Thanks, I look forward to more of your thoughts, you are very helpful. Let me know if there was more I needed to take from your exercise.
Your answers reveal to me that you've thought through and conceptualized some of these conditions based upon your experiences so far. And they also reveal a number of similarities between the way you and I think (a recognition of another person with views/experiences that are similar enough that they are recognizable at somedeeper level).
For example, I can relate to your perception, at a personal level, of sex versus making love. You could probably make a similar distinction between love and lust.
There is a certain before/after quality to your writing as to where you started piecing things back together. Having survived an affair (the marriage did not but I did) and to put away the anger, there can occur a perceived point in time where the past becomes the past and there is only "now" and "in the future." I know where and when that was for me. You might not know where and when that was for yourself and yet to someone reading your words, I think it would be evident to them.
However, I also picked up something else...that "before" and to a large extent even now, left to her own, your wife would not engage in sexual activity. It seems that whatever that is, it does not have much to do with you. It does not surprise me that she didn't notice (though she probably did with some feeling of relief) or might otherwise deny not only the infrequency of sex/lovemaking but that it was so infrequent or non-existent at all. Even before my past 14 years with the explicit demarcation of no sexual activity, there were long periods where my current wife just did not seem to notice absence (and when I finally did start pointing it out, there was lots of anger returned).
A similar occurrence in my first marriage except much more dramatic and my first noticed and worried about it at first, because we went from making love about 16 times per month (before our son was born) to 16 times in 4 years after he was born before we went our separate ways. How did I know? Wasn't it just a perception? No, I journaled and kept records (marked a calendar that only meant something to me)...just so what i was thinking or feeling wasn't different from what was and was not actually occurring.
So, been there done that.
Here's what I notice from your response in the period "after" you've begun to rebuild:
You identify a level of anxiety if the sexual frequency falls below some minimum. You both have that anxiety in some form (you because you don't want to be a non-sexual person in a marriage, her because she now thinks "something's wrong" once the issue was put into the spotlight). At one level you are attempting to fulfill an old Doobie Brothers Album title (What were once vices are now habits). At some level, though, you are probably going to need to transition away from the avoidance of anxiety to a point where you are engaged "for" something in your marriage.
There is an interesting article written from Laurie Gerber's POV that you might find interesting, in that you look like you are attempting to put some of these into place.
Last sex: 04/06/1997 Last attempt: 11/11/1997 W Issues "No Means No" Declaration: 11/11/1997 W chooses to terminate sex 05/1998 I gained 60, then lost 85 pounds. Start running again (marathons)
