Hello all,
I'm joining this forum as kind of a last ditch, Hail Mary pass, to try to learn from others and perhaps turn things around in my marriage. Perhaps.
A bit about us: I'm 62 and my wife is 58. We have been married 24+ years and we have one adopted daughter, 16.

Things are not going well at home on a lot of fronts, but for now I'm going to concentrate on the primary issues. I'm getting nervous even thinking about what to talk about first.
Our marriage is not really a marriage anymore; it's more of a living arrangement whereby we occupy the same house, drive the same cars, sleep in same bed (most of the time),
and share the superficial benefits of co-habitation along with our daughter.

I would classify the atmosphere in the marriage and family as moderately toxic to toxic. The family dynamic is out of balance and all three of us are suffering in our own way.
All three family members have issues with the other two members. It's less of a family and more of a 3-sided boxing ring at this point.

When we met, I was 36 and my wife was 32. She was a widow; her first husband was killed in an industrial accident. I had never been married.
We both brought a lot of psychological baggage into the relationship. Codependent? Most likely. We were both lonely and looking for another person to fill a void inside ourselves. First red flag.

To be continued...

Welcome to MB.

Please finish your story. There is not enough here for us to understand the problems between the three of you. What do you mean by "psychological baggage", and why do you cite "codependency" as a problem? And if people are lonely, why do you see looking for a marital companion as a red flag?

Thanks for commenting, Sugar Cane.
I plan on adding to the narrative as I have time to do so. I did say, "to be continued".

OK, continuing my story... I was asked unpack the term "psychological baggage" by Sugar Cane. OK, here we go.

Her baggage:
My wife is the youngest of three sisters. Her mother died of an embolism when my wife was 1.5 years old. Her father remarried the mother's best friend less than a year later. The father and the new stepmother were both physically and verbally abusive to all three girls. I heard some horrendous stories of what these girls went through; sad, sad treatment. My wife's father threw her out of the house one night when she was 14 and she slept in a park, where she ended up getting raped. A whole package of traumatic [censored]. She left home at 18, met a man many years her senior and was married by age 20. When my wife was in her 30's, her husband was killed in an accident. He was an apprentice for Com Ed (an electrical utility). He hit a live wire on a utility pole and was thrown down and landed on the truck. She spent several months in a psychiatric hospital after that event. This was in 1991 or 92. I met her in 1995.

My baggage:
I was born with a facial deformity and that fact has affected my life from that moment onward. Negativity, poor self-image, lack of self-confidence, shyness, depression, social anxiety, feelings of shame. I didn't really suffer a lot of direct bullying, but people stared at me a lot and my Inner Critic, and oh my god that son of a [censored] ruled my life and made me miserable. I avoided life as much as I could in order to not feel the pain of feeling alone and different. My parents didn't get me the psychological help I needed growing up. Psychological therapy and counseling wasn't as common in those days as now. My coping mechanism to escape the pain as a young teen and into adulthood? I discovered porn magazines and masturbation at age thirteen. I could numb quite effectively for at least short periods of time. Because I didn't feel whole as a boy or man, I sought, and continue to seek out female validation at a very needy level. (Sorry if the porn/masturbation references are offensive to anyone, but they are key to my psychological baggage description and to the whole marriage problem, which will be explained as I go on.)

To be continued...

Continuing on...
Discussing my interpretation of Co-dependency and how I feel it relates to our psychological baggage as discussed above.

My wife's co-dependency:
Entering our relationship, my wife expected me to be her "knight in shining armor" and to fix her to the point where her bad childhood and abuse suffered at the hands of her father, stepmother, and others didn't matter. She said as much to me on several occasions. She thought she could be healed by love alone. She didn't spend and hasn't spent enough time working on herself to heal her self from the inside. As a flawed human myself, there is isn't much I can do to actually change her. Because she went into our relationship with that "fix me because I can't fix myself", I call that a red flag. A red flag that I generally overlooked or ignored.

My co-dependency:
I too entered the relationship less than whole, for reasons discussed in my psychological baggage portion above. I felt terribly incomplete and inadequate as a man. Although I had started to do some inner work and was on medication for depression and social anxiety, I was far from feeling the self-love and self-care for myself that a psychologically healthy, confident man feels. My self-esteem and confidence relied heavily on others, in this case my fiance/wife. I felt shame, neediness, and low-self worth and relied on her to fill those voids up to and into the marriage. A second red flag.

