Normally I would agree with everything you have said. In fact, HD has been told those things many times on this board, including by me. But I now see his wife differently, similar to my wife. My wife has a very hard time seeking pleasure for herself. She is the martyr and devotes herself to the kids. She does not seek pleasure, but rather tries to avoid pain, thinking that she is only doing the noble thing by protecting herself and the kids.
The advice you give HD (and that I gave at one time) is to make him into a more attractive person. For most people, this allows their pleasure seeking side to come out. Improve yourself and the R will improve. For MrsHD and my wife, this does not make any difference. They will feel better not having someone pressure them, but it only allows them to back off the pain avoidance dance. There is no desire to seek pleasure. They have completely shut themselves down to this. It is way too vulnerable, too scary, too life threatening. They have been there and they will not go there again.
Corri might be able to shed a little light on this because I think this is part of what she is going through. Another poster on here some time back, Happy Giant I think, had a wife with similar but more extreme issues. We guessed she had experienced some severe sexual molestation sometime. She would not become that vulnerable to those feelings again. She would D before risking that.
Can you see how this totally changes the landscape? That is why people here criticized me so sharply for the tactics I had to resort to in order to save my marriage. If it were only a matter of becoming a less angry person, it would have been easy for me. But my wife never responded. It was never enough because she always had a new deflection why she could not trust me. I could have waited an eternity for her to come out from behind her defenses. On her own, she would not do it. It took a fair amount of in-your-face talk about FOO issues to get her to really see where she had responsibility, plus training for the both of us to lessen our enmeshment and not escalate, plus slowly getting used to showing vulnerability and getting used to those uncomfortable feelings.
