I technically understand relationships now since I have spent considerable time studying the underlying dynamics. I started that in earnest back in 1999.
I think maybe I read 2 or 3 non-fiction books on relationships before I joined this BB. I almost certainly read over 1000 novels and it's a rare novel that doesn't concern itself with relationships. Perhaps the novel of your childhood would read like "Bastard out of Carolina" or worse, but the novel concerning itself with the period of your life leading up to the moment when you decided to stop playing and cheating and ask the girl that became MrsNOP to marry you would read like every romance ever written. Therefore, I'm pretty certain that you weren't thinking "This is the woman who will best meet my need for very frequent connected sex over the course of my lifetime so I will ask her to marry me." Right? But you did have some reasons why you wanted to marry her and those reasons IMO constitute the "needs" you have/had in a relationship that are as important to you as frequent connected sex. You just don't "see" them anymore because they never altered over the years in the way that MrsNOP's sexual response to you did.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
