I don't find my DP attractive anymore...

[PunkDog]

Is there anyone out there (male or female) who has stayed with a partner they no longer find attractive?

How was/is the relationship?
Is this it? Am I never going to find him attractive again or can I get those feelings back?
Please help me if you've been in this situation, or even if you haven't but can offer hope and/or advice.
Thanks in advance.

I stayed with my partner (now ex) for a long time after I stopped finding him attractive. It got to the point where he actually turned my stomach, I coouldnt touch him, hug him or kiss him, let alone make love with him. It was awful and what was worse was seeing how it made him feel. He couldnt help it and didnt deserve it. I knew he felt awful that I wouldnt kiss him but I couldnt bring myself to do it. I cared about him and hated making him feel so bad. I finally ended it and it was the absolute best thing for both of us. We are now both engaged to other people and are happy.

All I wanted for a long time was to find him attractive as I didnt want to end the relationship. I tried lots of things but nothing worked. I never got that feeling back and I tried for years! I dont think I was as in love with him as I could have been though. I find my current partner incredibly attractive but I am madly in love with him in a way I never was with my ex.

It was hard ending it with him but it was truly the best decision I have ever made and I am so happy with my current partner. I hope you can work this out, its a horrible position to be in.

Thanks for your honesty foxtrot. How long did you stick it out?

foxtrot, i felt like that too with my exh. it wasn't a great relationship in lots of ways, but it got to the point where i just couldn't pretend anymore. I probably spent about 2 years having sex with him when I really couldn't stand the sight of him. I told him I wanted to divorce in January of that year, had sex for the last time in March (one last ditch attempt, awful), moved into the spare room by about May, then eventually we separated in the September. Wish I'd done it all sooner.

and just to add, that was 7 years ago. we are both now happily remarried with 2 more children each.

Hi Punkdog

Can you articulate why you longer find him attractive? For example, has he put on weight? His attitude changed? Cleanliness?

If you once found him attractive, I'm assuming there is a reason you no longer do so.

If it's something like weight, cleanliness, that's fairly easy to change. Attitude, less so.

Lastly I recently saw a couple I know really well split up. Neither had done anything particularly wrong. Personally I think where they went wrong was that after kids, they became mum/dad and they stopped having fun together as a couple. Then over time the stresses were just blamed on each other. And one day they just didn't have anything in common anymore except the kids.

I had this in a relationship once, where just all of a sudden I just switched off and like you say, couldn't even touch him physically. No reason, nothing he'd done, he hadn't changed, just somethign in my head flipped off. It was awful. And it was the end of that, as well, sadly, even though he was a really lovely man.

To be fair, I didn't really try to stick it out and wait as we hadn't been together for that long/didn't have kids. Perhaps it would have come back but it seemed pretty final to me.

I stuck it out for about 5 years after it got really bad. Ridiculous really as we dont have children, werent married and I owned the house outright!! I guess I just needed it to be the right time. The right time came on very suddenly and I just sat and told him it was over. We also had sex one last time and it too was awful. Dont know what possessed me. Think I was just trying to make him feel better but it made me feel so much worse. Still, live and learn eh :)

I stuck it for 6 years. I really really could not stand the sight of him. If he touched me it made me want to vomit.

I hated sitting in the room with him having to look at him. Still look at him when we're swapping kids and stuff and think how the fuck were you ever attractive to me.

I thought it was me, something to do with me, because he told me it was.

I have a new DP who I fancy the pants off

Thanks everyone. In answer to questions, it's a combination of things. I think the main thing is a deep routed resentment on my part of our financial situation.

We have four DCs together and have been together for 9 years now. Prior to that we had a period apart following the birth of our first DC.

Basically I feel that he has engineered everything so that if I ever leave him I have nothing. I am a SAHM (which we both decided would be the best for our DCs), so therefore I have no idependant income -only what he says I can have we can afford, which is £200 per week to but food, any clothes/shoes/extras for me and 4 DCs and petrol for my car (which is really his, and he would keep if I ever left).

Occasionally I will get an extra £10/£20 out of the joint account if I need it for food and he will lecture me till the cows come home and make me feel shit. I spend next to nothing on myself and the kids go without too. A month ago I spent £6 on a pair of leggings at Asda for me and he made some snide unecessary remark about me not really needing them (I really did need them!)

The other day I bought our daughter a coat in the sale which she needed for school (she'd had the other one for three years and it was really tatty), I bought it out of my own very over drawn account, because I couldn't face him being an arse about it if I took the money from the joint account. I still got a lecture, spoken down to about being extravagant.

Yet at the weekend he spent £40 on a hoody that she most definately didn't need plus other stuff that amounted to about £40 and had 3 pizzas delivered. Incidentally I didn't want pizza but asked for a can of diet coke which he forgot to order .

I think if there's any cash going spare, it should firstly go on things we or the kids desperately need and that I should have an equal say in how that money is spent, or it should be saved for us as a family. Two of our other DCs need shoes and that money could have paid for shoes. He didn't know they needed shoes becasue if I had bothered to tell him that, he'd have said some snide remark about budgeting properly and it coming out of the £200 I get each week.

