30 years ago I married the man of my dreams. A young bride of 20 with a 24 year old H. He was in the Navy and we were living overseas. Less than 6 months into our marriage a friend told me that my new H enjoyed the sex industry in foreign countries. My heart was broken. Shortly afterwards I snooped and read letters to an old girlfriend he was writing and never even mentioned he was now married. I tried to confront but was severely scolded for snooping. During this time he became a huge fan of pornography. Even at 20 there was no way I could even compare to those sexy women. I thought when we got back to the states we could have a new beginning. The pornography continued as well as visits to strip clubs and rumors of antics at bachelor parties. Please don�t ask me why I didn�t confront as I don�t have an answer. Our first child arrives during this time. We end up back overseas and I think things are good between us until I find out that H is sleeping with a co worker while I�m pregnant. Even having her to our house while I�m in the hospital after the birth of our 2nd child. It was one big humiliating scandal which he denied but I knew it was true. The pornography continues. We move back to the states, start a business together. Another chance for a new start�.. About 10 years ago I found myself attracted to another man. I allowed this man to stay in my life for a very LTA. A huge mistake which I truly regret. During this time H starts to visit massage parlors for the full enchilada as well as visiting prostitutes, 8-10 admittedly. Even ordering Viagra from India. The porn continues�.

H discovers the LTA, all contact is stopped, we discover MB and enter into counseling because of my affair. It took 2 sessions before H realized maybe this sexual contact with 25 or more other women and chronic porn use may have hurt me too over the years and told the counselor about it. The Viagra was thrown out, the porn collection pitched too. We�ve both been tested for STD�s and have been making remarkable progress since Nov. 2011. We spend lots of time together and get along nicely. All kind of EP�s are in place.

Last night we had a set back because of sex and I can�t explain it. I love cuddling and the closeness of it but when it comes to the sex act I completely freeze up. This is extremely important to him it�s almost scary. He tells me he loves me and is happy but if we don�t have sex he tells me he doesn�t think things can work out and he�s unhappy. It�s a total LB for each of us. I�ve messed up so badly and I want to fix it before I force him to seek sex elsewhere or he leaves me. Has anyone out there experienced this?

DeepWounds,

Have you been reading on this site?

You have not one problem, but two since both affairs are wrong, and cheating by one spouse does not make the other spouses affair right.

Has there been exposure of your and his affair partners?

You both need to get STD testing.

Perhaps you can write out a time line so others can see how this marriage progressed to where it is now.

God Bless
Gamma

DW, go and read Marko's posts on this thread: http://forum.marriagebuilders.com/u...flat&Number=2654211&#Post2654211

Are you achieving at least 15 hours per week of undivided attention time? Typically women need 2 things to desire sex: an emotional attachment to the man and the prospect of enjoyment. It takes AT LEAST 15 hours per week to feel an emotional attachment to your husband.

Read through Markos' posts on that thread and come back and give me your thoughts. I will leave you with this Harley quote:

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi5013_qa.html

Deep Wounds,

Welcome to MB. It has great information about how to recover a marriage and it appears as though you and your husband have much to work on for you both to feel safe in your marriage.

Have you read the books, "Surviving an Affair" and His Needs, Her Needs"? They are a good place to start.

Most women feel comfortable having sex with their husband only when they are emotionally connected. To achieve this, Dr. Harley recommends (insists) on at least 15 hours of undivided attention each week (more if your marriage is having problems) meeting the critical emotional needs of affection, conversation, recreational companionship and sexual fulfillment. Are you and your H spending UA time?

Has your husband finally given up the porn? Do you have EPs that cover this, i.e. limited access to internet, or however he was accessing the porn?

AM

I always type so much slower than Mel.

Ya gotta get up pretty early to outtype da Texan!!

Yeah, I know.

I am also multitasking, watching the olympics and talking to DS18 about his dislike of his braces, at the same time.

AM

Shaddup, Prisca!

Texan?

SF is my #1 EN and yes it IS that important. I think if everything else was going great but that one need wasn't met, it would be enough for me to seek a D.

