The Strawberry Letter - Everything is a Minor Inconvenience

Dear Steve and Shirley,

Everything seems to be a minor inconvenience for my husband, and I need to figure out if something is going on with him outside of our household. He used to love doing everything with me. He used to initiate intimacy, and afterwards, he would always get up and cook breakfast, no matter the time of day or night. That was our little fun time. He wanted to have a lot of kids before we got married, but now he’s saying that he doesn’t know if we can afford to start a family. He said that babies take up a lot of time and are inconvenient most of the time. That broke my heart because how can a child be inconvenient?

He’s been saying crazy stuff like this, and I’ve been taking mental notes. I asked him to go look at TVs with me at his favorite electronics store, but he said he’d already put on his lounging clothes, so my timing was inconvenient for him. The same thing happened with sex. The other night, I mentioned that we haven’t had sex in a week, and he said that I come to bed too late, so it’s a minor inconvenience for him to get in the mood. We never had this problem before. We finally did have sex two nights ago, and he went straight to sleep. I woke him up and asked why he didn’t cook for us, and he said that we need to find new ways of doing things because cooking at all hours of the night is inconvenient.

This is his new thing—everything is a minor inconvenience. Does this include me and our marriage? I want to ask him, but I’m afraid of the answer. It seems to me like he’s focused on something outside of our marriage that’s more convenient for him. What’s going on?