Other websites and on line groups?

I tried to save you the time....

In the interest of completeness, feel free to check out and then discard sexlessmarriage.support/. (Sorry Venus. Nice try, though.)

The other side of this discussion is that I know of at least one person on this site that hit the eject button on their marriage and has not been seen much since. I admit that if I did the same it might be difficult to revisit this site in sake of moving forward with my life. Plus if I was actually in a new relationship and had a sex life, I certainly wouldn’t want to be on here bragging about it.
My hats off to those that escaped and still come here to offer support, and I know there’s a couple of you, Baza, BBall, but some of us might not do the same. So might a dwindling active membership number be a good thing?

There are Facebook groups such as "Sexless Marriage Support" and "Married But Lonely Friends." I search there every once in a while, but some groups do not accept the idea that some things cannot be fixed.

Fetlife.com has a sexless relationship support group. That is where I first heard about this and similar worlds.

I agree that SimilarWorlds.com cannot get traction, and Reddit is poorly designed for an online community.

You can't move on until you heal, otherwise all your doing is covering the wound up and it's still bleeding underneath the bandage. For many of us this site is a support group, it offers a way to help heal and those that are better turn around and help those that need it.

Preface

This issue perhaps best relates to nyartgal’s suggestion that “Lowering the bar…is how you lose yourself.” Indeed, we all know the process of lowering the bar. What we may treat as a compromise simply paves the way to a succession of concessions. At the end of this process (baza’s “race to the bottom”), there may be nothing further that can be conceded in the sexual domain. However, I’m not sure that this itself actually constitutes the loss of self. Rather, I speculate that the self is truly lost only the once refuser has been granted sole authority to assess the worth of the refused (this granting of self-assessment-by-proxy could, I suppose, be a qualitatively distinct form of bar-lowering).

While many of us may have flirted with the catastrophic loss of self, I suspect that most have, even in darkest hours, clung defiantly (but perhaps silently) to a buoyant self-image. After all, we’ve ended up here in pursuit of answers, suggesting that the verdict from the refuser is not typically viewed as final. Such was certainly the case for me as I marched confidently to the dating sites after a split. But, this was the sneaky part. Even though I experienced confidence and optimism, I then unknowingly performed W’s dirty work for her.

There are too many details to worry about, so I’ve tried to stick to the essentials below. The important feature is how I simply absorbed someone else’s view of me, even in her absence. Some of this outcome was bad luck. Much of it, however, was rooted (not baza's kind of "rooted") in incomplete information contributing to terrible resource-management. And, after being so optimistic, I was truly primed for a great fall.

The Great Fall and the Loss of Self

Among my efforts on the dating sites, there were a small number of online interactions that didn’t clearly fit the general pattern. So, for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll just consider those cases to be basic noise. I also won’t bother discussing those prospects who were approached but did not respond at all. For the remainder of my interactions, however, failure and rejection were the consistent outcomes. As the weeks of effort rolled into months, a general pattern emerged, and the overt failures were related to a common factor…my appearance.

Very simply, a sure-fire way to kill a discussion was to exchange reasonably high-res pictures. The general pattern involved the exchange of pictures followed by about 0 – 6 further PMs followed by total silence. Four basic variations of the general pattern were evident:

1. No particular reaction to my picture followed by total silence (a large minority of cases).
2. A vague compliment in reaction to my picture (e.g., “Oh, that’s a nice picture.) followed by total silence (a large minority of cases).
3. An unequivocally hostile reaction to my picture (e.g., “Bye, Pig.”) followed by total silence (a small minority of cases).
4. A less hostile yet still snarky reaction to my picture followed by total silence (a small minority of cases).

After months of this and in the absence of clarifying information, I concluded that W must be right about my repulsiveness. My evidence to this effect was that substantial swaths of the dating female population in a densely populated European country seemed to agree with her (more importantly, these were women who were demonstrably seeking love interests of some description). In other words, I had embraced the view of the refuser concerning my worth and merit. I had, for that moment, lost myself. So, I returned to my prior life without fanfare.

Bad Advice with a Silver Lining

Even after essentially losing myself, there remained a tiny phoenix, the same one we’ve perhaps all harbored. I was a late joiner on EP, which led me here. Early on, I observed that avatars of users were varied, some laced with meaning, humor, mystery, etc. Others were just pictures of something, whatever that something might be. Still others featured either a cryptic shot of the member of the group or even a clearly recognizable shot. For a time, my avatar was derived from a picture of a lean male figure. The picture was cropped at the chin, near the shoulders and across the belly. The subject in the picture was wearing a snuggish T-shirt. I shrunk the picture down to avatar-size and turned it into a black and white.

A short while later, the bad advice arrived. I believe that the spirit guiding the advice was helpfulness. Plus, our exchanges were consistently congenial and good-humored. But, her input was clearly colored by hard-earned skepticism of an avatar apparently featuring a few vestigial ripples and the absence of adipose characteristically seen on someone of my age. In reaction to the avatar, my acquaintance confidently suggested that I confess that the picture was not mine, perhaps poking a bit of fun at myself (e.g., by captioning the picture with something like, “I’m working toward this.”). I responded with a very short discussion of the empiricism versus rationalism. I then indicated that a dishonest approach would have me displaying a chubby torso in my avatar captioned as “I’m eating toward this.” In other words, contrary to her confident presumption, I was the boy in the picture.

Her error had caught me off guard. But, in making the mistake, she became my hero. She had tried to help me a bit in one way but helped me enormously in another. Her skepticism of me raised the possibility a few online dating prospects who had reacted badly to me did so not because they necessarily found me somehow repulsive (as I had feared). Rather, they too may have been suspicious of some age-atypical aspects of my appearance. And, if even a few of them were wrong in this way, then the probability that W was/is wrong about me increases. By sticking her neck out, my acquaintance accidentally helped me to un-lose myself.

The Lessons

Don’t lose yourselves. But, if you do slip, get good information and use that good information to un-lose yourselves.