We finally were able to schedule our initial appointment with a certified sex therapist. It starts on 6/5. My wife and I went through standard couples counseling for about 4 years, which helped our communication tremendously. Then, I went through about 3 years of individual therapy to help myself through some rough times. Both helped tremendously. However, I live in a DB (dead bedroom).

I grew up in a house where my parents, while very loving and nurturing, made me feel uncomfortable discussing sex and relationships. My father would giggle and tease me, and my mother’s comment was always “don’t worry about it.” Not helpful at all for an awkward adolescent, and it has harmed me in more ways than I ever realized.

As a result, I never experienced a sexual awakening or tried kinky, fun stuff from when I was 16 years old until now, which is about 50 years old. All sex has been vanilla. Now that I’m approaching 50, I realize that you have two lives: the second one starts when you realize you only have one.

I’ve worked hard to improve my mental health, removing barriers placed there by my parents and digging deep to get to know myself emotionally. Now, there are so many things I want to try and experiment with, and I want to do that with one person only—my wife.

When I started my mental health journey, I always envisioned my wife being at the other end of the tunnel, waiting for me with open arms to say something like, “There’s the guy I married. I’ve been waiting for him. Good to have you back. Let’s make up for lost time.” Unfortunately, the opposite happened. It seems like she’s repelling and pulling away when I lean in to become more emotionally intimate. To be fair, I wanted to go from A to Z much faster than she did, which she told me. Fine. Here are two examples within the past week of me slowing down:

Example 1: She goes and takes a shower. I surprisingly jump in with her. I wasn’t even looking for sex; I just wanted to share a non-sexual physical experience with her. Just watching her made me hard, and I showed her to prove that, yes, I am attracted to her. She smiled. I went to kiss her. I got lips, and she pulled back. I said, “No, a real kiss.” I had to ask for that. She pulled away after about one second. That was painful to me.

Example 2: Me: “Let’s lay in bed naked and just hold each other, skin to skin. No sex.” Her: “Let’s just lay here.”

Can you see how demoralized and rejected I feel? And that’s just two examples—there are many others. The cumulative effect of these little instances adds up to a very heavy feeling.

What really gets me, and maybe it’s my own fault for assuming this, is that all the hard work I’ve done to improve myself mentally and emotionally hasn’t helped our intimacy. Instead, she’s rejecting all my cues (subconsciously or consciously) and pushing me away. It hurts more than she knows, and even though I’ve tried to express it emotionally and verbally, it just doesn’t seem to resonate. I’ve told her for the past 6 months, I’ve walked around with a lump in my throat, feeling like I am going to break down and cry. Her rejections are slowly chiseling away at my confidence, making me less inclined to initiate anything. (Ask me when the last time she initiated any sexual act was? The answer is “I can’t remember.”)

I’ve told her I consider this issue super-critical, but she’s not doing any discernible acts to help our relationship. I’m not sure if sex therapy will help ferret out these issues, but I’m scared to death that when we do address them, we’ll realize we’ve reached the end of our marital road. Then what the hell did I do all this hard work for? I’m tearing up just thinking about it. (I guess the only positive is that if this marriage does end, I’ll be emotionally ready to handle the sexual part of a new relationship by expressing my needs, wants, and feelings.)

I’ve told her that I’m unsatisfied, concerned, and that I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life celibate. I want to spend the rest of my life with someone who wants me, who desires me. I don’t have that at all right now. Am I catastrophizing? Maybe. But the facts don’t change from incident to incident. The issues are still present, and it’s a big, important issue for me. Talk is cheap, I told her; your actions speak louder than any time you say, “Yes, I will work on that.” I can’t control her actions, so I’ll focus on mine. I’m starting to wonder if my interpretation of our relationship falls into the “sunk cost fallacy.”