Tell Me About It: Get outta here: Wives squirmy over husbandly affection

Adapted from a recent online discussion.

Question: I adore my husband, and our two young children, but I am at a loss as to how to see my husband's love and affection as anything other than yet another demand for my time and energy. He is loving, affectionate, kind, and passionate, but when he comes to give me a hug or anything along those lines (whether it's just a hug, or a hopeful lead-in to something else), I think, "Go the hell away and take care of yourself." What is wrong with me? My head knows he is fabulous in every way.

Answer: There might not be anything "wrong" that you'd need a capable therapist to fix, but given the toxicity of your thoughts and the very real risk you'll actually express one of them, I urge you to find a safe place to air them and figure them out.

You may well be just an overtired, over-touched parent, and a couple of sessions will be enough to address that. Or you might be feeling angry about something else, rationalizing it away, and quietly getting more steamed by the day. Or you're attracted to someone else, or just not your spouse anymore. These are things to spend time on so that you can address the problem without blowing up an entire section of an otherwise happy life.

Q: When I'm busy (cooking, getting organized for the day) or just acting busy (puttering around the house), my husband will often come up and give me a hug. My first instinct is nearly always squirmy annoyance.

But I try, instead, to close my eyes, take a breath and a moment, and really hug back. To think about it not as something he wants that he's taking from me, but as a gift that he's giving me - that, if repeatedly rejected, he'll probably stop giving.

He's an affectionate person by nature; I could go days without physical contact. So I'm trying to be better about taking his gestures to heart.

I've come to realize that a 10-second hug not only doesn't derail everything else I was doing; it can be a trigger to think about whether what I was doing really was all that important.

A: I love this. I want to hug it at the worst possible time. Thank you.