I too was surprised at the inactivity here. Back in the olden days there was a lot of participation. There was so much participation that it was frequently hard to keep up. I kind of drifted away for several reasons, but the biggest one was that I felt like I had reached a point where I was no longer benefitting and wasn’t really helping anybody else either. That, and the fact that there was so much activity that it was consuming a huge amount of my time. I felt that I needed a break.
My situation was different from anybody else on the board at the time in that there was no sex in my marriage from the very beginning. There are pages and pages of my story if you go back far enough, but the thumbnail version is that we met while attending a Christian university, and being good kids, we didn’t have premarital sex. We never talked about it, but I guess I just assumed that she was on the same page that I was – interested, but waiting until marriage. It was only after we were married that I learned that she not only had no interest in sex, but was basically repulsed by the whole idea. So while others were talking about where things went wrong, or why their spouses lost interest, mine never had any interest to begin with.
As pretty much everybody in a long-term SSM said, there are cycles in how much it bothers you. It never really goes away, but there are times when you can kind of accept it, and times when it’s nearly unbearable. The low T has been a double-edged sword. In one sense, it’s made things easier. It has lowered my libido, which takes the edge off. But on the other hand, it’s also shined a spotlight on the fact that I’m no spring chicken. I’ve been having a lot of issues with the idea that time is running out – that there’s a lot more sand in the bottom half of the hourglass than in the top.
I know it’s displaced, but due to the time running out thing, I’ve been having anger issues too. I keep it buried, but I can’t help but feel like it’s her fault. Like she’s cheated me out of a decent sex life. We were still teenagers when we got married (she was 18 and I was 19), we’re in our 60’s now, and I’ve NEVER had even a brief stint of decent sex life. And being that we’re in our 60’s, hormone levels in general are declining, I’m having intermittent ED problems, and things are only going to decline further from here.
That’s why I’m back. I don’t know exactly what I came looking for, but this forum helped me so much before that I just knew I would find something. It’s terribly sad that it’s fallen into to this state.
