I'm 35 (female) and my Husband is also 35 (male) WE have been together for 12 years, married 7 years.
Sex has always been an issue in our relationship and the lack of intimacy got worse over the last maybe 5 years. I thought he might be having an affair, so I went on his ipad one night about 3 years ago and I found a lot of porn on his Internet history, as well as chat rooms and watching live sex videos. The history went back as far as ten years. The type of stuff he was searching for and watching way gay and transexual.
I asked him about it straight away and he got upset and left. He came back the next day and told me that he was abused by a man when he was a child, and that's why he watches it, to try to understand what happened to him??? I tried to be understanding and supportive but the images of what he was watching wouldn't go away.
I told him I will try to make things work and help him through it, I've told him to get therapy but it's three years later and he still hasn't taken any steps to get help, and he still doesn't make any effort to be intimate with me. He promised that he will stop watching it, yet I found it on his phone a couple of weeks ago. Again, I asked him about it and he just said that he doesn't know why he watches it.
Our sex life is non existent now. He doesn't try anything with me and I don't with him because I feel unattractive to him and like I'm just a cover up for him liking men. I don't feel, and never have felt sexy around him, we're more like house mates and best friends than man and wife, but we love each other.
He always avoids the conversation about our sexless marriage and it seems he's happy to just carry on how we are. I've told him I'm not happy with a sexless relationship, I want sex, passion and intimacy, but he just expects me to accept it I think. He tells me he does find me attractive and wants me in that way, yet doesn't do anything to show it. So much time has passed now that I don't think of him in that way and am struggling to get past it and think of him sexually again.
Recently, there has been a lot of chemistry with someone I work with. Nothing has happened but I can't ignore the fact that another man is looking at me in a way that I always hoped my husband would. I really like this man and we get on so well. He makes me feel like a 'woman' again and that I am attractive and wanted.
I don't know what to do. I've tried talking to my husband tonight and I just got the abuse story again and how it's still affecting him, yet he's not trying to get help?? I've told him again that I'm feeling lonely and depressed because of it all so we need to resolve it, even if thats agreeing to just be friends, but he doesn't listen to me, he just says he'll try.... but I know he won't, and I physically can't be intimate with him anymore, that's gone for me.
Can I carry on feeling like this in a sexless marriage because I love him and don't want to hurt him? I can't imagine being without him, but I know deep down that I want more. If he was watching poen but still showing interest in me and having sex with me it wouldn't be such a big issue, but he used to get annoyed with me when I'd try having sex with him, which made me so insecure about myself, so I stopped trying too.
Am I being unreasonable and should I be more supportive?
