Married and Alone

by Douglas Weiss

The intimacy anorexic’s busy-ness inside the house could take the form of house cleaning or garage-tidying. It can take the form of an overt focus on the couple’s child or chil- dren, usually consisting of excessive time spent with the child helping with homework or doing projects to the ex- clusion of the spouse.

Busy behaviors can also take the form of leisure activities like reading or surfing the web. The computer, and especially the internet, is the avoidance strategy most often employed by anorexics. Online involvements like social networking, weather-monitoring, and pornography may completely fill up the hours in which the spouses could have been interacting and relating.

Honestly, we both get stuck in a pattern of becoming silent in response to problems.

Understanding addiction, I can tell you that an addiction is a disease based on the addict’s choice to be addicted. Even if the addiction is the indirect result of childhood abuse or some other factor out of the addict’s control, the choice to partake daily in addictive behavior is still 100% a choice.

Wow, no wonder he felt so insecure about himself that he spent a paragraph shoving his credentials in our faces. This is not what any program says about addiction.

So it is with intimacy anorexia. A twenty year old soul is less damaged by intimacy anorexia choices and less entrenched than a fifty or sixty year old soul.

Wow, he absolutely cannot keep his shit straight in this passage.

Rule #2: Maintain eye contact during the exercise.

People with Aspergers are screwed for this one.

When I did open myself up, I was met with nothing to attach to.

She gets what she wants by agreeing with my re- quests then never following through. She doesn’t know what she wants, so she can’t really give herself what she wants. She can’t ask for what she wants. There’s a Bangles song, “If she knew what she wants – he’d be giving it to her.”