Most of the time my husband and I get along very well. Conflicts between us are as rare as a sunny day in Seattle. This is because we usually want the same things. But there's a big clash going on right now, and hubby says he doesn't want to talk it to death, but I'm not willing to let it drop until we get it solved. It's a monster, at least to me. I don't know how to handle things when he comes home from work in about an hour and a half. I'm not even sure I want to talk to him.

Hubby and I both come from a background of child abuse. Both of us used emotional shutdown as a coping mechanism, but I regained my emotions through years of therapy, and he won't even consider doing so for himself. I need for him to feel things. I need to see that he feels it. But he's an iceberg.

When we disagree, it's usually a logic-versus-emotion thing. I want something, he doesn't. He gives logical reasons. I understand the logic, but I'm disappointed, and all I really need is for him to acknowledge that it hurt me. But he takes it as, I didn't understand the reasons. And he explains them again. Well, that doesn't help with the feelings. Then my emotions escalate, because in addition to not getting what I asked for, I now have a husband who doesn't get me at all. Whereupon he thinks I still don't understand, and he explains his logic to me AGAIN. Then complains that he has to keep repeating himself.

There is something really making me very angry right now. When he called me on break at work, to discuss our current issue, I asked him, "How do you feel when I'm upset?" He answered with, "Well, I just back off and give you space so things don't get worse."

I said, "That's what you do. That's not how you feel." That's when he said he had to go back to work, and when he gets home, he doesn't want to keep talking about it. We did reach a compromise on the original point of conflict, but I am far more upset about his lack of emotions than I ever was about the disagreement. I thought I was marrying a sweet, wonderful man, not an unfeeling Vulcan. And I'm getting sick of it. As long as he is incapable of completing the sentence, "I feel ___," or even of comprehending what the word "feel" means, I am beginning to wonder if I didn't make yet another mistake.

I'm going to stay on this site until he comes home, and hope someone can help me. Maybe I'll stop in on the chat room. I'm not in crisis, but I am one quivering soggy mess. And the one person I need most has gone into turtle mode, shut down in his shell, and doesn't seem interested in comforting me.