Are there any midlife women who want daily sex?

[Bagheera]

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.

You may well be correct. Recovering from childhood sexual abuse is a painful journey, and one that not many abuse victims complete successfully. Based upon your descriptions of your wife's behavior, I would say that had you delivered the sort of ultimatum to her that I did my wife, back when you were trying to improve your marriage and before you stepped outside of it to fulfill your sexual needs, that your chances were probably 'low' that she would have said yes to pursuing further therapy, and may indeed have opted for divorce instead.

However, my point to you today has been that now that you have stepped outside of your marriage to fulfill your sexual needs, and have been doing so for at least a couple of years now, that you have effectively removed ANY chance that she would choose to stay with you and work her abuse issues over the choice of divorce. In my opinion, your actions have reduced that chance from 'low' to none.

That is why I recommended the course of action that I did -- giving up your extramarital shenanigans -- in order to restore trust and restore at least the 'low' chance that you did have previously.

I'm not just making this, SSMGuy. Go look over your relationship books on the issue of recovering a marriage from infidelity. Every single one of them will tell you that the very first step toward marriage recovery is that the infidelity MUST STOP before any real progress can be made. Go look over the infidelity forum here on this site, and you'll see the same story. By continuing to step outside of your marriage to get your sexual needs met, you are essentially locking yourself into the exact two choices that you outlined above.

-- B.