Two incomplete, co-dependent people and an addiction:
As you can now see, we entered the marriage as adults, but also as two seriously flawed individuals. She had her voids, I had mine.
I also had a full-fledged porn/masturbation addiction at the time we got married, one that she was not fully aware of the extent of. A third red flag. She knew that I masturbated, but at the time it didn't trigger concerns in either of us. It should be noted that unfortunately, my wife was my first real sexual partner and I lost my virginity (at 36) to her. One other point, and it saddens me to admit this, I didn't know then (or now) what my natural sexual arousal response is without the influence of porn/masturbation in my life. I didn't use porn/masturbation when I was with my wife, but I used it in addition to our love-making when she was not around. It surely had a psychological and physical effect, as I will discuss in later posts. As a sidebar: I started masturbating at 13 and have never really stopped, all the way up to now, at age 62. The longest I have ever gone without using porn or masturbating is approximately 45 days, ***EDIT***

This is how we basically entered marriage in 1996.
To be continued...

Well, you cannot change the past, but you can do better in the future. I do not think it is unfortunate that your wife is your first sexual partner.
There are circumstances under which everyone can be trusted and circumstances where people succumb to temptations. Obviously, you have not brought about the right circumstances for your addiction yet.

People fall in love with their spouses because they have fun together and because they make each other feel good. How much time do you spend with your wife during a typical week - dating and having fun?

Have you read Dr. Harley’s basic concepts?

Do you get any undivided attention?

Several days a week, increasing up to every day. We never lived together per se, but we slept at each other's houses more times than not up until the marriage. But - important point - looking back now, I can see that we never have had a lot in common - our interests, likes, dislikes, hobbies, political tastes, musical tastes, all pretty much polar opposites.
We have never been "best friends" for that reason, and that lack of a close bond of friendship has made it harder to overcome our differences once the romance and love faded.

No I haven't. Is that something I should read or "get" before I continue? What do you mean by "undivided attention"? Undivided attention from who?

OK, continuing now...

As the narrative is now going to be entering a discussion of our actual marriage, should I switch to the Marriage 101 category or stay here? Just curious.

Yes read Basic Concepts

Yes I would notify the MODS and ask them to move this to MB 101

How do I notify the mods? Thanks.

OK, continuing the narrative...

I proposed to my future wife in early spring, 1996 and we were married in late summer, 1996. A nice church wedding and we honeymooned on a cruise to the Bahamas and ended up in Key West because of an encroaching hurricane. As stated previously, I was 36 and she was 32. In fact, I turned 37 while on our honeymoon cruise. We lived in my house, sold her house, then sold my house and bought a larger home in 1997.

The first couple years were happy ones. We knew she couldn't have children because of physical abuse she had suffered as a child. We went to a fertility clinic and this was all but 100% confirmed. Not having kids was never truly a deal breaker for me because I was always nervous about having a child with a facial deformity like mine.

Personality eye-openers:
At some point, and I can't really put my finger on exactly when, I began to notice troubling things about Brenda's personality. Mind-reading and always being right - assuming she knew what other people were thinking - and it usually was something bad about her. This led to numerous conflicts between my wife and my family which in turn led to me being in the middle. My wife accused me of never taking her side, and well I didn't often because I felt she was wrong a good deal of the time. She always assumed there was ill intent on my family's side, which is ludicrous. She eventually stopped going to family functions, which did nothing to mend the fences. My wife and my niece were the main stubborn ones, and for a while, I was on my nieces' bad side as well. My niece and I have since mended our relationship. A certain amount of resentment has lingered on through the years for me because I don't think my wife has treated my family fairly. It was the first major dent in our marriage bliss from my point of view.

Her gastric-bypass:
My wife was fairly heavy when I met her (around 200 pounds) and she continued to gain weight. At her peak, she weighed about 280 pounds and contracted diabetes type II. Her doctor recommended a gastric bypass, which was just beginning to be used to combat obesity and to put diabetes into remission. She had the procedure and started losing weight, however she totally ignored the exercise program suggested by the doctor's team. Just blew it off, because she knew better. This upset my greatly, because I understood she was missing a wonderful opportunity to create a whole new, healthier lifestyle. More dents in the marriage, because her stubbornness was becoming more and more apparent and my opinion didn't really matter, it seemed.

