From former AP to " legitimate"couple adjustment

I understand that paranoia. I didn't transition into couple-hood with my AP. That was never on the cards. I did continue with my affair after I left. He actually broke it off when I started to get serious about my current partner. But he is, afaik, still with his wife. (Ive been thinking I should check in with him soon!). But other than the emotional entanglement and family fall out of transitioning from an affair to a public committed relationship, I think all relationships go through these kind of dating to settled phases.

I'm only 2.5 years into my post SM relationship, so things may change. I remember at one point, before we were officially living together, but maybe shortly after we were de facto living together, my partner spent the evening doing hobby stuff instead of being 100% attentive to me. I spent the evening doing my own thing. He said he felt guilty about not focusing all his attention on me. But I said y'know we're not really dating anymore and I love being in the same room with you, but I need time doing parallel activities myself. We now have the room set up so we're both have comfortable spaces to do our own thing. And yes, sometimes we have stressful weeks where we don't spend 'enough' time together. Sometimes, I just say "I need some time with you this week". He makes that call on me sometimes. I suppose right now we're pretty lucky in that we have kid days and non-kid days. Kid weekends and non-kid weekends. So we have particular times that we know we have together and those external boundaries on our time as a couple mean that we make those days special (usually - I'm super busy with work right now...) that may be harder in some ways when the kids are fully out of the house! But we have a ways to go before that happens.

Our sex life has probably never been particularly experimental. Bizarrely. We are both sexually adventurous. I mean, sometimes it is. But the basics of our sex life is so good, that we're not super adventurous. We've both laughed about this. Our sex life is soooo much more experimental than the shitty sexual relationship I had with my ex. There's almost always some form of oral. There's a little other stuff, too. We play rough sometimes, we're both a bit switch. It's not bland. But at this point we know what works.

Y'know how when you were in your SM and people said - set aside time together, do date nights, schedule sex, blah, blah, blah. And it was useless advice? Well, in your case it isn't useless advice. Set aside some time. Make a date. Schedule some hot sex. Make some kinky rules. Occasionally, I make a rule that he can only cum inside me once a day. (We still have a LOT of sex.)

Honestly though, once we've been together 8 years, I'll see it as success if we're having sex 2-3 times a week. I'd be happy if there were more, but I don't think I'd see it as a failure at all if we were having sex twice a week. Like you, I'd check in to see that we were both happy, but it's not a bad hit rate! Give yourself some credit and enjoy what sounds like a successful relationship.