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?