SillyOldBear, interesting take on one's "rights" in a marriage. I'm glad I didn't read your reply before I got married -- I might have cancelled the wedding! So, before you're married, you're free to have sex with anyone, except those who don't want to have sex with you. And the only difference with marriage is that you're free to have sex only with your wife, except when she doesn't want to have sex with you. So in the sense of sexual freedom, marriage is entirely restrictive. I suppose the "benefit" is supposed to be that your spouse's restriction is to your benefit. OK, not a bad arrangement. The only problem is, it falls apart completely if one partner shuts the other one off sexually -- then it becomes WORSE than being single, especially for the other partner.
As for winning her back, we are already together in many ways. It's just the sex that's not working. We go out together for "romantic" evenings all the time. She's fine with that. We invite each other to all kinds of events, and we enjoy our time together. It's just that it's totally without erotic content or sexual followup. She knows I have a sky-high sex drive, but she doesn't want to know how I deal with it. Here's a Playboy calendar, so whatever you gotta do! Went to the strip club, sure, no problem, just don't bother telling me what you did there! Just hope you're happy and that it helped you get it out of your system so I don't have to deal with it. That's the spirit. Not exactly what I'd call the jealous wife, to say the least.
It's clear to me that given the alternatives, she wants me to stick around and continue our togetherness in all the other areas, but deal with my sexuality in whatever way, as long as it doesn't result in something embarrassing like calls in the middle of the night, or some young thing that would feel entitled to move into our house with us, etc. And that's pretty clear from many separate comments over the years.
And if, as you all seem to suggest that I do, I sit her down to really unload all the details of what I do, she would ask why are you telling me all this? You know I don't want to hear this! Whatever. And she'd leave the room. And that's happened many times when I insisted on talking about the situation. So I've been there with the honest talk, and it doesn't work. "Here we go again, another discussion about sex. Why do you insist on that over and over and over again when you know I don't want to hear it? Whatever you gotta do. Just leave me out of it." Maybe I didn't make that clear enough. That part of it has been pretty tough, at least at first, because I didn't know how to deal with the situation if my wife simply didn't want to talk about it. If you can't talk about it, you can't make any progress, was my thinking. So that might put it into perspective a little more why I have sort of taken things into my own hands and made my own decisions independent of my wife.