But, it concerns me that you feel if you do not quickly work through this problem you will 'force him to seek sex elsewhere.' You are responsible for 50% of an M that paved the way for A's, and 100% responsible for your OWN A, but you are NOT, in any way shape or form, 'responsible' for HIS A's. Your inability to have sex with him right now is not 'forcing' him to get it somewhere else, that is a choice that he is in control of, not you. It is, however, not meeting one of his most important EN's and does need to be worked out.

Whether he is getting that need met or not does not excuse his behavior. Many people do not get that need met and still do not have A's.

You said 'last night' is this the only time this has happened, or this is a regular occurrence?

Is it possible you are freezing up due to the anxiety that if you don't perform, he will cheat again?

Have you counseled with the Harleys, would you be able to do this to discuss this topic?

I have been reading on this site and H has written in a few times a while back. We've both have been thankful for MB. We've been through the exposure,STD testing and EP's. Everything is progressing fine except my meeting the frequency and intensity of H sexual needs.

H doesn't have sexual performance issues I guess I'm the one with the performance issues. He's always wanted me to look and act like a porn star which just isn't going to happen-it's just not me.

We get lots of UA time. We work together, commute together and have lunch daily. Weekends are also spent together. I love spending time with him but I'm more comfortable cuddling and being close than I am in the sex act.

We have read the books and apply the MB principles daily. I do believe he has given up on porn and I monitor his cell and computer. I don't feel the need to watch like I did months ago so maybe I'm starting to feel safe.

I'm coming back to MB because I'm still having trouble with intimacy and not sure how to approach the subject with DH. We've been working so hard on our marriage but I know he has to be so disappointed that I'm not the sexual machine he wants me to be. Do you folks believe in sexual aversion or do you feel if the marriage is fine then the sex should be, too? I think I've had sexual aversion for a very long time dating back to the early days of our marriage. After discovering he was paying for sex overseas and was a chronic porn watcher I remember feeling so disgusted and that sex became something dirty and unnatural. After D-day and hearing more about his prostitutes, massage parlors and affairs it became even dirtier to me. I think we made a big mistake in making me agree to sex 3-4 times a week because it's pushing me away when it's intended to bring us together. In retrospect, I should have given myself time to feel safe with him again. I'm practically starting to have panic attacks when it's expected of me to perform. We spend a lot of time together and most of what he wants to talk about is when we can have sex again. How can I feel so comfortable cuddling but so fearful of sex? If I approach the subject he's going to get very mad and bring up my past affair. This is all so depressing....I need some serious help!

I was just reading one of Dr. Harley's Q&A columns where he said that if sex is painful, don't do it. If you are experiencing anxiety about it, that qualifies as a type of pain. Sounds like you feel you have to do it to keep him around. Aint gonna work. You have to FEEL like it, and he is primarily responsible to make you feel like it.

Were the affairs properly addressed last year?

Is he still off porn?

Yes, the affairs were properly addressed and we've been following MB. I do believe he is off porn but he did admit he watched a sex tape we made together back in the 80's while I was out of town this weekend. Not sure how I feel about that

There is a big issue that hasn't been addressed yet, and that is your 10-year affair. That must have had a huge effect on your emotions and your marriage.

Who was this man - a neighbour? Colleague? Ex boyfriend? How did you two meet without your H knowing anything? Was he married? Was the affair ever exposed to his wife and your employers, if appropriate? Did you move away fro the neighbourhood? Has all contact stopped, and if so, how did you achieve this? Is there any possibility of contact further down the road?

What is your H's posting name?

What were you doing "out of town" without him? Was this an emergency trip and if so, why couldn't he go with you?

If you've been following MB and reading the Harley books, you must know that nights apart are out of the question after an affair. How can you know what your H was doing when you were away, and how can he know that you were not meeting up with OM?

My affair has been addressed and it is over. There has been no contact and there won't be any further contact. He lives in the next town, if he's still in town. The majority of the affair was phone conversations so once D-day came around it was not that difficult. There was a physical part but not as much as you would think after so long. Felt more confident having someone to talk to. It was all wrong and I'm truly regretful.I'm sure my affair had an effect on my emotions and marriage at the time, how could it not? Now, after my affair, it has the lingering effect of shame and humiliation.

