I certainly do not doubt your intentions Corri. I have read many of your posts and you really sound like you know what you are talking about.
I think where most LDrs "miss the boat" is that they cannot understand how important sex/physical intimacy is. It is simply a piece of themselves that is, for whatever reason, missing. And there is very little interest in replacing the missing piece since doing so can instill fear, uncertainty, or a sense of personal accountability that the LDr has indeed been the source of years of marital strife.
It is irrelevant whether the "decision" to withhold sex is a conscious one. I am a firm believer in breaking things down to their simplest form, and in most cases the simplest form is this:
1. Couple is having a fulfilling sex life. 2. One partner choses to let something get in the way. 3. Couple no longer has fulfilling sex life. 4. One partner is miserable because of it.
Almost everything in adult life is a decision. In cases of rape or childhood abuse, something was done to someone and there is no decision. It just happened. Adults decide how to deal with things that just happen to them. LDrs have choices about their sex life and their choices DRASTICALLY AND UNAVOIDABLY affect their partner.
LDr's choices are:
1. Choose to determine the cause of the loss of sexual appetite and take steps to fix it. 2. Choose to live in fear and/or ignorance and MAKE their partner miserable. 3. Choose indifference.
I emphasize MAKE because most LDrs seem to want to take the stance that their actions have no real impact on their partners and that, if their partners are miserable, it must be something that their partner needs to deal with within his/her self and not a direct result of the actions of the LD spouse. Nothing could be further from the truth here. They seem want to make any reasonable expectation of them seem like an inordinate amount of "pressure" placed on them to relieve their feelings of guilt for allowing such a major problem to manifest itself the marriage. It is extremely difficult to deal with this since the LDr is acting out of fear, which is, many times, mistakenly perceived as mortal danger.
Just like you make the decision to stay faithful and love your spouse every day, whether you feel like it or not. The LD spouse must make the decision to make sex/physical intimacy an important part of their life EVERY day, whether they feel like it or not. I am not saying have sex everyday, I am saying to make it important every day. It is already important every day to the HDr. In most cases, it was important to the LDr too when they got married.
LDrs cannot expect their spouses to change just because they have. They also cannot expect their spouses to be happy with, or even tolerate for long, the LDr's lost sex drive. LDrs should never be surprised when their HD spouse has an affair or leaves them...but they always are. That fact, in itself, demonstrates how little the LDr understands the predicament THEY PLACED their spouses in by choosing to forsake their HD spouses.
