Several years ago, I was in an SSM and came very close to divorce. I read books such as Michele's SSM book. I figured out that I needed to do a pretty strong 180 and told my wife that I would not have sex with her until she learned how to touch me. We signed up for conseling with a board certified sex therapist and my wife was confronted with her issues. Ultimately she choose that she preferred to remain married over being divorced (and those were her choices as I had made up my mind that the marriage would get better by a certain date or I would end it). We then started having sex about twice a week, but sometimes less.

We recently hit a couple of those sometimes less patches, where her being tired, not in the mood, etc. We had been on a month long vacation. In the beginning, I said to myself jet lag and finally getting a chance to relax were reasonable reasons. But she continued to not be in the mood, then she came down with a brief cold.

A flood of emotions came roaring out of the past in my mind. Feeling of being emotionally abandoned, not being loved, being in an SSM. I coped and tried to focus on my making myself happy by doing things I wanted and telling myself that I could get through this. I also worked at making sure that I was doing things in her languages of love so she felt loved by my. Yet she did little to try to make me feel loved in non-sexual ways and focused on what she wanted only.

We did survive without any fights or confrotations and we restarted marital relations when we got home. That was a month ago, and I had pretty well put it out of my mind, when this past week we again had a dry spell where she wasn't in the mood to be intimate.

How does one ever really recover from something so tramatic as being in an SSM? I can put my head down and tell myself that it is her and not me; that I need to focus on being happy and improving myself and she is the one that looses when she either is too tired, too busy or picks a fight with me over some trivial things that just poisons the closeness between us for a few days.

I didn't like it that those old demons returned and I haven't yet banished them again. Any of you with experience on how to do that once and for all times?

Last edited by Young at Heart; 09/30/14 09:26 PM.
>43 years of marriage--My wife and I are now closer than we have been in decades. I believe that my SSM is over.