I went out of town to spend some time with childhood friends. I missed my girlfriends. We posted pictures on FB of our adventure so hopefully there was no doubt where I was. H has had to go out of town on occasion and stays in contact with me. There's been other occasions in dealing with the kids where we had to spend the night apart but for the most part we've been together each night. UA time is plentiful since we commute and work together. Most of my affair conversations took place getting to and from work.

How does your H know that contact with your AP is over? Can he verify this?

How did you end the affair?

He monitors all forms of communication one might use for contact and all time is accounted for. How else do you propose to verify?

There was no "MBletter" when things ended it was done over the phone. H did not want me to ever contact him again and I agreed. We discovered MB after the fact. I was actually fearful of being asked to write a letter as a test of not following the no more contact agreement we made. Was not going to risk another smack in the face ever again!

I came here with an issue and asked for help am I a lost cause?

"UA time is plentiful since we commute and work together. Most of my affair conversations took place getting to and from work."

Hi deepwounds, I am going to suggest that you start here with the UA time. Quality UA time is spent on dates. How often do you go out on dates together?

Huh? Why did you say this?

" I think we made a big mistake in making me agree to sex 3-4 times a week because it's pushing me away when it's intended to bring us together. In retrospect, I should have given myself time to feel safe with him again. I'm practically starting to have panic attacks when it's expected of me to perform."

I so agree with you here!! You should not have sex with him whe. You don't feel like it. Is he doing something you don't like or are you just not in love with him? If you will follow the steps in this article, you can overcome this aversion. It really does work too!!

After reading all this, it's not hard to see why you have trouble with intimacy/sex with your husband. When was his last affair or extra-marital activity? While none of this excuses your LTA, I can certainly understand how you ended up there. Has your H made any sort of JC to you? The level of his adultery would be hard for anyone to recover from.

How long has it been since you went NC with your OM?

Have you ever heard about OM from a third party or have you check OM FB. Or any other indirect form of contact with the OM?

Where is the OM in your life now, does he work or live near you?


What has your WH/BH done to repair the damage his affairs did?

Talking about issues on the commutes to and from work is not UA time. Where is the fun in your commutes? No where.

You are being defensive about this for no reason. I asked these questions because they had not been answered in your thread and I wanted to be sure that there were no loose ends from your affair. It is important to end an affair completely otherwise recovery will fail, and I wanted to establish that this had been done.

Not sure why I said this it's just that I feel like something is wrong with me because I don't crave sex.

How can I possibly not have sex with him? This is what is most important to him on his needs list. He's not doing anything I dislike, I do love him and I want to get us back on track sexually. Just this morning we wake up and are in each others arms for a while talking and enjoying the closeness. Then the sex talk begins and the moment of closeness is no longer for me and he's once again disappointed in me. MelodyLane-there was no article attached that you spoke of.

It has been 2 years for both of us since we discovered each others secret lives. We are both working hard and sticking to MB's. We have made our lives an open book to each other.

There has been NC with OM for 2 years. Have not heard anything about him and have not checked on him in any way what so ever. We do not live in the same town. Husband is doing everything he can to be the perfect husband. Which I am grateful for, I am, but there's some pretty deep wounds left which didn't heal up as quickly as I would have liked. People look at me from the outside and see a completely different person as I see. I'm just a shell of the person I should be or can be. H realizes my self esteem is not where it should be which is probably not very attractive to him. What can we do to repair the damage from our past lives? We are trying to move on with our lives and treat each other properly and with respect. We do spend a lot of UA time together which is not just limited to working and commuting together. Now that the kids are both in college we have even more time to spend together.

SC I'm sorry to sound defensive it was not my intention at all. My affair has completely ended and there are no loose ends. I think something I struggle with is that H had so much extra-marital activity everywhere I look is a constant trigger for me. I'm not sure who is the enemy in this sexually charged world. How can I overcome this?

whoops! How to Overcome Sexual Aversion

I'd like to address this one statement you made since others are helping you with other, very important, aspects of your lack of desire for sex with your husband.

