This is just my opinion, but marmajam, you seem to have a lot of problems communicating, which are clear from this thread and also are evident in your reported interactions with your husband. For me it is impossible to work out what is going on here - is your husband a man driven to desperation because his wife refuses to communicate with him? (A very painful thing that cannot be underestimated and CAN drive people to do "crazy", hurtful or overly emotional things, or seek solace elsewhere.) Or are you a woman who refuses to talk to her husband because of the things he has done over time that have chipped away at you/ eroded your self-esteem/ clashed with your preferred way of interacting? There is no way of us knowing as we only have your side of the story but you do have quite an emotionless/ dispassionate way of writing here, and also seem less concerned with the emotional and physical hurt your husband may have experienced and more focused on the impact that his behaviour has on you.
My hypothesis is that you are someone who hates to express negative emotions/ discuss problems, and who prefers to deal with problems by ignoring them/ sweeping them under the carpet (as you said) and hoping that if they are ignored long enough, they will go away. I imagine that if you are put on the spot, you may really struggle to get words out when it comes to being asked to express the way you truly feel about a problem. I also imagine that perhaps you are uncomfortable with displays of strong emotion or physical affection. Your husband on the other hand sounds like a much more verbal, communicative person who needs to talk things out to feel like problems are getting voiced and resolved. Perhaps his tendency to need to talk/ show dramatic emotional displays is something you dislike. Does this sound accurate at all?
I think one thing you really need to concentrate on is your refusal/ inability to communicate regarding problems and the apparent lack of joy you get from life, and ask yourself when these issues started. Is this the way you've always been since at least adolescence (perhaps with fluctuating levels of severity over the course of your life)? Or is this something that's only emerged in your current relationship, or that has been triggered by a negative experience/ event? Is your low mood something that's bothered you for a long time, or do you think it's a distinct episode of depression?
If it is a way you think you've always been, there's nothing WRONG with that - I say this because I am that kind of person myself but I think to a lesser severity. There are MANY people out there who struggle with strong displays of emotion/ physical affection, and who struggle to get the words out when they're expected to communicate about difficult issues. There is a theory out there describing these kinds of people - Masterson describes them as "safety-sensitive" - people who struggle to feel safe in relationships and are constantly trying to strike a balance between being close to others/ having relationships, but not being engulfed by others' emotional needs/ "neediness". A description I found from a Google search:
Safety-sensitive persons have learned that the cost of being connected in a relationship is to abandon one?s sense of self and be swallowed up by the other. On the other hand, the cost of having a sense of self is to be isolated. Since neither is bearable, individuals who are safety-sensitive are constantly seeking a compromise between the two. However the compromise keeps them neither in nor out of relationship and therefore is itself not satisfying. The safety-sensitive individual is ?stuck? in this dilemma.
The extreme form of interacting in this way is schizoid personality disorder - which I am not suggesting you have, this is all about a spectrum of personality traits with SPD being the extreme end of that spectrum - but you may recognise characteristics of this in yourself:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder
Related to this is an avoidant attachment style:
psychology.about.com/od/loveandattraction/ss/attachmentstyle_6.htm
Now again I want to say I am not trying to diagnose/ label you and I may be totally off-base. However, as someone with these traits myself I think if you do have these issues it is important to understand why that's the case, and realise how painful others can find it when you "cut yourself off" from them. I have had to learn to communicate better because I learnt how upsetting it is for others when I just can't get the words out to explain "what's wrong".
It is theorised that people may develop this way of interacting with others due to early experiences with their caregivers - caregivers may have been more disengaged, meaning that the child's needs are frequently not met and the child comes to believe that communicating their needs has no influence on the caregiver (I just paraphrased that from Wikipedia). Does this ring true to you at all?
Now my post may be totally off-base and unhelpful but I thought I would add a different interpretation/ perspective, which after all is what a discussion forum is for! :)
