A true life story
Next week will be the fifth year anniversary of the day my wife and I tied the knot. It hasn’t really been smooth sailing and many people feel marriage is all about a fairy tale, a handsome hunk sweeping the fair damsel off her feet and riding off into the sunset to live “happily ever after”. From my experience, marriage is anything but.
A year after our wedding, my wife lost her mother on that ill-fated Dana plane crash. She was barely into her first month of pregnancy and she almost lost the baby. God knows how much we all tried to hold things together for her and her younger ones as she automatically became the mother figure to her younger ones. A few months later, into her 8th month of pregnancy, we both left the shores of Nigeria to the US as I had accepted an admission for graduate studies
Fast forward to today, we have three lovely kids, a girl (the first) and two twin boys. Unfortunately for me though, I seem to have lost some of the affection I had in the past for my wife. In clearer terms, I fear I don’t find my wife attractive anymore
As I mentioned earlier, things aren’t as smooth as one would expect. We all know, especially those who live here in the States, that working as an International student is hard. You can hardly find companies that want to hire foreigners, especially in the IT field I’m in. I sometimes wonder how I would pay for rent, utilities, daycare, and even food at the beginning of each month. Rent alone takes away all my meager salary. My wife first of all started out by purchasing and sending baby clothes and other stuff home to Nigeria, but with the “receive today, pay tomorrow” attitude of people at home, coupled with the whole decline of the naira, the business has literally been ruined with so many bills to pay. Luckily she also started school on a tuition-only scholarship, so we have to take the kids to the day-care almost everyday, which is an additional strain to the meager pay I receive
I don’t want to assume it is my feelings for her reducing, but these days I almost always catch myself staring at her in forlorn. I don’t see the beautiful girl I married during the first few years of my marriage. I want to assume it is the stress of all this, coupled with my school work, but these days any little thing she does annoys me. She doesn’t help matters either and sometimes we shout at each other or argue over the most trivial of things. For the past couple of months we’ve not slept in the same room. She prefers to sleep with our daughter while I sleep with the boys in the other room. Anytime I want us to be together, she’ll complain that the kids are too young to sleep alone. I accepted that argument when we first had the boys but they are almost three now. I sometimes have to carry them to their room so that she will “agree” to stay with me, and that is sometimes with great reluctance
Don’t get me wrong, I still love my wife. I just fear I don’t find her attractive anymore. The other night she told me our sex life has really dwindled and I out rightly told her it was her fault. She said she knows and she’ll try being better but till date I’ve not seen any improvement. She’ll complain of being tired or a headache anytime I want to initiate anything, only to plead with me the following morning. There was a day she just lay there like a log of wood, indirectly telling me to do what I want to do and be done with it. I got so angry that I didn’t know when I started yelling on her. She didn’t even respond and turned to face the wall. I left her alone in bed and slept on the couch that night
I want to believe it’s the stress of work, school, and the many thoughts going through our minds that is causing all this, but I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I don’t love my wife anymore. I don't want a situation where all this will split our family apart and suffer the little ones