Humor us and tell her again, and this time explain that you aren't happy with this arrangement you've had and you want to have a happy sex life with her instead.
And you really think I haven't already done that, including saying that I'm not happy with this arrangement? I thought I've explained this more than once. One of the issues in therapy was that I endlessly confronted my wife with the "we need to talk" thing, and that I wasn't happy, etc. The advice was that I needed to back off because repetition was pointless after a while, and that she needed some time.
It's difficult in a forum like this to present a comprehensive picture and for people to give advice that fits a complicated situation.
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No, you haven't got it and you know better than to say so. You've just wasted your time building a pro-divorce straw man
No, others on this forum have presented the marriage-divorce strawman. I would never have brought that up. Comments like, well, just get a divorce and you can sleep around all you want. Just filing for divorce doesn't do it, man.
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which is why are you so afraid to confront your wife
Completely the opposite, at least in the past. I've had to rein myself in, as even the therapist told me I needed to back off to give her space. What you're suggesting is a very natural, and normally it should work, and it's what I instinctively did early in our SSM. But it backfired as it pushed my wife into a kind of nervous breakdown meltdown, perhaps having to do with a combination of depression and sex abuse powerlessness issues. I never fully understood the whole complex of issues and excuses. But it actually led to her being more susceptible to getting sick, which added to the problem.
DanceQueen, your suggestions about confronting her apparently assume that she's a perfectly psycholgoical healthy person who will scream and stuff and get over it like any normal woman. That is what I assumed at first too, and I was mistaken.
I'm sorry to be so "obstinate" about all this, but if the issues had been as simple as you seem to think, this problem would NOT have gone on as long as it has. The very best of our couples therapists told me privately that he had counseled thousands of couples, and that I just needed to know that the chances that I could ever make this marriage work the way I wanted to was "unlikely" in his experience. Not impossible, but it was fair for me to know it was "unlikely", even with the best effort.
And that's a tough reality to accept. But he seems to have been right. I've got things back pretty good as a relationship between us, but this might be as good as it's ever going to get.
