New Here! Intro and Question

Hi and welcome (I think?). I think your situation is an almost inevitable natural progression of a sexless marriage. You are refused for years and years and years and then you start to feel differently about your partner. I am in a similar situation. Probably not so far down the line, but it is getting harder and harder to be sexually interested in my wife. We are in counselling trying to sort it out, and she is trying (as best she can), and I still love her. But for me that sexual connection is fading.

I am sure your counsellor is right, that you have a lot of built up resentment from the last decade and a half and that is blocking your willingness to be intimate with him. You might find that working through some of that in counselling would help you.

BUT there are other issues too. Trust is one. After being ignored and reset for so long, it is very hard to trust that your partner is able or wanting to change in any fundamental way. If it takes you being about to walk out the door, and then suddenly he can find all these reserves of sensuality and affection, it is like 'Fuck you, you had that in you all the time and never listened to me when I told you how much pain I was in?' And also what are the chances of him sustaining it beyond two or three months? Anecdotal evidence from here would suggest not very much. And he has never given you much reason to trust him. You would need a significant amount of personal growth and self-realisation from him to have any faith that he was actually going to change.

Something I am also learning about myself is that there are also a whole lot of processes going on at a much more primal level than thought. I believe we are hard wired to bond with other people, and to try and reinforce those bonds through affection, intimacy and (if we are talking about a partner) sex. When you are refused over and over again that process starts to switch off. It takes a long time for some of us, but it does.

And finally I keep finding this wall inside me. It is like a Pavlovian response. For years whenever I thought about my wife in a sexual way I would shove those feelings down and suppress them, knowing they were not welcome to her and that they were painful for me as a result. Now I find my sex drive is as strong as it ever was, and while it probably is affected in relation to other people I don't think it is very different. But with my wife if sex comes to mind there is like an automatic process to try and shut it down or switch it off.

Can you overcome all those years of conditioning and resentment and lack of trust. Probably you can, if it hasn't gone too far. But it will be a major undertaking for both of you. Should you? And do you want to? That is a whole different question.