Did I have green teeth? ... or did she?

The title comes from this post twelve years ago. It was one of several (including this one and this one) where I tried to understand why Wife was so absolutely not sexually attracted to me, why she appeared to find me sexually loathsome.

Well yesterday I was rummaging through some old files on my home computer -- looking for the notes that I published as this article on the Patio -- and I found where I had saved so many of Wife's IMs with Boyfriend 5, back when she spent all day texting him and then I'd stay up at night and copy them into hidden files for later reference. I paged through a few of them, just for the sheer self-flagellating discomfort of it all, I suppose. I even found one where she tells what appears to be the exact same story I told in this post, only from her point of view:

Hosea's version: The other morning she was sitting on our bed wearing nothing but a skimpy nightie, and I told her how genuinely attractive I find her ... still, after all the years we have been married. Her response was to curl up in a ball in fetal position and beg me to stop saying it. 

Wife's version: [addressing Boyfriend 5, about me] Yes, I admitted that he's closer to me than anyone. He said "If only you could see how sexy you are" and I lost it. I just grabbed my nightgown strap out of his hand, wrapped my arms around my knees and put my head down on my knees and cried.

And as I browsed the texts just before and after this, I think I saw something of an explanation. It doesn't contradict any of the hypotheses that I spun in the posts I reference up top, but it adds some detail.

In the first place, Wife hated her own looks. Just a few lines farther down in the text message above, she told Boyfriend 5, "I look at my own body and find myself hideous." And I think the next step was that, if she was hideous and I still desired her anyway, I must be a pathetic loser. When I tried to act in ways that (so I hoped) would reassure her and make her feel loved, she read it as neediness, pawing at her, clinging to her. And I suppose that if you start from her premises, that's logical; anybody who would treat a hideous gorgon as if she were desirable must be doing it out of desperation, ... right? But we all know that desperation is a turn off. Desperate, needy, clinging people are never sexy.

In short, I think that by telling her she was sexy, I guaranteed that she would think I wasn't.

This is consistent, too, with her hating to let me see her orgasm. On the one hand, like any of us, she had to get the release any way she could. If she could close her eyes and shut out the world, if she could pretend she was totally alone, then she could concentrate on feeling the squishy arousing wetness and the explosive ecstasy in her loins. On the other hand if anybody could see her, then all she could think of would be her own (presumed) ugliness reflected back in their eyes -- an image, I have to guess, of some grotesque, chancred hag wandering alone in a blasted wasteland and dementedly strumming herself. Uncouth. Brazen. Revolting.

I hope I'm wrong, but that seems too consistent with the data to be all the way off base.

What a terrible way to live.