I feel like my wife has started trying to dress sexy ever since we’ve become friends with this young and fashionable couple in our building. Is she trying to draw everyone’s attention? It makes me feel so uncomfortable. I feel no attraction towards her anymore due to this and our sex life has suffered as a result. Please help.
Your wife’s fashion choices reflect how she chooses to craft and perpetuate her identity as a human being. While it is not uncommon for people to commonly wish to mix things up regarding how they present themselves physically, attributing cause and intent to her behaviour without drawing her into an honest discussion could be seen as reeking of bias. Let us assume that you are right about her trying to dress sexy. Why is that a problem for you? The answer to that may reveal certain latent rules and preferences that you hold dear about how women ought to dress for it to be acceptable to you. This could also be connected to you, your culture, your family, or the locality in which you live. Your lack of attraction towards your wife due to a change in her clothing choices possibly points to an extremely specific or possibly narrow vision you have for how she must present herself to the world. Your wife is an adult and must be entrusted with her own well-being. Your concerns may be voiced whenever you’re ready to speak about this. Your sex life will get better the moment the emotional bond you’ll share improves. To bring some dignity and solidarity to that bond, you’ll need to first examine how you think and then prepare to have a dialogue with your wife to better gauge her motivations rather than making assumptions about why she does what she does.
My wife has started calling up my best friend in the middle of the night whenever we fight. She makes comments like she wishes he was her husband despite knowing that I can hear what she says. I no longer feel any love so sex is out of the question. What should we do?
It can be extremely humiliating for an individual to have people within their familial and social circle drawn into such a tense atmosphere. You will need to have an honest discussion with your best friend to lay some boundaries that limit his involvement in your domestic life.
This could be an awkward or an interesting opportunity to bond with him — depending on how you handle your private emotions while having a dialogue. Your wife will also needs to be coached on conflict resolution and communication skills by a trained professional so that she doesn’t speak in an abrasive or exaggerated way about private matters to any onlookers or scrutinisers. When she declares that she would prefer your friend as her husband, it may be coming from a place of spite or yearning.
A counselor can help to investigate this. Marriage counseling is an excellent jump-off point for such problem-solving to take place safely and privately with guidance and enough time given to learn and adapt to new ways of speaking with respectful and empathetic intent. A marriage needs to be protected against voyeuristic designs or casual conjectures so that it doesn’t get uncomfortable. After all, everyone has a unique way of choosing what they say and controlling how they are perceived publicly.
(Dr Aman Rajan Bhonsle, Ph.D, is a consulting relationship counsellor and youth mentor)
