Accuracy, thanks for the detailed post. I pretty much agree with everything you wrote. And I've also read SSM, a whole bunch of other books, and gone to three separate marriage and sex therapists with my wife over the years. They have been very helpful in improving our relationship overall, except for sex.

But life always has realities and wrinkles that are hard to anticipate. I'm sure each of our situations are complex, and it's easy to think that one can enumerate all possible conditions that others would encounter too.

So, to take what you wrote and apply it to my situation, the wrinkle is that my wife first revealed her sex abuse to me years AFTER we got married. Apparently a lot of feelings about it came back later. She thought it wouldn't affect her at first, and it didn't. So I had what I thought was your "baseline" and then one of your exclusion exceptions was thrown in AFTER the wedding. So how do you deal with that? In any case, that's water over the dam at this point.

So, even aside from the SA, you would say my wife's POV is invalid. OK, I agree, and you and I can assert that until we are blue in the face. But just what am I supposed to do about that?

So then the simple logic that everyone dishes out to others, when it's not their own marriage of course, is, well, just get divorced. OK, any dunce head can come up with that solution. Get a new wife, problem solved. As if wives are just interchangeable units, independent of in-laws, property, children, healthcare plans, memories, friendship since college, and more. And when you have all that and a GOOD friendship with your wife, the advice to SIMPLY divorce just for sex seems absurd beyond belief. So I would get new step kids, new property alignments, health plans, vacation homes, in-laws, wills.... just for sex from a new woman who might herself be hitting menopause soon and also lose interest? Not to mention the even high divorce rate for 2nd marriages. Doesn't seem very tempting, I have to tell you!

There are so many other solutions, FWB, etc. that is now virtually assumed to be commonplace, and it is. But that's not what I'm here to discuss, because I haven't given up on my wife just yet.