EVERYTHING is great but the sex. Can this be true?

[Kettricken]

What Southern Girl said.

I realize I am the minority opinion on this one, but my experience is, yeah, it can be true. Sample size = one.

We really always have been the best of friends, a reasonably good team for getting things done, got each other's backs, laugh a lot together, no nastiness (beyond what you would expect from flawed creatures), etc. We always have been able to and still do talk for hours about anything -- religion, politics, fashion, psychology -- and rarely get bored. We vacation well together. We're good with each others' families. Etc Etc Etc. We've both done a lot of growing up over the past few years, and both realize some problem dynamics in ourselves that naturally affected our relationship ... but truly, all pretty minor stuff.

Except for the sex. And the physical touch in general. My realization that my desires in those areas were far far far from fulfilled and I was no longer willing to accept a starvation diet was what upset the applecart. I won't claim to have handled most of it well, but it could have been worse; the board really helped. Before that, though, the sex conflict was beginning to morph into your basic garden variety power struggle and threatening to destabilize the whole relationship. Spending time with him just wasn't as fun anymore, and I found myself tending to want to deny him what I knew he held dear just for the sake of revenge ... very unlike me. The tension accompanying the unresolved sex/touch issues began to cloud and poison every interaction. The resentment which started out as, "He won't have sex as much as I want/relax into it, let himself go, and connect with me the way I want/cuddle with me without vibing like a reluctant cat" turned into, "He really doesn't care that I'm this unhappy; bastard!" It was getting really easy to lose Lil's "Assumption of Good Will" (or is it "Intent"? which I love, btw).

And it really wasn't him being a bastard. I wasn't able to articulate (even to myself) what was missing for *years*. Then when I did, he didn't jump on the bandwagon right away (how dare he! grin). In retrospect, it was almost a classical Schnarchian Crucible scenario; me jumping into mine sent him into his, where he had to confront some very different issues, and it took us awhile (over a year, all told) to get back in sync. So it wasn't me begging for years and him ignoring it, which would indeed be a red flag for trouble elsewhere.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, does it matter? Even if everything is hunky-dory everywhere else, it would take a saint to be able to compartmentalize the sex conflict and not allow it to bleed over into everything else ... primarily, their attitude. People who feel guilty about considering leaving or throwing down gauntlets because "It's just the sex; everything else is great" are missing the fact that it won't *stay* "just the sex".