Honestly, regarding the fantasies . . . they aren't as extensive as they were, but I still notice other women and do some daydreaming. And I have read that this is one of those things that really is markedly different for women and men in almost all cases--in fact, that when a woman and a man both say they fantasize, they're almost not talking about the same thing.
I remember a fairly in-depth interview with a transsexual who went from female to male--it aired on NPR a year or two ago. He described being attracted to women as a woman, but he said that nothing prepared him for the change in his sexuality when he took the male hormones before and after his surgery. He said that if, for example, he noticed a pretty girl on the train before, when he was a woman in every physical/chemical way, he would note her, wonder about her name and where she was from, maybe give her another look or two, and that would be it.
But after he started the male hormones, he said, the whole encounter would be different. As a man, if he noticed a pretty girl on the train, he would be pulled out of the moment and almost involuntarily forced into an elaborate and "truly pornographic" fantasy about her. I do think that part of the reason it hit him so hard--he described it as frightening--was that he hadn't developed his response to these fantasies since puberty the way men born as men do. But I never forgot his utter shock at the experience of a simple fantasy about a girl he would have been just as attracted to when he was a woman. It suggested that women have no idea how men experience sex or arousal. I realize everybody and his brother says this already, but that drove it home for me.
I think the thing that doesn't get mentioned here, that is either the best-kept secret or the unique thing about my marriage, is how utterly normal and unremarkable my wife thought the end of sex between us was. She looked at it as the Circle of Life. The sexual relationship is born when you're dating, dwindles upon marriage, and dies completely a couple of years in. Then you have sex when the spirit moves you, and if it never does, then you do something else instead. Perfectly normal, inevitable, and certainly nothing to get worked up about.
The HD half of the relationship has a very hard time grasping this. Even if their other half openly states that everyone's marriage inevitably ends up sex-free, they tend to think there's some hidden truth that's being covered up by this implausible lie.
