Would you have been similarly motivated if he instead had asked if you would be OK with him having a girlfriend in addition to you as a wife? And if he had said, well, if you don't want sex, then you shouldn't mind if he had it with his girlfriend as long as it was just a friends with benefits arrangement and wouldn't otherwise upset your marriage? Would you have reacted at that point, or would you not have taken him seriously until he actually went out and got that girlfriend, but not yet slept with her? Or would he actually have to sleep with her?
As I see it, if you're going to divorce, you might as well take the above approach first. What's there to lose at that point?
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Now, I think that if he had told me, at some point before he got to actually wanting a D, that he was SO upset and hopeless, that he found himself considering D as his only option - that also would have made me sit up and take notice.
Didn't really work in my wife's case. I guess she knew I was bluffing.
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It made me see that he wasn't just being a pervert, but he truly needed that intimate connection to feel loved and worthy.
Very true, but it's also about the physical fun, which for a person with HD, is very much fun indeed. And so to be denied that fun is pretty tough. As an HD person, it's almost impossible to accept that you have promised to have sex with just one person for the rest of your life, and then that person isn't interested. So all those dreams of having great sex -- like really, you're not going to have sex again as long as you live?!! When an HD person really contemplates that, he goes into a cold sweat and realizes he's not going to be able to handle that. It's not just the rejection for an HD person, it's also realizing that he's put into a sexual prison. That's certainly the complete opposite of what marriage was supposed to be. If you're single, you can have sex, and then -- you get married and that means you can't have sexy with anybody at all??? It's beyond absurd. This view is, of course, completely not understood by the LD or ZD (zero desire) person.
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... surely you (as a HD person, especially) did not marry her thinking you would never be having sex with her. I don't think people just change like that - if you two had a good sex life at one point, it's still in there somewhere.
No, she was pretty interested when we first met, though she was a bit inhibited in some ways. I, however, believed the generalizations written by experts in sex advice books and columns -- that women peak sexually around 30-40 when they are more comfortable with their bodies, etc. Total BS in our case. With each childbirth she became progressively less interested. And then with menopause -- zero interest. Never came back at all. Therapy helped us get along better in spite of this, but not a hint of her sexual interest came back. Talk therapy did nothing in that regard.
