Alma, I kept trying, love and prayer. I wouldn’t give up. My family was around 1000 miles away for the first nearly 8 years, and my mother had died when I was a teen. My self-esteem was pretty low also. I was too often criticized for it to flourish! He used to say he didn’t love me also. We didn’t have date nights or the other activities you spoke of, but were struggling. It sounds as if you’re both doing the right things in that regard.
I think it made it difficult for him, that I didn’t give up on him or our marriage, especially him as the children’s father. Therefore, because he is basically very moral, he couldn’t entirely give up. There was a time that I used to cry every day, not in front of him as it annoyed him. I found support in weekly Confession, the priests knew me and let me say what I needed to. There was a 6.am half-hour Mass. I’d go to that and come home to make everyone breakfast.
Without God I wouldn’t have survived.
Perhaps your husband needs to understand more about himself. And that he is wearing himself out, and to learn more realistic standards for others. My husband would never be diagnosed. He says you can make anything fit any diagnosis, but I did find he does tick a number of the boxes for aspergers. That doesn’t mean your husband does. But if I had known the possibility and the symptoms when I was younger I might have known to take his criticisms and seeming coldness as being not personal. Maybe it would have hurt as much, but I could at least intellectually not taken it as personally.
It is a triumph that I can walk up to him each morning and share a hug. It far beats the early days when finally I’d ask for one and he’d say, “What for?”
A couple of things helped me cope, another person’s humor in response to something my husband said that hurt me. He’d come into the room when my brother in law and his wife were visiting, said something high-handed to me and he walked out again.
And some years later, in Confession, I had tears running down my cheeks, but wasn’t saying anything about that. The priest said, “Go back a minute. What were you thinking of just now?” I answered the priest with what my husband had said to me that morning, and he began to laugh. Another person might have been offended but I do have a sense of humor. (The priest was good but had his oddities and so do I, so it was okay) Yes, what my husband had said was pretty ridiculous. Actually it was pretty mean also. But those humorous signals did help me to step outside the criticism, to see that what my husband said to me wasn’t reasonable. And you do need to realize that it *isn’t *reasonable, no, you’re not unworthy of love, not too hard to love.
I have to head off now but keep in touch if you feel like it.
)