"I think I'm a pretty good husband overall. I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't gamble. I don't stay out late. I have a forge in the toolshed that hasn't seen a fire for three years now because I don't have time to do any metalwork anymore. I have fishing poles, but I don't go fishing. At most I take the family and bait hooks for the kids. I love to go shooting, and I haven't given up my gun club membership, but I haven't been shooting since November. I loved jiu-jitsu, but the classes were held an hour away on weekday evenings, and I just couldn't justify the time away from the family."
Two further points occur to me:
(i) At the risk of using a metaphor myself, you are letting your fire of inner masculinity die right down and this has definitely affected your marriage. You need to start doing at least one of these things for yourself again...now. Pick one and reshuffle things to make time to do it. Stop making excuses - the alternative is that you and your marriage will continue to spiral downwards, and everyone will eventually suffer. Read what david deida has to say about the importance of a man's purpose to his own self and to the sexual dynamic, and then have another look back at what you've written.
(ii) As someone who used to do combat sports, you should have a head start in cultivating a new way of thinking about yourself and your "needs". I may be generalising vastly here, but when it comes to sex, women tend to prefer steeliness and assertiveness (so long as it flows from genuine love, rather than disrespect, weakness or neediness) rather than cuddliness. I can see that Bagheera has said some very enlightening things about this.
S&A
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated" - from The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
Which I take to mean that every man has within him a spirit of relentlessness and optimism. Its already there; he just has to cultivate it.
