She would have the bf for his money. If she needed to have sex with him to keep him around, she would. After all, she had plenty of sex with me before we got married. I am not intending that as a character slur. I am no better. I would have a gf for the sex. If I had to buy her jewelry to get her to keep having sex with me, and I could afford it, I would buy the jewelry. I bought my wife a very expensive set of custom made earrings for our first anniversary. I stopped buying her jewlery after she pretty much stopped having sex with me. I am no better than her. We are the same.

Look, this is who I am and this is why I am married to my wife. It is not an accident that we are together. We both thought we married "above our heads". We were both tragically mistaken.

I couldn't believe she was willing to marry me. I figured she had low self esteem because she has bad skin (acne) and because she was a nice Jewish girl from New York who didn't quite fit in when her parents moved to South Carolina when she was in high school and she never recovered from being such an outsider. Of course, I did not know about the rapes back then.

She figured I had low self esteem because I was short and also had bad skin. She thought I was low libido because I had such limited sexual experience. She figured I "talked a big game", but if I really cared about sex as much as I claimed verbally, then I would have found a way to get some. She never realized that those traits which led to my failure at attracting women would carry over and produce failure in my career.

We thought we were 2 zit faces who would each overlook the other's flaws and build a wonderful life together. We did not realize that we were 2 deeply scarred human beings unable to break free of our past hurts, whose needs and shortcomings were perfectly aligned to produce heartbreak.

RH talk is not going to help here. We have had RH talk. She won't even try to overcome her anxieties regarding sex. I won't even try to overcome my anxieties regarding work. There is no "deal" available under which we each work on our weaknesses in order to motivate the other to work on theirs. The problem is not that each of us wants the other to "go first". The problem is that neither of us is willing to address our own problems at all. Even if our partner does "go first".

We are far past the point where Dr. H would say it is time to Call It Quits. Neither of us will do that. As you (Retread) pointed out on another thread, neither of us is willing to do the work to make any other relationship successful. So no point in getting out of this one.