Are there any midlife women who want daily sex?

[Bagheera]

Until recently we had not talked about it for years...until she recently accused me of having "met someone else." I have lost 60 pounds and begun renewing my interest in stuff that I had given up (music, backpacking / hiking).

Most excellent, TEGH. These are exactly the kind of activities that we tried to encourage you to do when you first showed up here a couple of years ago, and I'm very glad to see the positive changes in yourself. Well done!

Your wife has also noticed these positive changes -- to the point that it has made her concerned that you might be having an affair. That's a good sign, actually, and it means that she too has noticed your increased sexual attractiveness. And if you're more attractive to her, you might be more attractive so somebody else...hence her concern. You are on the right track with your GAL activities, and hopefully finding that such efforts can also have positive effects on how your spouse views you. Yes, she brought it up as a negative accusation, but look at the hidden message behind that accusation: you making positive changes to yourself has upset the old status quo, shaken things up, and caused her to question herself and her long-standing hold on you.

In this accusation, she did admit that she did not marry me so that she could have a marriage without having it be a sexual one. She said that in response to my observation that the women who have gotten involved with me over my lifetime seem to do so to allow them to have a comfortable relationship that does not involve sex...that I will allow them to be who they really are without requiring sex in exchange for that environment of being who they really are.

She did try to tell me that I was confusing sex with intimacy. But she also cannot (or will not) explain why, in more than 14 years, she has never attempted to be intimate with me sexually or otherwise. She was not the one complaining of too little intimacy; I was.

While I understand that the underlined statement above is one of your core beliefs regarding your current situation, when your wife was confronted with that belief of yours, she flatly denied it. Why not take her at her word? No, she wasn't able to articulate a better explanation, but she was at least able to state that her truth didn't match your own view or 'observation'. Why not accept that and try to move forward with it?

Now that you are well on your way within 'phase 1' of the four phases of SSM recovery, and have gotten your wife's attention with it, I would recommend that you next begin to actually court your wife again, in accordance with 'phase 2'. She's afraid that you might be courting someone else, so turn it on *her* instead. Start at the beginning and treat her the way that you would a brand new love interest. You will most likely encounter disbelief from her at first, perhaps even a bit of negative push-back, but if you are persistent, she might start to become intrigued and appreciative of your attention, especially knowing that you won't "go sexual" with it, IOW your previous agreement.

You said to me a couple of years ago that you didn't want to be 'diagnosed', and that you didn't want any book recommendations. Instead, you wanted concrete examples of the actions and steps that actually lead to recovering from an SSM. That's what I'm giving you. I didn't make up those "four phases" out of an abstract vacuum -- I observed what worked for me and compared it to the handful of other success stories that I read about on this forum and others like it. Admittedly, most attempts at recovering an SSM fail, but for those folks that do manage it, they all seemed to roughly follow this same common theme.

Best regards,

-- B.