How to rekindle love?

[Rose888]

Newbie here. I'll try to keep this brief while including the pertinent info.

H and I have been married for 22 years. We have four kids, ranging in age from 10 to 20. We married at 22, and we had had no other sexual partners.

Until recently, I would have characterized our marriage as generally good, with the exception of the discrepancy in our libidos. I am the lower-desire spouse. H would express frustration periodically, I would try to work on things, I would think things had improved, and then in a year or so we would have another heated discussion. I know at one point, DH was on a marriage site seeking advice and was advised to divorce me. He was also going through a general depression, and I was pregnant with our youngest child, so I chalked it up to the depression and didn't take it as seriously as I should have.

I have a hard time reading H's emotions. He hates to cause pain, so he does a good job of backtracking after upsetting conversations. For too long (like, two decades), that lead me to believe that the issue was resolved and that things were mostly good with a few bad patches. Even now that I am aware he does this, I have a hard time not believing the surface behavior.

Several years ago, H started suffering from what seemed to be seasonal depression. We live in the frozen north, so this is not good. The winter of 2014-2015 was very bad, and just when he started to come out of it, we were hit with a very stressful situation regarding a business that we owned. H started talking about how he felt we were roommates. I badgered a doctor into giving me testosterone cream, in an effort to raise my libido. It didn't work. I suggested intensive counseling with a focus on our sex life, but H refused, mostly due to cost. (We could have paid for it, but the price tag was startling.)

I knew we needed to figure out the sexual side of our relationship, but by now, H's depression had worsened again in anticipation of winter, and he was withdrawing emotionally. I believed things would be easier to address once the winter was over.

H left to spend the winter someplace warm. The kids and I stayed here and visited him for a week partway through. (One of our kids is a sometimes suicidal teenager, so although we want to move the whole family somewhere with more year-round sunlight for H's sake, we want to wait until this kid is out of high school, since we fear the consequences of uprooting this kid from the current support system.) I read several books about sexual issues in marriage, and I feel like I finally get H's side of things.

H came back at the end of March. He was outwardly polite, helpful, and involved with the kids, but he seemed emotionally distant. I confronted him a few days after he came home, and he admitted that he just didn't feel desire for me anymore. It was like that part of him had switched off. And with it, apparently, his love.

Part of him wants to leave, so he can try to find a sexually satisfying relationship while he still has a chance. Part of him doesn't want to cause anymore pain. When we first talked, he seemed like he was in the process of making a decision, so I've been bracing myself for two weeks for the other shoe to fall. Yesterday (he brought it up), he said that he doesn't feel like there is a decision to be made. I said I had stopped planning our family vacation because I wasn't sure we'd be together then. He said I should plan it, that he had no intention of us not being together in July. He also admitted that his feelings on this aren't entirely consistent from day to day.

I have a first appointment with a counselor tomorrow morning. Even before this latest development, I knew I needed some counseling help to deal with the emotional impact of having a spouse with depression.

H won't take anti-depressants or see a counselor. He is amazingly stubborn.

As far as I know (and we both work from home in the same room), there is no affair. We still eat breakfast and dinner together, go for walks together, talk frequently about our days and about what we are reading, sleep in the same bed. Physical contact is limited to hugs I initiate or him putting his arm around me at night.

I read both The Sex-Starved Marriage and The Divorce Remedy. I identified a couple of typical behaviors to not do (pester for decisions, seek validation), and I'm hoping my counselor can help keep me accountable on those. I'm working to get more of a life.

But I don't know if those will be enough to rekindle love. Any suggestions?