the price of time

Most of us are scared of the unknown. What will happen if we left? And stuck because of feeling of love. I love the woman I met twenty years ago, but she hasn’t been that woman for a long time. Someone here once said, “A man marries a woman thinking she will never change, but she does. A woman marries a man thinking he will change, but he never does.” Sad quote.

And you are not whining.  I literally cry sometimes and I’m a 47 year old man.

You stay in love because you've never understood what she feels. Would you deny the basic needs of someone you loved, even to deny them of what you had promised them to the point where their health suffered? No. You would not, because you are in love. She's not. She does not have love. She has control.

Whether "men" or "women" love differently is debatable. Most of the stories of marital dysfunction on these boards tend to have very common elements distributed pretty evenly, in my observation, and so I'd suggest that at least dysfunction when it manifests seems relatively uniform. I often see this abstraction of "men" vs "women" being used as a tactic of changing the subject away from "Me" vs "my partner" - the only two people directly present and accountable in your relationship - to some form of plural "we".



Sometimes it can be helpful to frame things a bit differently and to look for the common ground - to see a blind spot.
"Have they always been wearing masks to hide their true feelings?" - a good question - and one where there is often common ground. In a long term dysfunctional celibate marriage, are you not BOTH portraying a facade to the world and to each other to avoid the consequence of dropping the charade? I often get surprisingly strident and calamitous answers when I suggest removing a wedding ring, or sleeping in separate beds, for example. Something bad will happen, which must be avoided. It means the "show" of a marriage will be dropped, which risks a consequence.



Like most of us on here, I drowned myself in marital self-help books. Of the lot of them, a few took an evidence based approach and were more successful. In particular, John Gottman's lab work in this area found that the biggest predictor of divorce (upwards of 90%) was found in eye-rolling, indicative of "contempt". Once it has gone that far, it's nearly impossible to retrieve and almost always ends in divorce in the longitudinal studies.

bozodeclowne , so much of our posts in this forum begin with a stance of "waking a partner up to a reality".
People have sex drives, irrespective of their partner. It's pretty easy to have sex in a marriage. People who want to have sex will have it even under the worst circumstances, or with people they shouldn't, and in scenarios where they risk disgrace and financial ruin. Most of us start in a place where they view their partner's sexual aversion to them as being some kind of lapse in awareness that can be corrected - like chewing with your mouth open. This isn't just a lack of awareness or indifference though - it's deliberate avoidance, overriding their own sense of sexuality to avoid having it with someone they don't want. So, yes, it is deliberate - but that doesn't mean she's trying to control you. It likely means she doesn't see you as a suitable sexual partner. If eye-rolling is happening, that likely means "contempt" as well. That means there's a long way to go just to claw your way back up to zero. Zero being "no-attraction" - about equivalent to walking past a stranger on the street.

So, the focus on shaking her back to reality and honesty - I'm not so sure that's really possible.
What extra information do you need from her other than what is and isn't happening, that would make a difference for you?
Is the reality not already apparent? Why do you need her verbal confirmation of what you can see is already happening or not happening?

A wedding and a Christmas dinner, are an opportunity for a show, and they are also present a situation in which "householdery" is present. That is - a sense of family togetherness and belonging. Amicable ex-spouses sometimes have this.

In thousands of these stories, I have never seen one amount to change in approach until a very real consequence was attached and FELT, rather than being warned about. A threat and a fight every month and constant gaslighting takes less effort to deal with than say - catching or getting caught in an affair, or one's partner beginning (not warning of) a separation, or of one's partner offering a choice between an open relationship or separation. If it's a choice between boffing someone she doesn't want and having a periodic argument about it every month or two, the latter sucks the least.  

In her mind, she's likely in the same place as you. She's obviously not into it with you (if she was, she'd have sex with you), and so her strategy is avoidance and distraction.
The more you focus on it, the more it thwarts HER ambition to ALSO survive the sexless marriage. Remember - SHE'S ALSO CELIBATE TOO. In her mind, she's the hero for just showing up in the marriage and trying to maintain the chaffe cloud that allows you both to maintain the facade. You, on the other hand, are like the smartass kid who keeps pointing out the card up the sleeve. Her goal isn't to fix the marriage, it's to survive being married to someone who she doesn't fancy in that way. YOU are the one who is likely to spell doom for the marriage in relentlessly pointing out the lack of sexual expression and affection, which itself would be the result of some deeper disconnection upstream.  

You both are stuck in the same predicament, surviving a celibate marriage.
"Working on it" - I presume you are both celibate while said work is happening, and the clock keeps ticking?

What if you were separated and living on your own, and possibly free to date? If she felt the marriage was important, and the clock ticking while you were now single - do you think it might change the scale of her approach to "working on it?" 

Sure, it's possible she doesn't think you care about sex, but she probably knows you do.

More likely, she's just hoping you'll put up with her aversion to it. You have so far. She's hoping that will continue, I reckon.

Bozodrclowne said: “ ...
Is it possible whatever her reasons, she doesn't see where this ends up? A highly-educated, intelligent woman? At another family gathering she was relating how we no longer sleep together due to my snoring. That prompted visible shock on the faces of several of her female family members, and some pushback as well. I picked up on that, while she seemingly did not.”

It’s possible that you are the one who isn’t seeing where this ends up. You have endured sexlessness for years. The best way to predict future behavior is one’s past behavior. You are likely to stay in the marriage and the marriage is likely to continue being sexless.