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[quote=Anonymous]I’ve found reading this post to be very informative.  I am a woman who has “withheld” sex from my husband and it is very sobering to see the other perspective on this situation.

To the OP and the many responders in kind, I sympathize with your situation and my heart truly hurts for you as I realize that my husband must have had/have many of the same feelings as you are expressing.

To shed some light to the other side of the coin, I would like to share why it is that I lost the desire to have sex with my spouse.

The OP stated the commonly known fact that women expect a man to change, and they don’t and that men expect the women to stay the same, and they don’t.  I know that this was the downfall to my marriage.  When my husband and I were pre-kids, we had sex often.  I am very much a go with the flow kind of person and my husband tends to like to dictate the pace of the day, so generally we were focused on him and I would say 90% of the day was dedicated to him (I am not at all laying any sort of guilt on this, it was fine at the time).  When our first child arrived, six years into our relationship, I felt he did not change to adapt to the child.  He still wanted everything to stay the same, and by this, I mean everything.  I think that the child made him feel out of place and he was grasping to maintain his status.  This is understandable in human nature, but trading in our paid off sedan for a 2 door sports car 2 weeks after the birth of our child does not instill much confidence in working as a team.  It felt to me that he was more concerned with maintaining his routines, physique, etc. than embracing the changing family dynamic.

Our relationship started to deteriorate within months of our child’s arrival (which, from reading these boards is a pretty common occurrence, so I would say that it was a normal bump in the relationship).  My husband was always loving to me, but often got frustrated with me when I could not focus my attention on him 100%.  When there were rare moments where I had 15 minutes to myself, he would often want my undivided attention at that point.  I felt that I was never getting any time to myself.  He used to jokingly say that he’s not #1 anymore and he’d taken second place.  I would comment to him that he’s lucky that he’s in second place, because my needs are last.  This is just a brief capsulation of how these things can start.  I think that it got to the point that I was devoting so much of my time to others that there was nothing left for me.  I always enjoyed having sex with my husband, but for me, I think there was a switch that turned and he became more of someone that I took care of vs. someone that I partnered with – sex was the last thing that I wanted – it almost felt like I was having sex with my child vs. my husband.

In the beginning, he would often ask for sex, but stopped after being rebuffed and waited for my queues…which as much as I wanted to want to give him, I could not muster the desire.  He and I had a discussion and he told me outright that he could probably last in a sexless marriage for a couple of years, but that he would likely have an affair to fill his needs.  Internally, I was okay with this.

This is very long winded and I’m not sure if I’m giving you any perspective.  My husband and I split over the summer – which I initiated.  After the first 2 months, which were hellish, we have settled down and are ok.  I know that we are uncommon, but I truly want happiness for him and we get along much better now that we do not have the sex void over our heads.  We have 2 young children (2 and 4) and I think that it is best for them.  We went to a therapist and asked what was best for the children (custody wise, mainly).  She said what is best for the children is for them to see their parents have healthy relationships.  
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