I've hurt my wife by finding others attractive
I stumbled across this site by googling a question my wife asked me: "Do you think that you could ever be loyal enough to think that my body is the best?" This led me to the "my husband had a crush" post and now this:
My wife and I have been married for 7 years. I love her very much and find her very attractive. I made the mistake early on in our relationship of talking about former girlfriends including what they looked like. This led to more discussions and fights about who I was attracted to and who looks better than who and so on.
She is deeply hurt by the fact that I would say someone else has a better body than her. I say it as "yeah she does... so what?" This doesn't make a bit of difference to me, but she can hardly live with it. I would gladly change into a person who thinks she is the best looking woman in the world if I could. We have many arguments about societies standards about women's bodies. We both believe that women should not be judged by their bodies, but I guess that's exactly what I am doing. I've also told her that a relationship is about "the whole package, not just looks" which made her feel even worse. As if I was saying "you're ugly, but your sense of humor makes up for it". I never meant that. If I wasn't attracted to her in the first place, I wouldn't have asked her to marry me.
Her trust in me has been shattered by my trying to expain this in every way possibe. In doing so, I've contradicted myself plenty of times. This issue seems to overshadow our lives and may bring us down if we can't find a middle ground. If I could find a way to never find anyone as physically attractive as her ever again, I would do it. It seems to her as if I'm fighting to keep the right to look at other women and find them attractive. I'm not. I don't care about other women and feel like I'm pretty loyal.
I'm getting fairly confused about all of this and wonder what some of you might have to say? Any Ideas on how to get our trust and intimacy back?
Thanks,
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