Hi. My husband and I have been married for over 17 years. The last two have not been good. After lots of talking, our issues seem to be in two areas – communication and sex.

Communication – I’m pretty quiet and don’t talk much, with him and in social situations. With him, it’s mostly routine day-to-day stuff. He wants more in-depth conversations about stuff that really matters. I can change in this area. It’s still hard, but I have been working on talking more.

Sex – He is a very sexual person and wants more sex, more making out, exploring sex. I’ve become very non-sexual. I don’t really feel turned on. We have regular sex, but he says he feels it’s always for him – he wants to see the desire in my eyes. But I don’t feel desire. I think my feelings towards sex are due to my perception that we have too much sex. (We have sex almost daily (on average 5-6 times a week at least), unless one of us is sick or something. It’s been this frequency pretty much the whole time we’ve been together.) Looking forward, he wants to have more sex; I don’t, ideally, I’d like to have less sex. I agree with him that I need to be more engaged in sex; I think I can be, but I don’t think I want to explore sexually or have increased sex.

I’ve decided to start seeing a psychologist next week. I’m looking forward to the sessions, to help get some answers to why I’ve become so quiet/shutdown/disconnected/non-sexual.

(I think I just wanted to say this stuff out loud to someone else. My apologies as my thoughts are jumbled.)

We still love each other and have build a good life together. We both think the sex issue is a deal breaker and if I don’t become more of a woman, our marriage is done.

We’ve even talked about him having another sex partner. But then it seems ludicrous when we talk about how that would actually happen. And then he says he won’t find someone else cuz he has a smaller penis. So then I sometimes think he feels stuck with me. But then I also think being with me is better than nothing (ie. having some sex with me is better than not having sex with anyone).

Any thoughts?
Thx