He has two houses including the one we live in which are both in his name.

We are not married!

He has also put on a lot of weight, but that alone wouldn't make him unattractive to me, but tbh even if he lost all the weight, if he still had the same attitude and made me feel like this I still wouldn't find him attractive IYSWIM.

ANd he wonders why I am narky and snappy with him! .

Would really aprreciate other peoples thoughts on this situation. I might print them off and show him this thread so only constructive comments please. AIBU?

PS He thinks my narkiness is nothing that the full moon passing and a bit of evening primrose oil won't sort out!

Thanks for advice.

Jesus - that doesn't sound good OP and I can see how you'd go off someone like that.

How tight is money for the family? Do you have any idea of what his take home salary is and what it's spent on?

In short, most rational people would agree that you should have equal say in what the money is spent on. As a SAHM, you bring just as much value (if not more) to the family as he does.

It's completely unacceptable that you're not involved in the decision making.

I was going to make quite a mercenary comment but then I read that you might show him this so I stopped.

Quite frankly, I think if my 'partner' behaved toward me like that it wouldnt matter if he looked like Jonny Depp. I wouldnt want to sleep with him either!

Its not acceptable that you and your children are forced to go without while he spends money on himself, but you already know that.

Do you think theres any hope of him changing or has he always been like this? Does he really not think that you all deserve to share any money. I find that I enjoy sharing extra money with my partner, we use any spare for nice things for both of us and enjoy it. I dont blame you for being snarky and put off. If this has been his attitude for a while though I dont know how hopeful you would be about engineering a change in him?

I think his take home is about £35,000 but he's self employed and I suspect it's more than I am led to believe, or certainly has been in the past, but perhaps not now (?).

He does go without too and has curbed spending on himself considerably which used to be very OTT and extravagant and not at all proportionate to what I have ever spent on myself or the DCs.

Well, he has agreed to go to councelling thank goodness. He thinks our problems are bascially all mine because I have bad PMT and am perhaps grumpy when he comes home sometimes (he'd probably say all the time!)

As I've said though the financial situation is actually eating away at me - to me it smacks of a man trying to keep a woman in her place. It is disrespecful, and hugely unfair which results in me resenting him deeply to the point where I am struggling to look at him and/or be in the same room as him.

It's a shame because he doesn't see the happy fun me because in the morning when he's here I'm not happy and fun (at least not until he goes out) and the same in the evening - I'm tense when I'm around him. It's like he can't do anything right really, I am annoyed at him all the time and when I'm around him I don't really like myself very much tbh.

My shoulders ache all the time - I don't reaslise I'm doing it but I'm so tense I must be holding myself in a really unnatural way.

I'd just be honest and say you want to be more involved in the family finances because it's all family money. Take an interest and responsibility in managing the finances and he won't be able to refuse if he is rational.
To put this into context, my wife hasn't worked fpr 7 years. I transfer most of our savings to my DW for her to manage. It clearly demonstrates her input is just as important as mine (if not more) and that she should have just as much responsibility and input as me.

Sorry - that last post is specifically about the finances - I realise the problem is much bigger than this

dogfish lol!
What I say is most definately true. He can be hugely generous, too - for my birthday he paid for me and my sister to go for a spa weekend which cost a fortune. However, he also remarked that he got hardly anything for his birthday and mentioned how I got a spa weekend for mine. It seemed totally lost on him that I have absolutely no opportunity to save any money whatsoever and am not allowed to draw money out of the joint account so could spend hardly anything on him (the same at Christmas).

If he can find the cash for things like spa weekends, £80 when he takes our DC out for the day etc am I right to think IANBU to suspect he's either earning more money than he tells me, or we have more disposable income than he leads me to believe - either way he's managing to accumulate some savings it would seem, wouldn't it?

If that's the case would it not be fair for that money to be shared between us so that we can both decide if to spend/save it?

givemesomespace - thanks. I'll try your suggestion. I think you're looking at it from a rational perspective though, which I don't think he has got, but it's worth a try and I might just be pleasantly surpirised!

Yes it would be fair OP - so start to get involved in the finances so you can have some clarity on what money is coming in and what is going out

X post

Yes - I'm going to bring this up at councelling (sp?) and will bide my time until then as we can't really talk without annoying/arguing each other at the moment. I will also print all this off and show him after we've been, I think as it would just be inflammatory before.

The thing is, because he is SE I think it's much easier for him to conceal things from me - if he was an employee he would just get his monthly salary paid into an account (joint) and that would be very straight forward, but things can easily be manipulated if you're SE and have an accountant.

I fought tooth and nail for a joint account a few years ago on principle, but I'm not so naive now to think that what goes into that account is the total sum of his earnings. I think it's just something he's set up to shut me up. He does have a wage paid into it, and all the bills go out of it but I think there's more money that goes straight into another account.