You and wife's story is interesting to me. I had some not great sexual experiences young. And obviously with my exH things weren't great. But with what happened to me I wanted to own my sexuality. I didn't want to be "broken" by someone. I did everything in my power to exert my autonomy over my body, to find out what my preferences were, and to learn to be unafraid of saying what I wanted and how I wanted it. I know there were guys hurt in that process. I'm not proud of that part.

I also felt a lot of the same things you felt in the EA when we went through the A. I took that very personally. I bent over backward to the detriment of myself to try to make him happy. And yet here he was more than happy to lavish attention and physical affection on a person who made time for him only when she didn't like her bf very much. Initially the sting was the rejection, but after time the sting was more just anger at myself for putting myself in the position to be hurt like that. That I handed him that kind of power over me that I let myself think I was the problem.

I think our issues on this side are a little different. He's more conscientious about how long we've gone between. He's more aware that leaving sex on the bottom of the list actually hurts me because I just don't feel the same way. Now it's more me trying to understand what sex actually means to him. When he decided to focus his attention on me again on the other side of the A things kind of came to light that we still haven't talked about and I know we should. He used physical connection to me to fulfill an emotional connection I wouldn't give him at first, and he didn't want to give me. He literally couldn't keep his hands off me when he didn't know what he wanted future-wise. The sex at that time was like two randos at a bar, pure chemistry, all lust, no love. It was honestly a lot like the beginning of our story.

H was a FWB before I seriously started dating him. We went out on a date here or there, but most of the time it was one or the other of us checking in at midnight to see if we were the sure thing at bar close. Or at like 9 or on a week night I'd slip out to his apartment after my daughter would go to bed and be back before midnight. (My roommate was there with her. I didn't neglect my child for sex. Just to be very clear). In the beginning he caught feelings before I did. And I could tell before he said anything. The sex changed. The exact same process happened after the affair. It went from raw chemistry to everything slowing down, tons of eye contact, cuddling and lingering in bed after. And like in our beginning the more we connected emotionally the more the sex changed. Then the frequency. The more he feels connected to me emotionally the less we connect physically. My fear here is that there's some kind of subconscious madonna/wh*re complex. Like as his wife and his love interest he can't see me the same way as he does when I mean less than that to him. Maybe that's not it at all and I'm reading into it, but it feels like something I can't just leave alone. I don't know that he even realizes he doing that.