Thanks for the response and that of your wife. I really admire your situation and the change that has occurred in your physical and emotional relationship. Your wife must be incredibly special to make the huge step to consider the possibility of change in this department. You are also one persistant and understanding guy.
I also really feel for Sooner, his posts are excellent at describing the confusion and suffering that the husband feels after years of frustration and no end in sight. Virtually no other positive avenues to motivate change remain untried and the emotional portion of the relationship goes through a roller coaster ride, more often than not on the downhill slide.
My comments following relate only to what I see as the male perspective. I find it almost unfathonable (although I know it is true) that many wives are in the reverse situation and I would have no idea if the same dynamics would be at play in this situation.
Having read your posts Jongo and Sooner (and the posts of many men on this board), it is shocking to me that there are so many of us who are in virtually identical situations where we initially had a loving and sexual relationship with our wives but over time the wife has given up embrasing the physical portion of our relationship. No apparent reason. Nothing you can really do to change the situation. Just accept. For years and years and years. Nothing, absolutely nothing seems to motivate the desire to change. The wife loved and continues to love the husband, seemingly enjoyed a physical relationship at one time and believes she might enjoy this again, but its gone and lost. The husband really "craves" this relationship and the more it is denied, the more he craves. The harder the husband tries, the more elusive a satisfactory resolution appears.
On the one hand the wife thinks of herself as inadequate and deep down knows that a physical relationship is important and not really that objectionable, but just will not go there.
So what can you do to motivate change? Well it seems from the posts of men and women who have been on both sides of the fence, that there are probably two paths to motivate change. The first is to be patient, fully accepting, supportive, loving, no pressure at all, try keep the lines of communciation open and very positive and hope that over time that a physical relationship evolves. This approach may or may not be successful and could take years or decades to be successful. On the other hand, passive aggresive type behaviour seems to make the situation much worse and doesn't seem to have any hope of motivating a change in the situation. Onto the other extreme, when you take an aggressive approach you are rolling the dice. Aggressive behaviour usually involves the threat of loss of your relationship through either affairs or divorse. This would appear to be a very risky approach but has the advantage of bringing the situation to a quicker resolution but has the disadavantage that you may loose your relationsip altogether. You would really have to be fully prepared to walk away from your relationship to take this approach.
So most of us, who love our wives, are caught in this terrible dillema and typically end up taking the worst possible approach, the passive aggressive behaviour. I guess that is human nature. We go back and forth in a circle of frustration and confusion.
Comments on this analysis would be very useful - am I missing something?
