How do you manage to get them to talk?

[Lina]

While I've been blessed with a husband who is open to relationship talks and is open to the idea of change, this is *so* very much not a topic he wanted to discuss, or even face the existence of. It's not like pulling teeth any more, but mostly because I've established a relatively unaggressive, humorous way to talk about it, now.

But in the beginning, I essentially started off by saying "I've got some things I need to tell you, and I need you to not respond until I let you know I'm done." After I'd gotten his promise that he would stay quiet, I just... I dunno, broke it down. I told him that I love him, and that I love being with him, but that I just wasn't happy with our sex life. That I look at him and think "God, I love him" and it fills me with warmth that turns into fire... and that the knowledge that he didn't hurt. I told him how I felt, how I'd been feeling, the details. I said that I knew he didn't mean it that way - or at least, that I hoped he didn't mean ti that way - but that I felt crushed, unfeminine and unattractive, when my husband repeatedly rejects my advances. I stayed reasonable, not angry, but I was crying through a lot of it. I'm pretty sure I listed a number of the reasons my paranoia had come up with to explain the difference from how we were before. I ended by telling him that, while I really didn't want to lose him, I needed to see change for our relationship to work for me. Not that anything is wrong with him, *or* me, just that I need more than he'd been giving. Once I even told him that I was terrified that, after hearing me tell him all of this, he was just going to say "All right, g'bye." After I felt that I'd said everything I could say, everything I'd had running around in my head for the weeks and months before, I let him know I was done.

And he was shaken that it had been affecting me that much. He really just hadn't known that it was hitting me that deeply and harshly. And because I'd told him that I needed to see *some* sign of giving from him, and some sign that he was willing to work with me, he talked with me about it. And he's put up with me bringing it up over and over again over the last couple of years surprisingly well, though there have been a few rough spots. Nowadays, I just ask him how things are going on the lovin' front, and he chuckles and lets me know what he's thinking about the whole thing. At least a little.

So... um... that's how I did it. Don't know how others do, or if it would work with you and your H, but... yeah. :-D