Trying to understand

You make many false assumptions here, and this statement is especially untrue.

My wife would be just as much hurting from a sexless marriage as would I. We have never discussed this, but I have noticed that after intimacies she is especially content, often showing it by cooking me something special for breakfast. As is often said: "Happy wife, happy life." My wife and I connect through intimacy, and show/feel love and acceptance in the process.

I am not porn-damaged, so my situation might be different. But please do not expect your own abstinence to be the standard by which every other relationship should be measured.

 

There is no "right" answer when it comes to how to be intimate within a marriage. Some people like @DefendMyHeart can find happiness and closeness without sex. Others have the opposite feeling.

I do agree that for most couples, a "sexless" marriage wouldn't work. However, for some it does.

no reason to judge or shame others for their choices - as long as everyone is one the same page and is communicating about it and not hiding resentment.

 

There is a right answer but most of the men in here seem to be confused between intimacy and sex. They don't know the difference. I know that it was explained in here in great detail a few months ago. Sex is not the same as intimacy. It can be a part of it but it is not a necessary component of it. I have an intimate relationship with my dog. My dog understands me and understands my needs and knows when I'm happy or sad or upset. He's my service dog. But I don't have sex with my dog. But whatever. I'm moving on from this dialog.

 

Very true. The entire reason I even mentioned anything about the way my husband and I are in our marriage was to show that not all people need sex to be happy together. And also to advocate for and validate the feelings of the OP on here when she said she sleeps in another room to feel safe from her partner. I never mentioned anything about how our relationship should be the standard, nor did i tell anyone else they should consider doing the same.

And I may have misunderstood what @stegiss meant when he said "intimacy" because I automatically thought he was referring to sex, and that assumption was based on previous comments in this thread.

I think most of us are on the same page now though

 

And another thing. If you guys really knew what you were talking about and had all the answers then why are you here? Why aren't you being intimate, your word not mine, with your SO instead of spending so much time here? If our husbands were being intimate we wouldn't be here having these conversations either. The way some of you choose to describe intimacy is just frightening. It's why I'm here. It's how I found Dr. Weiss' program. You better go figure it out because we're about done with whatever this is.

 

Like I said many times, you cannot see your own fallacies. All you see are the supposed fallacies that women have. That is how you have structured your mind, unfortunately. You have built up many connections that would save your penis rather than seeing the true beauty of the other sex, that is, their value outside the bedroom and outside their physical attributes.

With respect to your earlier posts:

• It is much easier for a women to respect a man that isn't needy; you are needy (please see this). Someone's respect for you is based on your actions, not your ideational beliefs. That is, being respected is a response. It is not a gift, it has to be earned. Expecting respect is neediness; stop.
  
• Please do your own laundry, take responsibility for your own "problems" instead of expecting something out of other people (who are not servants). Right now your wife is your servant, which is truly a sad situation for her.
• To build on responsibility, you are not responsible for your own actions. You are waiting for your wife to save your penis, this is because she is lower than you (your brain wiring). This is not how it should be; women and men are on equal footing.

I wish you well on your journey through growth. I know it is hard to take that next step, but you can do it! I believe in you! You can change your brain wiring, that is the nature of the human mind!

 

Where is it fair to me to continue to put myself in a place where he can be unfaithful to me? My boundary is about what I need to stay in the relationship. In my particular case, yes my boundary is severe because I have taken a long time to reflect and search and try to heal, and due to my history of complex betrayal trauma, I know that I can't go through a relapse. I can't recover if after him seeing what his previous actions did to me, destroyed me, he then chooses to relapse. In my case he is over 2 years clean so at this point he has enough (though still needs more) recovery work under his belt that a relapse will be very much a choice. I'm giving him support by trying to stay and keep our family intact. I, personally, will not lessen his pain at choosing to betray me and betray the agreement for sexuality in our marriage. Again though, I have a tougher stance because of who I am and the details in our story. We've done a lot of work and that is now where the boundary is (there are other boundaries for other behaviors) because in his case, where the acting out becomes a by product of disconnection and general degradation of our relationship, he will have passed by a lot of other opportunities for my support to get to the acting out. His second spat of acting out (I was unaware of all of them until it was all over) resulted from him never talking to me, never sharing his emotions, hiding just about everything from me in his work world. He created a very lonely, stressful world for himself and then blamed me for being upset at how he treated me. So if he relapses, it will mean he's not telling me things already, he's not allowing me to care for him, he's not treating me with kindness and respect, he's not loving me at all. So in our case he will have already made a choice to turn away from our relationship and my response is that I will not live in that level of pain again. So for us, if he relapses we separate so that I can assess if divorce is my final choice or not. He knows this, it is clear and now that he is not an addict acting out, he has enough integrity to see that I deserve agency to choose if I am in this relationship. We've been together for 21 years and have children, I won't waste more of my life if he's going to wreck the marriage. He's no longer focused on himself, he's no longer treating me like an object wife. I don't think he could handle holding our marriage hostage now that he is working recovery. He doesn't want to go back to being horrible. Sorry I'm going on so long but this boundary works for us. We've discussed it at length together and he knows that I consider porn as bad as an affair now. They are both instant deal breakers for me.