Backstory: my wife (of 10 years) and I, despite getting along very well in most areas of out marriage, have had ongoing intimacy issues for quite some time. We'd taken some very aggressive measures to address this 2 years ago, but we've since fall back into old habits.

She's been on business travel... A LOT. She just got back from a 2 day trip on Wednesday, only to ha e to turn around and drive to an all day meeting yesterday. About an hour away from our home... and she has to make that drive again today.

When she got home last night, things were awesome. We were watching something on TV together, holding hands, scrolling through Facebook together and laughing our faces off at various memes. When we went to bed, she was so tired that she fell asleep in the clothes she went to her meeting in. Despite being that tired, she actually rubbed my arm a bit and let her hand rest on my arm. Felt good to be touched.

This morning, after my shower, she was still in bed. I got back into bed and wrapped my arm around her, and kissed her forehead. I looked down and noticed the dress she'd fallen asleep in had hiked up and her leg was exposed, all the way up to her hip. It was an immediate turn on for me. I let my hand slip down to her bare hip, caressing it, and then leaned down and kissed her bare hip. All of a sudden, she let out what seemed like a moan of frustration and disgust, scratched her bare hip where I'd kissed her, and pulled her skirt down to cover herself.

I felt so rejected in that moment.

What's worse... For the rest of the morning, she would not look at me or initiate conversation with me.

This REALLY hurt.

You know, maybe I'm taking it harder than I should, but there have been too many instances in our marriage like this, where I was being affectionate and it just seemed to bother her.

As things have gotten worse and my low self esteem has made me more and more afraid about engaging her to ask why she is feeling this way, I've used this as narrative to feel worse and worse about myself. Over the course of the last year or so, I've been working on training myself to not push for romantic affection from her, but when she gives me what I think are signals that she may be ok with romantic affection and I make a move and get shot down, it's like... I really had to work myself up to a place to be comfortable enough to try something like caressing her hip with my hand... and then to be invalidated like that... it's not only a slap in the face to what signal I obviously misread, but it gives me weapons of self deprecation ("see... look at you... you had no business touching her and you deserved to get shot down because she doesn't want you") and you know what people like us with depression and low self esteem do with weapons of self deprecation...

...we self deprecate.