My heart goes out to you, D. And I admire you for giving it your all and then facing the reality that there is no cheese down that path.
Sounds like your sitch of working on the house elsewhere should make for a more tolerable transition than would otherwise be possible.
Sometimes it's so hard to admit that the person who wants to work on the marriage is also keeping the other one prisoner. To stay with someone and keep applying pressure to make the marriage better when they frankly aren't interested in doing the work or considering changing-- the initiator isn't doing the other person that much of a favor. Not every marriage needs to be saved.
I don't think there's one single instance on this board of a LD person who is truly LD (and not simply blocked by anger, past abuse issues, etc.) changing. We have an LD person who has made the conscious decision to behave in a sexual way in order to express love to her spouse, but affirms that she is still LD-- and I believe she is the only instance of that.
There are some people who had good sexual vibes in the beginning and that has changed for different reasons. I'm not talking about them.
I'm talking about a sitch where from Day One it was clear that the sexual vibes were not there, or it was questionable whether they were there-- in those cases, as described by the posters here, the vibes have not materialized after 3-5-10-20 or more years. Or there may be a change for a while, but as soon as the H-er D partner stops applying pressure, the sitch returns to the status quo. This is not encouraging, but it is realistic.
In my case, when my bf hugged me at the end of our first date, a teeny red flag went up-- there was no feeling, no energy in that hug. I'm not saying I should have kicked him to the curb right then and there... but I should have turned my radar up higher instead of turning it off.
I predict happiness for you in the future, Dave. (And she'll probably be happier, too.) Good luck to you. Keep us posted. You always have friends here.
