My Husband’s Definition of ‘Pampering’ Shocked the Hell Out of Me – Here’s Why
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Two pieces of advice stood out when I shared my story. A group of people were of the notion that it was only my husband who could define what pampering meant to him, so I should have a conversation with him. I’d already done that but nothing came out of it. That notwithstanding, I went to him again asking him to define pampering.
He said, “You don’t give me what I need when I ask for it.”
In my mind, there was nothing he had asked that I didn’t give or didn’t do for him. I asked him to come clear. “Name just one thing you asked that I didn’t do for you.” He wasn’t straightforward with his answer. Instead, he asked me to jog my mind through memory lane and I would find out. When I insisted on the answer, he said, “You’re not a child to be told everything.”
His answer brought me to the second piece of advice that stood out for me when I shared my story. Many people were of the view that all the things I listed and said I was doing for him didn’t work because I was operating outside his love language. “You should know his love language and do it for him.”
This advice cost me a few dollars because I had to buy that book online. It wasn’t the first time I was hearing of it, so I told myself, “This is the time to get it since everyone is talking about it.”
I read the book in two days. I tried practising some of the suggestions. Anytime I did something new from the book, I would ask him, “Do you like that? Do you want me to do it often?” He would chuckle and brush my question off. Loving a man should be easy, but he made it look like looking for a treasure in the jungle with a distorted map.
I stopped thinking about it completely and decided to do what any wife would do to please her husband until one day, maybe out of frustration, he uttered what it was that he wanted but I wasn’t doing.
Before I came to share my story the first time, there had been incidents I didn’t talk about because, in my mind, they were mere accidents and didn’t need attention. While being intimate with him, it accidentally slipped and entered the wrong path. The entry was so forceful I had to scream out of pain.
He quickly stopped and started apologizing, “My bad. I’m so sorry I got carried away. Are you okay? Please forgive me.”
He went to the fridge and got me a glass of chilled juice. It didn’t help to ease the pain, but the gesture meant a lot to me. That accident happened again and again on different occasions, and I began dreading intimacy with him. He no longer apologized for them because, according to him, it wasn’t his fault. I had to tell him to be careful whenever we were doing it.
While I treated those moments as accidents, they were not actually accidents. He was slowly drilling it into my mind that it was an option both of us should consider. I didn’t know because he wasn’t vocal about it until he eventually did.
“This is why I tell you often that you don’t know how to pamper a man. Why don’t you allow us to try it? It won’t kill you. Soon you’ll see it as fun.”
I was down and gasping for breath because he had done it again, and the pain was crawling down my spine and heart. I couldn’t even put words together clearly. “What did you just say? You call this pampering? Leave me alone!”
I shoved him off, got out of bed, and went straight to the hall. I fixed myself some cold juice while trying to process what had just happened.
We spent the rest of the night apart, but in the morning, we talked about it. He was acting hurt and not ready to talk, but I was ready to address it once and not again. I said it wasn’t going to happen. I told him everything had its place, and his dingy didn’t have a place behind me. He wasn’t talking much, so I kept pushing my grievances one after the other, as gently and softly as I could. He responded, “Okay.”
That “Okay” didn’t sound healthy, but I took it for what it was. After that conversation, he stopped initiating intimacy. When I realized it, I started initiating it myself. Some nights he said no. Other nights he obliged grudgingly. It didn’t bother me as long as we did it. It has become the norm since then. He doesn’t initiate. I do all the initiation and the work.
It’s hard to think of the past—how awesome everything was and how dry and lousy things look now between us. We are not fighting. We talk and make fun like we used to. We go out often. I’m still that wife I used to be. He’s still that husband minus a quarter—he no longer initiates. There’s no fire and flames when we do it, but I’ll take it like that than succumb to his suggestion. One day he will come around no matter how long it takes.