Esox, you should be glad you weren't around when I started here. You would have tracked me down and bludgeoned me to death with a self-help book. A big one.
You know, SSMGuy, your wife is not lying to her doctors and friends and family because she approves of your sexless marriage. You get that right? She knows something is wrong here. She realizes you aren't a happily married couple. Up on the surface, she resists your attempts to change things because change scares people even when the status quo sucks. We all prefer the devil we know, within limits. You're almost as scared of change as she is; that's why you haven't pulled the trigger on a truly unequivocal statement that you will not accept sexual starvation--as you yourself stated, you're afraid she'll call your bluff and you'll have to go through with it. And the truth is, you might. But we're betting you won't because we've been down this road.
My marriage is not "fixed" or "perfect." We have our problems. But let me give you a little glimpse of where we are now. The weekend before last, we had great sex late Saturday night. I took the boys hunting that day, and she went out with her friends that evening. She came back and, to use the dry clinical term, "initiated." I responded with joyous alacrity.
Then . . . disaster! Her period . . . a couple of nights where the kids did astoundingly stupid things and wore us both out . . . and a dentist appointment that left her mouth full of pain. None of it her fault, but I'm not *that* recovered . . . after a week I start to wonder, and after ten days I was getting antsy.
Last night, I hoped, would be the night. The boys and I cleaned the house a bit and she and I made dinner together. I rubbed her shoulders and kissed her neck as I usually do, but with more urgency, and she responded with deep kisses and encouraging noises, and then I screwed up. I tried to get her to go upstairs with me right then. She didn't want to do that. "How about tonight?" she offered. I should have said, "I'll hold you to it!" but I didn't. I told her about my frustration and about how I didn't like being constrained by her puritan rules about sex--that it must done at night, the kids must be asleep, no mornings, no daytime, etc. That was a mistake. It was something I needed to say, but it would have been hard to pick a worse time to say it. It turned out we'd both been expecting to get lucky that night, but I'd just started an argument about it.
We both got upset, she started to walk out of the room, but I pulled her back in and we kept talking. I talked to her about why I was so frustrated and why I brought it up. She told me she knows she has hangups and this is just one of them. I told her I thought we'd both be happier if we weren't trying to shoehorn our sex life into the brief window each night between the time we put the kids to bed and the time we're too tired to stay awake any more, and it's not like it's any of their business what we're doing in the bedroom whether they're awake or not. But I also apologized for bringing it up at exactly the wrong time.
My point is, we talked about it. We both got a little upset, and we were both honest, and we both had to take some of the blame, but in the end, we worked it out. And that night, after the kids were in bed, she mauled me like an angry she-bear.
I can see you right now ticking off the things in this post that your wife would *never* do, from talking honestly about her sexual hang-ups to allowing herself to be pulled back into the room to having passionate sex with her husband. But 18 months ago I was where you are now, right down to arguing with DanceQueen and the regulars here about how they didn't really understand my situation and they all wanted me to get divorced.
One more note on what you call the "divorce-threat." If you are threatening divorce, that is, purely using it as a threat to get your wife to knuckle under, you're right, it probably won't work. The idea is not so much to say to her "you have to do X or the marriage gets it!" The point is to take that big leap for yourself and be able to say, and really mean it, that you are not going to accept your lot anymore and you are going to do whatever is necessary. You are right that this puts divorce on the table, but it's there with some other options. The point is to control what you control and let go of what you don't. You don't control your wife's actions, but you control yours.
