... I made sure that she understood that although (a) I was willing to bust my butt to make our relationship better, that (b) if things had not significantly improved in one year's time, we were done...we would separate for good and I would file for divorce. It was no bluff, and she knew it. The real breakthrough came in the fall, when I put a copy of MWD's "The Sex-Starved Marriage" down in front of her and asked her to read Chapter 1 as I left for work that day. When I got home that evening, she was in tears: the light bulb had gone off in her mind and she *finally* understood that I had been hurting just as much as she had been all those years. She got it, and we began moving forward together from that moment on. By the following winter, we were seeing a therapist who was a qualified individual counselor, couple's counselor, and AASECT sex therapist, and we utilized him in all three capacities for the next three years (2008-2010), until I again had to change jobs.
Though I will certainly admit I did not threaten to leave AND go through with it, I did something pretty close to what you're suggesting about 10 years ago. I told her how very much it would mean to me if she came with me to a good sex therapy program. It took a lot of convincing, and they gave me advice to tell her to get her to come in. I also gave her several books along the way, telling her how important it was to me. In once case, she refused to read it. In another case, she said she felt the material in the book felt very critical of her and made her feel guilty. In a third case, I think she threw the book away -- I never saw it again. And as I've said before, she discontinued the therapy, saying it was too stressful -- not that I was the problem -- she thought the therapists were the problem. She didn't want another therapist, she wanted to discontinue it altogether. And she was much happier when she had decided that she wasn't going to go anymore. I'm having trouble really believing that your approach of threatening to leave and doing it would have produced different results. I'm suspicious that the reasoning is simply by elimination here -- "Hey, that's the one thing you haven't tried so -- obviously -- that would have made the difference." Given what I've been through, that just seems like grasping at straws. Your wife breaking down in tears and all sounds totally out of character for my wife in that situation. She would have just felt huge guilt and stress about the pressure. And I believe her reluctance to examine her sexual issues is stronger than her reluctance to split up. If you ask her if she'd like to divorce, she says no. If you ask her if she'd like to talk about our sexual issues, it's like it's totally verboten and you can't even talk about it. So it's hard to see how I really have any choices besides staying in an SSM, or getting a divorce.
