SillyOld, he hasn't described the lack of sex as "hurtful". He says he doesn't like it. I'm just not 100% sure I believe him. I can't help thinking, if he *really* wanted it, and if it *really* mattered to him, he would go for it!
I asked that question both of my wife and here many times. The longest we went was literally a couple of years with no sex. She would talk to me about it--sort of--crying and telling me she didn't know what it was, but it wasn't me, she WAS attracted to me, she WAS, but . . . .
My question was the same as yours. "I KNOW I desire you. You CLAIM you desire me. We're consenting adults married to each other and we're in bed together right now. What's stopping us? If you find me so attractive, why do you keep rejecting me?"
She wasn't rejecting me. She was rejecting sex. But that was hard to see when she would laugh at me (and I don't mean a kind-hearted chuckle, I mean literally laughing out loud at my audacity in thinking she would have sex) or call me a pervert (again, not as a joke, though she may have intended it that way--by the time the word passed her lips, it was dead serious.)
But those things were her way of making excuses and placing blame. As Young at Heart says, it hurt her too. Honestly, we both blamed her and thought there was something wrong with her, that she was failing to live up to her obligation as a wife. She was miserable. She thought she was a horrible person and a horrible wife (and I did not disagree, though it took me a long time to admit it.) Don't be too sure your husband doesn't feel the hurt.