You say you don't "crave" sex. Most women don't have the same drive for sex that men have. Dr. Harley describes a man's EN for sex as a "craving" for sex.

Most of the time, if a woman is in love with her husband, if she feels bonded to him and has the prospect of enjoyment, then she is willing to meet his need for SF.

So the first question to consider is: do you feel bonded to your husband? If you two argue or fight, you are not going to feel bonded. If you don't spend enough enjoyable uninterrupted time together, you are not going to feel bonded. Is he meeting your ENs and avoiding LBs?

The second question is: do you have the prospect of enjoyment from your sexual encounter with your husband? Do you feel pressured by him to have sex? Does he pressure you to "perform" a certain way? You have mentioned this performance aspect a couple of time. Do you feel that you are being unfavorably compared to past sexual partners, real or paper? Is he a good lover? Does he try to please you in the way you like?

These two aspects of SF for a woman cover most of the emotional side of the equation. Read the Aversion article MelodyLane linked for you to get the full picture.

The physical aspect of sex is that testosterone is the driving force behind the craving for sex that most men have. This hormone is a powerful aphrodisiac. Women have a small fraction of the hormone in their bloodstream. If you have a lower-than-normal amount in your body, this might be a reason you don't have a craving for sex.

Do you think about sex? Do you dream about it at all? Can you still, um...you know, have a great time during sex?

After seriously considering all the emotional aspects of SF for you, you might consider going to a doctor and having your hormone levels checked.

This was the only real problem I had with menopause. Everything else was going great, but over the course of a few months, I lost the ability to physically enjoy sex. I felt just nothing. It was awful for me. And even though I didn't want to think about it, I was always thinking that my H must be comparing my "lack of performance" to the A sex. He wasn't, he said, but it was a very very difficult time for me and I started to not enjoy sex very much because of the difficulty, both physical and emotional.

The testosterone therapy has been very successful for me and made me feel much more energetic and positive about life, even beyond SF.

Just something to consider, once you have thoroughly considered everything that has been presented to you in your thread.

Dr. Harley also notes that this craving typically exists independently of the man's relationship(s). That's a very hard topic for a lot of women to grasp & cope with; most often, women experience desire toward a specific person. Men usually experience desire in a more general sense. When men are craving sex, just being around a woman -- ANY woman -- is often very distracting.

My wife was also bothered for some time by the fact that when I craved sex, she was the outlet and not the object of the craving. It's just the way men are wired. Satisfying the craving on a regular basis helps dramatically reduce the level of distraction. For most men below age forty, twice a week is an average minimum baseline, but it's a bell curve with many outliers on both ends!

Please don't mistake my statement of the way things are as a statement of the way they ought to be.

SF is also my #1�and my unfaithful wife who had an affair with AW has now developed sexual aversion. But while she was in the midst of the affair, she was more open to having sex more often than usual, which for us was 4x a month�more than ever in our marriage of 17 years.

It has been seven months since she revealed her affair to me and we have not had successful intercourse in that entire period. Though I'm very unhappy, I'm coping. We're seeing a therapist and trying to cobble our marriage together.

Last week she was at least trying, but the pending sex act took her back to emotional pain and I voluntarily stopped before we got it going. I'm gutting it out and have told her that I don't want to do anything that's going to take her back to pain (she was raped by a man prior to our relationship).

I see value in our marriage for each other and for our children, but this is so hard. Nothing I've tried seems to work. I'm not satisfied with the status quo, but every time I try anything related to SF she goes into a PTSD episode. I have forgiven my wife for her infidelity but emotionally, I'd almost rather live with her affair if I could have sex with her regularly�sad to say...

I hope someone has a testimony that can help? Has anyone crawled out of something like this without divorce?

Lion, welcome to Marriage Builders. This program can resolve your problems. I would start a thread with this post so you are not stuck at the bottom of someone else's thread. The reason your wife won't have sex with you is because she has fallen out of love with you. We can show you how to fix that. Please start a new thread and take the time to read through this article: here

I'm back after an awful sleepless night on the couch. Think I've figured out something that may be more important to me than I expected and that's a spouse who is a provider. Am I not sexual because I don't feel safe and secure with him?