Reality sets in. My addiction grows:
The more my wife’s personality idiosyncrasies, stubbornness, and unreasonable thinking came out, the more I withdrew into my shell. I avoided conflict with her at all costs, because she was not an easy person to discuss disagreements with calmly. I retreated more into my porn habit, which by now had migrated onto the computer screen. It was the main way in which I could avoid the pain of dealing with a overly-critical wife (in my view) and an unruly child. It wasn’t ideal or healthy, but I did it anyway.

The adoption of our daughter:
In 2005, three years after my wife's gastric bypass, we adopted a six-month old baby girl from Guatemala. It took about a year from start to finish, and we brought her home in the spring of 2005. My wife loved being a mom in the beginning. She was a stay-at-home mom and they did lots of things together. She took tons of pictures and had many more taken at portrait studios, of our daughter and the whole family. As our daughter grew into her toddler years, things began to change.
Our daughter is EXTREMELY headstrong and was this way from about 15 months onward. Instead of disciplining her, my wife would let her get her way, and then when I came home, it was my turn to deal with her. Around 6 PM every night, my daughter would enter the "witching hour" as we called it and would cause all kinds of trouble. When I tried to discipline her, she would scream and cry, which then triggered my wife into withdrawal and retreating into the bedroom. Her constant refrains were, "I can't take it when she does that" and "I'm off duty"! In short, I was left holding the bag of parenting alone whenever I was home. Weekends too. Sometimes all weekend. I felt like a single parent a lot during those years. I'm sure our daughter picked up on that feeling as well.

To be continued…

Have you read the basic concepts?

Not yet. I suppose I better before I get booted off of here.

Please tell us what you think.

Marriage Builders is all about understanding how emotional needs and love busters work and having a plan to learn to meet each others emotional needs and eliminate love busters. Along with reading the Basic Concepts, please read through all the dating articles. Dr. Harley starts with a couple who like each other but are no longer in love with each other and works through scenarios of couples who hate each other, dislike each other, and others. The articles offer valuable insight.

Since you describe your marriage and family situation as toxic, you should consider starting with eliminating love busters. You talk about having a porn/masturbation habit. That would need to be eliminated and your wife would work with you to meet your need for sex. There should be no anger, no disrespect, no angry outburst, no independent behavior. There is so much to learn about creating a great marriage, but it can be done if you work through the materials and build the helpful habits. It's best, of course, if you and your wife are doing this together, but even if she is unwilling to join you, you can start on your own by learning what the love busters are, then eliminating them one by one.

That's why it's really important to start by reading the Basic Concepts. Dr. Harley has on this forum really helpful articles about what it takes to build a great marriage.

I have no idea how long you want us to wait until you start talking about your marriage as it is today, so i think I'll just wade in based on what you said on your other thread about lack of libido.

Is there any interest on your wife's part in trying to restore the marriage?

It might be that she's happy that you don't want to have sex with her and feels that if masturbation and pornography make you happy, you should go for them. She might even be planning to divorce you as soon as your child is on her own. Since she is in the same marriage as you, it's hard to see how she could be happy with it.

On the other hand, she may want to save the marriage, and would be willing to begin a restoration with simple dates that involve recreational activities. If the latter is the case, the dating series that Dr Harley wrote might apply to you, especially the third where the spouses hate each other.

What do you know about how she feels? Do you talk to her about this?

What is meant by "undivided attention" is one of the things that you will come to understand as you review the Basic Concepts. Simply put, are the two of you spending time alone, free of distractions, where you concentrate on meeting each other's emotional needs?

You need to find out what you and your wife's most important individual emotional needs are. Then, you both can focus on meeting those needs. If you meet the most important needs, then feelings of love and closeness with follow. From your description of the present state in your marriage, it seems likely that emotional needs are not being met. The "psychological baggage" concerns are distracting you from putting your attention into the real problem - the failure to address each other's emotional needs.

While I don't want to invalidate the problems you brought up, I need to point out that there are many marriages that have equal if not more severe challenges, and yet the marriage thrives because the couple concentrates on meeting each other's emotional needs.