TL/DR: My girlfriend of 4.5 years wants to eventually get married, and I really love her and want to make her happy. But I am not sure if I want marriage soon, and intimacy issues are pushing me away from the relationship, while my own desire to pursue intimacy and excitement is pulling me away.

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We are both in each other’s first “real” relationship. We were also both virgins before we met each other. We have also both been through a lot of personal growth and hard times together. COVID brought us together quickly, and we spent a lot of time together isolating, and it early on became normal for us to live together. We both started therapy and began unpacking things for ourselves that caused some trouble in the relationship (depression, anxiety, trauma). All of this happened early on in the relationship (at least early for me, for a first relationship) and what started out as a “let’s just try it for a month, see how it goes” quickly became very serious.

Don’t get me wrong - we fell in love, and are very compatible in our core beliefs and have natural chemistry together. She is my best friend, and we know each other better than anyone. We tell each other all the time how we love each other, and how cute we are, and we support each other.

We’ve been living together for two years (feels like more because of the time we spent together before that) and have shown deep commitment to each other. We have sort of brought up the conversation around marriage a couple times. Every time, I expressed that I am not ready for marriage right now, and I don’t know what it will take for me to feel that I am. She told me that she expects to get married eventually. It doesn’t need to be right now, she will wait. But she doesn’t want to wait forever, and doesn’t want to wait years only for me to say no.

I’ve been trying to think about why I am not ready. After all, we are best friends and love each other a lot, and I want to make her as happy as possible.

So far, this is what I’ve come up with, and I’ve organized it this way:

Problems pushing me away:

We have a dead bedroom. It didn’t used to be this way, but we have had multiple bad sexual experiences together that left us both uncomfortable. Frankly, we just don’t have sexual chemistry together. I am usually left feeling unsatisfied, and because of her anxiety and trauma, she feels ashamed and depressed. I hate seeing her this way, but it kind of makes me a little frustrated. She claims that she wants to resume the spark and get better, but she makes no effort to do so, while I have. I don’t feel intensely attracted to her, and I almost think she subconsciously knows it. We both have been busy in life, but also to avoid these bad feelings, we have largely stopped trying to do anything sexual.

An adjacent issue is that I feel she doesn’t initiate intimacy, but expects me to do so. We’ve discussed this long ago, and she made minimal effort to improve, but ultimately I guess it failed.

We’ve tried communicating, toys, games, romantic nights, taking online quizzes, etc. Eventually it just stopped.

Desires pulling me away:

I want to experience the excitement of dating, perhaps even causal sex or non-monogamy. I think this is because I missed out on this stuff in high school and college. Even though my girlfriend and I are great for each other, I’m left thinking that it’s not very logical to marry the first person you meet. I have a desire to make new relationships and form a deeper level of connection (possibly including intimacy) with more (multiple?) people. I can’t explain why exactly I have these feelings. It seems like I should be able to suppress them for the right partner, but I have to admit that it is a temptation pulling me away from her.

Tied up in this is my desire to explore my sexuality (gender attraction) and also kink. There are things my girlfriend and I could do about this, but only so much.

I also just don’t know if marriage is something I want or not. I can envision my life with or without it. But I can’t see it happening right now.

So, can we fix the problems pushing us apart, and implement the desires pulling me away, in our current relationship?

Perhaps, but it won’t be easy. I don’t feel a deep attraction or spark for her. I almost feel like I would resist attempts at intimacy. At least, I would need more gradual steps to change things. I believe my resistance comes from the following:

1. I expect that we will have an unenjoyable experience because that’s what we have had before
2. I want to avoid her negative feelings after the fact that arise from depression and anxiety

I don’t want to lose her. But I also feel that we are unaligned in our goals and sexual chemistry right now. Note that we are both in therapy and working through our issues.

Part of me wants to live alone again and have freedoms that a single person does. I want to flirt with other people. But I love her and want to be friends with her, perhaps still want intimacy with her. I guess this is partly why I’ve been envisioning non-monogamy. I’ve hinted at it before, but she highly rejected the idea and got defensive, depressed, and the whole trauma anxiety response happened so I’m hesitant to talk about it again.

Please let me know, should we break up? Are there ways we can fix this? Is what I’m feeling valid? Thank you.