Germanlearner

Not to post identifying information online, "work", "the house keeps developing major problems including (but not limited to) something that was supposed to be a six-week job starting in mid-January and is still ongoing", "there's a global pandemic". I think I'm not expressing myself clearly - I absolutely would not say that true intimacy or love are missing, or that I don't like lustful sex. What I'm trying to say is that, for me, there are two kinds of sex: "lustful" sex and "loving" sex. The former is fickle and comes only when it wants to. The latter is all about love and emotional intimacy and cuddling afterwards (for me) but I'm only doing it because somebody asked me to. I think a fair analogy is "eating quiche". I used to be really into quiche but then life happened and now I'm not in the mood for it so often. My husband still really likes quiche and would like to be eating it 2-3 times a week. I'm content enough to eat it that often, and I enjoy it well enough when it's in front of me, but I wouldn't have chosen to eat it and my husband can tell. Again, identifying information, but the short answer is "my family imploded spectacularly a year and a half into my undergrad degree". The sex actually got better in a "per occasion" sense after that, but the frequency never recovered from the ongoing stress of depression/sudden financial issues/trying not to fail my degree/then-undiagnosed learning difficulty, and it slowly tapered off. There were some "rallies" when things got better for a while, but they didn't stick, not least because by then we were very much in the dynamic of "I want it less often than it's happening". There are absolutely things, at this point, that need to be talked through with a shrink. That's why we're not asking y'all "how do we solve our sex life"! We're asking "how do we replace it without nuking our emotional life".

Yelling at doctors like J Jonah Jameson asking for pictures of Spiderman isn't going to take away our external stressors, much though I might wish it could. Should I be talking to a mental health professional? Sure. I've been looking, getting one who speaks our native language and takes my medical insurance isn't quick. What we're after for right now is something to at least reduce the amount I'm hurting my husband. While I'm happy to have sex "from a place of love", that's not the same thing as sex "from a place of lust", my husband can tell regardless of whether I'm "performing" and it makes him feel unwanted.

She didn't unilaterally decide, and been willing to keep having sex she wasn't really into. It was me who decided to stop that (with talking to her of course) because it wasn't working. Mutual enjoyment is important to me, and with that usually missing, it started felling worse than nothing. Also she is not happy about this and would prefer her drive came back. The reason we're here is we've exhausted nearly every option to do so, and so are now looking into how to make things work without it.

Thanks to Wiseman2 and DarkCh0c0 for the comments. However we are not trying to bring sex back, but figure out how to the relationship should look without it, and how to keep feelings of closeness and prevent its lack pushing us apart. To answer some questions. The triggers mentioned involved her parents going through a messy breakup and a period of depression. She sought treatment and is a lot better now, but that sort of thing never truly leaves you, you know. That's our best guess as to the reason, but as said we don't think that really matters any more. We both work, don't have financial problems and both do equal house work and child care. Dates are more like once or twice a month now with the time the baby takes, but this this was going on for many years before that. Has anyone had experience with successful relationships without sex?

My wife and I have been together 13 years and married for 8, and we have an 8 month old baby. We are writing this together and will both be reading the comments. For the first few years sex was fantastic. But then her drive slowly dropped away to almost nothing. There were triggers but at this point they don't really matter. Mine, sadly, has not. We've tried many things over the years since then. Most didn't help, some made it worse. In the end I called a full stop as sex we weren't both into was not doing either of us any good. She is now looking into medical advice. It might work. It might not. Couple's therapy is very expensive where we are and not covered by state healthcare. We intend to stay together. So we're looking for advice and ideas on how to manage the relationship from here without sex.