TLDR: How do you communicate to your spouse about your needs and arouse traits in him set the relationship in a better direction? I (still) feel unsettled about this new marriage and have trouble directly express my needs since they are so closely tied to who he is. I don’t want my feelings of “I want out” to blot out all rational thought and I want to seriously consider the downside to ending a marriage to a good man. But worse than staying in an unsatisfying situation, I don’t want to divorce only to have this cycle repeat itself because I couldn't communicate right.

Warning: wall of text incoming.

See previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedPillWomen/comments/7eeyhb/recently_married_and_questioning_everything/

The Situation

For those of you who have been following, I've been torn apart in my outwardly perfect on paper marriage and feel unfulfilled, depressed, and restless. I constantly flip-flop between "should I stay or should I go?" and have wild fantasies about divorce since I feel trapped.

I can’t seem to dig myself out of this depressed funk which isn’t entirely separate from the relationship. Before, I had created a narrative that my depression was entirely intrinsic to me because then, in theory, I had control of ‘fixing it.’ I don’t know how to fix the relationship so if I acknowledged the depression was related, I felt too helpless.

Where I'm at now

My husband is aware of what an emotional wreck I’ve been since we got married, but doesn’t know that it closely relates to our relationship. He agreed to go to counseling to work on things. My goal is to bring the core issues to light to see if they are possible to resolve. Ultimately, if it turns out that there are the major problems in the marriage and nothing can be done to fix it at least we gave it a fighting chance.

My husband has the power to lead the relationship in a healthy direction by taking a more dominant role, understand female behavior better, and lead us to more exciting adventures together...but doesn't know how or feel like anything needs to change. He's happy with the status quo. On my end, I've exhausted every RPW skill/value I could bring to the table but it hasn't helped this feeling. At the risk of sounding like a completely ungrateful bitch, I genuinely think that his beta qualities are a prime source of my disatisfaction and growing resentment in the relationship.

What I've discovered

I started blaming myself until I read this article that gave me so much clarity about my marriage.

http://www.sdmancamp.com/2015/08/the-life-cycle-of-wife-of-beta-male.html?m=1

Some things from the article I can identify with:

  • She begins to get a sinking feeling that something is missing in the relationship...and tends to think there might be something wrong with her... In almost every case, the husband is blissfully unaware of her sense of lacking.

  • She will almost always go out of her way to avoid situations where he may want sex or even any type of intimacy. She has a lack of desire.

  • She's probably not seeking out male attention, but she gets it from somewhere. This stirs up A LOT of feelings she probably hasn't felt since the honeymoon period ended or even before meeting her beta husband. This experience is almost always both exhilarating and terrifying.

  • She genuinely loves her husband and hates that she has these feelings of arousal for another man and not her loving husband.

  • To this point, she thought her lack of arousal was her fault...she begins (correctly) to attribute her lack of desire to her husband. This is a stage where she begins closely observing his behaviors and making mental pro and con lists. Outwardly, she probably seems a bit aloof and cool, but not negative.

  • She becomes negative and sarcastic towards her husband. She eventually starts focusing more and more on his negative qualities, and her negative behaviors increase. In almost every case, this change in behavior seems to come out of nowhere to the husband. He has no idea what she's been going though, which has probably been several years of dissatisfaction.

-She contemplates having an affair and/ or divorce. At this point, she's ready for a change.

In terms of making a pro/cons list, below are some very concrete practical things I think can be improved by my husband. (yes this might be a ridiculously long list, but I need to start somewhere)

  • lead us on new fun adventures.
  • encourage and empower me to be the best person I can be (and I do the same for him)
  • tease and have fun. I cannot overstate this...nothing's more sexually-arousing than confidence and having fun.
  • sets clear rules and boundaries and not take my crap.
  • demand respect/be dominant/lead
  • be someone I can look up to.
  • has more important things to do than spend time with me.
  • not be boring.
  • not apologize constantly
  • he's “happy being the person he is”, which is really just code for “too unambitious to improve himself.”
  • consistent and stable + excitingly spontaneous. Give zero f&@( about shit that he can't control, calmly handle the shit that he can.

So ladies....what do you think?