Hello, my name is Deborah and my fiance and I have been engaged for 2years and 4months. We do not live together and have never had intercourse. I know this puts us in a different boat since living together and having pre marital sex is socially exceptible. We both have strong views on sex before marriage and feel that we will be blessed for our decision. Never the less our relationship has been rocky for the past year. Some people have told us that our problem is sexual frustration and I'm not going to lie, there has been some, but this is not the core of our problem. We have been striving to keep our spirituality and believe that without God in our lives, the marriage will not work. Unfortunately, both our spirituality's have had their ups and downs. Not that we don't feel very strongly about our faith. We do. We know what we are supposed to do, but have a hard time, like all humans do, of keeping our standards where they should be. We've survived being apart and having to deal with long distance relationships. We were engaged, and then I moved away from our home town to attend college. I told him that I didn't want to get married until after I finnished school and this was okay with him. School lasted 2 years, we delt with the long distance relationship and remained faithfull to eachother. Now that I'm out of school and working, we have decided to start getting the ball rolling on our marriage. Yet through all that we've been through ( and it has been a lot)things don't seem to be working out. We've changed and grown so much in the past two years I feel we are moving in seperate directions. I've read "His Needs, Her Needs" and feel that even though we are not married, we aren't meeting eachothers needs. We can't make eachother happy. We can't hold out a decent conversation without arguing. How can we come together again? I feel like I've fallen out of love. How can we get this back? How can we meet eachothers needs? I'm scared that if we can't make our relationship work now, how are we going to make it work when we are married? I realize that getting married doesn't solve our problems but in turn magnifies them. I think the problems that we are having now are bad enough! I would appreciate any advice you have to give in solving our dilema. Much Thanks, Deb

Deb,<br>Have you two talked about this?? Has he read HN, HN? That might help. I don't know if it is sexual frustration. But I do know that in the book Dr. H talks about that being a male need---so maybe HE is frustrated about it and you aren't??? But I definatly wouldn't START having sex to try to make things better. After waiting this long I think you owe it to yourselves to work on what's wrong (and I know you weren't talking about having sex to fix the relationship). But you are very right, marraige only magnifies problems. You must straighten out these things before a wedding. Good luck.

GBM,<p>Thanks for your advice. We do talk about our frusrations and fears. Sometimes I feel like we are both on a neggative and possitive rollercoaster. One week he's positive about us working things out and I'm not, and vice versa. No he hasn't read HN, HN but I will deffenitely tell him to pick up a copy. Thank you for your reply.<p>Deb

Deb, Do you think that you have changed from going away to school and he has stayed in your home town and may not have changed in the same way? Between the age of 18-24 approx. these are very formative years and great changes occur. I don't know if you are in that bracket but your mention of college made me wonder. Of course you could be 50 and decided you needed to go to a school out of town!!!!<p>I was raised with very strong religious beliefs particularly about premarital sex. However, on meeting my husband, I witheld and he respected that and didn't push. I did however reach a stage where I was so in love with him and wanted to make love to him that being married was not an issue. We made love, we did not have 'sex' and it was for all the right reasons. So keeping in mind my beliefs, my conscience was completely clear and I felt I did nothing wrong. In fact, I felt that I was so lucky to have such a wonderful experience!<p>Another more clinical thought is one that is not necessarily logical re your beliefs but is certainly practical. Would you consider making love and if that is not the answer and you break up then you will know, but if it does help it could be something wonderful both mentally, emotionally and physically!<p>Wishing you the best.<p><br>Fionn<p>[This message has been edited by Fionn (edited 11-18-98).]