Since my wife and I started counseling, I have been trying as best I can to be positive and engaged in making things work (although it hasn't been easy) but I don't know if I see anything changing. We made it through the holidays pretty well and I was even starting to have a little optimism, then the weekend after new years we had a big fight again. It started out about something trivial, but evolved into an argument over having a baby again. Lots of being screamed at. I eventually screamed back at her, only to say "I can yell louder than you so stop screaming at me".

She continues to say that we can't go forward until I let all this go. She has said that my not wanting to have a child now is me effectively putting our lives on hold, and that we can't get better until I get past that. I need to be able to at least envision a life together with out fighting and screaming all the time before I can get past this, and certainly before I can even think about having a child with her. I know she has apologized, but I need to be able to see a pattern of a different behavior and I haven't seen that yet. And as the fighting has been going on for months at a rate of once every week or two, I think it's reasonable to expect that we can go at least a few months without fighting before I'm going to feel secure about it.

The thing is, being screamed at and constantly being anxious about when the next fight or disagreement is going to unfold, has me feeling so bad all the time that I don't even want to have sex anymore. She does, and outside of wanting to get pregnant, she wants us to have more sex for bonding. But on top of all the feelings about myself, she has told me that my wanting to wear a condom during sex makes her feel trashy. That makes me feel even worse! I don't want to make her feel trashy, but I don't know what else to do.