He claimed that I didn�t give him a chance, but last time I thought about it, seven hours was more than a decent window for him to try to initiate something. It makes me so angry when he would rather play video games than try to be intimate with me. He�s never spontaneous and he knows how much of a problem I have had with our dwindling sex life for the past year and three months. He knows that feeling like I have for the past several days, I am in no mood to initiate anything and I don�t think I should be expected to, either. Sure, he can pick up on my bad moods, but somehow he cannot figure out how to help to mitigate them. It bothers me that he�s so intensely intelligent, yet at the same time so slow when it comes to dealing with other people emotionally.

He says that he feels the same stresses, less the self-hatred, of course, but he doesn�t ever exhibit any kind of emotion until my dam breaks and I let it out. He knows what makes him feel better when he feels badly, but I don�t understand why he can�t stop to think for one moment that maybe his significant other needs or wants the same things. I just wonder if he is capable of applying his common sense to situations that don�t pertain directly to his own issues.

I hate to say it, but I am not going to apologize for needing to feel sometimes, or for needing to cry and be left alone. He says he needs me to help him when we�re going through a difficult time, but where�s my help? He helps by avoiding his own emotion and escaping into a fantasy world of fighters and dragons, when I�ve told him that he needs to come to me and talk. I get left by the wayside to deal with everything on my own while he slays evil on a screen.

I get really frustrated because every problem we have has been a problem before. I feel like a broken record when I find myself raising the same issue for the nth time in two years and I hate it when he says that it�s not always the same things and things do change. Why, then, do I still have to bring up our unequal sexual satisfaction (I get the short end of the stick), his not completing his portion of the housework, my feelings of taking a back seat to his computer games? Often these things change for a spell, but end up reverting before I can even give credit for there having been an improvement. Granted, I have the power to restrict his computer usage, to not have sex with him until he realizes that I need at least an attempt at equal orgasms, to follow him around and tell him to pick up this, that or whatever he has dropped and not bothered to pick up, but I�m not his mother.

I feel shortchanged, that both of us have been shortchanged, because his mother never taught the importance of housework, communication, and mutual satisfaction to her sons. She was socked to hear several months ago that he cooks and cleans and I found myself wondering why she wouldn�t teach her sons any of these things.

Needless to say, there was no intimacy last night. Of any sort. And I don�t know when there will be again. I feel myself sliding into that place of disinterest again and that inevitably causes pain. All I ask is that he stop saying he wants me and acts on it instead. It�s clich�d, but actions do speak louder than words sometimes and I�m sick and tired of just the words. I want spontaneity and romance, not on-the-clock predictability and more dishes in the sink. I want gifts and flowers just because, but I can�t expect that when I received $40 in Christmas gifts and gave $100. It seems as though that�s typical in this relationship. I give one hundred percent and get so much less back. I know that as much as I say it, as much as I scream and cry about it, these things may never come to fruition, but a girl can dream, can�t she?