Sure, your initial goals were stability and family, but that doesn't mean you can't set yourself new goals, does it? You've achieved one lot of ambitions so you have a habit of success and can plan to make more dreams come true. Involving your husband in your dreams would be useful, don't you think? And your first joint goal might be, How do we, in our circumstances, give our relationship vitality again?

All too soon your daughter will be at school, moving out of your life and into her own. If you haven't invested in yourself, your career, your friendships, community and interests, not to mention your marriage, won't you feel empty and abandoned once she's grown up and left you? I wish you the application to make your present life pleasurable.

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