We have been in business together since 96. It was a 50-50 thing until about 8 years ago and he stopped producing in a heavy sales industry. So for the past 7 or 8 years I've been the bread winner and have carried almost the entire burden of running the business. I share his sales numbers with him so his lack of production is not a surprise to him.

After having to pay an additional 20k in taxes yesterday I had a bit of a collapse and told him that I didn't feel like he was pulling his weight at work and the stressful burden was killing me. His response was F YOU, F You! He did not want to discuss it any further and we didn't speak for the rest of the night.In the past he's complained to me and others that I hold my feelings close to the chest. I think you can probably understand why. How can I ever make myself feel vulnerable and open with him? This morning I apologized for hurting his feelings but I had to be honest with him...finally. He said he didn't handle things well-I'll say. Thank you for giving me a place to safely vent MB's.

What have you done since you've been here last?

Will you sign up for the online program?

I return after some years of absence with something very troubling. My husband has returned to viewing pornography and I need advice. He is watching it, lying with excuses to be alone and trying to hide the internet history. I'm fearful of confronting because I know he'll push the blame towards me for not having enough sex with him. Am sickened over this return behavior pattern and don't want him to touch me. What should I do? He promised he would never go back to his old ways.

I would begin by confronting him immediately and coming up with a plan to prevent him from ever using porn again. For example, he can either stay off the computer or you can place some software on it that will prevent him from ever doing it again.

Secondly, you should read your thread again and follow the advice that will help you create a romantic marriage. If he wants you to have sex with him, he needs to help you create the environment that will help you desire SF with him. Obviously he is not doing a good job of meeting your needs and this needs to be resolved.

He has to commit to an exclusive sexual relationship with you. What do you mean by not having "enough sex" with you? Your sexual relationship should be mutually enjoyable in every way, including frequency. If you don't feel like having sex at a certain high frequency, you shouldn't. You should meet his needs in a way that you enjoy too.

Sometimes one of my children come to me and say that a brother or sister called them "stupid."

I always ask them "Are you stupid?"

They always answer no.

Then I teach them that they shouldn't spend time with someone who says disrespectful and judgmental things to them, even if it is their own brother or sister.

He can say you are to blame, but you aren't.

Looking at porn is a choice he made, and not something you caused him to do. If he blames you for it, that is ABUSIVE and you should not tolerate it.

I can tell you what my wife would do if I were looking at porn - she would let our extended family and church know what I was doing, and she would change the locks. She certainly wouldn't waste any time on a discussion where I judge her for my own offensive behavior.

As MelodyLane said, if he wants sex, there's a way to get it - building a romantic relationship with you. It's up to him. The information he needs on how to do that is all here for FREE.

I'd let him know that if he continues to look at porn he is going to lose you because you can't continue to tolerate that kind of pain.

Deep wounds, do you have spyware on your H's devices? I just reread your thread and see that your H had a long history of serial cheating and pornography. If he is hiding pornography use from you, I would be very concerned about what else he is hiding. I would get some spyware on his phone and computer and a VAR in his car asap.

I also notice you come once a year or so to give an update on the fact that your marriage is not happily recovered, but then do not respond to the posters who try to help you and just disappear. Are you serious about getting some help this time? These problems will not resolve themselves on their own.

I do not have any spyware on his devices but do try to monitor the best I can. How many times do we need to come up with a plan to prevent his porn use if all he needs to do is say he won't do it again? We come up with a plan that works for a while then it happens, then the apology, then another plan.. Such a vicious cycle that has destroyed me on so many levels.

I have trouble coming to this site often because I must hide that I am here. I have promised to make my life an open book with no secret activities. This is a secret activity and I feel really guilty being here. I must plot out and be very careful on when and how an opportunity to post can happen to not get caught.

DWounds, if he says he will not look at pornography and does it anyway, I think Dr. Harley would encourage you to start preparing for a separation.

I agree. If he has continued to break his plan then you need to plan to separate. Will you do this?