Just a note about myself and my wife; we do have a pretty good marriage besides this, and I do love her deeply as a friend and confidant. I'm not sure where that puts us for the future, but I think my first step is counseling for me, and then we'll see where the road lies from there. Wish us luck!

I [32M] and my wife [33F] were both in fundamentalist Christian purity culture (Josh Harris, purity vows, etc). We were model kids/young adults. We both dated a couple other people, but never went beyond kissing (though we both carried guilt for those premarital kisses). We started dating and married at 25 after being friends for over a decade. We did it right, we saved ourselves for marriage, and we lost our virginity to each other on our wedding night. Our christian friends and family tout us as an ideal role model and tell us how happy they are that we did it "right."

Now, 7 years on, I came to the realization that we have always had completely mismatched sex drives. It's beyond even the normal "you're not always going to be in sync" problems. We have struggled to even be intimate once per month for pretty much our entire marriage. Once we get into it, we enjoy it, but she is just rarely interested. I'm always the initiator, and I hate the feeling of getting shot down, so I frequently hold my feelings of desire inside. Even so, she's always making comments about how "out of control" my sex drive is. It's clear that I'm the one who wants sex.

And on top of that, I'm getting to the point in my faith deconstruction where I have realized I don't believe in anything like purity culture anymore. That's really hard, because now I feel like I missed a really critical part of my coming of age years. It feels like I worked so hard to stay "pure" for a woman that doesn't even want me like I want her. What was even the point of it?

I'm unhappy and dissatisfied. And I feel like I was manipulated by Christianity into this place. I feel trapped.

I'm not sure what I'm looking for, just wanted to get it off my chest, and maybe someone else has a similar experience. Anyway, thanks.

EDIT: Wow, I'm blown away by all of the support. Thank you to everyone who left thoughtful, meaningful replies. Almost all of them have really good feedback, much more so than I had expected. I'm actually very encouraged by how many of you shared how your lives got better after experiencing something similar, though several different pathways to better were shown. Thank you everyone.