I didn't ever want to have to talk about this. It's so hurtful, but here I am. My boyfriend and I have been together eight years and it has been so amazing after ironing out the beginning, which should have just smacked me and clear then but nope. In the last three years, we haven't had sex. Nor kissing with passion. I get the same smooch his mother gets! No tight snuggles, no lying watching a movie together. It's him on his phone and I watch TV alone. I have tried and tried to start something but it's play-stupid and rollover game. After three years a person has been over-patient. It started as me trying to walk by him naked or spray my perfume on before bed, or sexy panties. I'm a small woman. Nothing has changed with me, and I get nothing from him, not even a rollover for a kiss. He faces away from me and turns his head to the side for my magical goodnight kiss. In the last seven months, I have started to say "I'm here why don't you want me"? But I get excuses or it gets turned around on me so I am made to feel bad. Now it's to the point of me crying and crying, "Why don't you want me?" "What can I do to change?". I was made to feel his sex drive was low and he is so sorry, blah blah blah.. Screw that! His sex drive isn't too low for porn! He hasn't been touching me but he sure has been doing it to porn... We have watched porn together. I'm up for it, for sure, to help get a little dirtier but when he doesn't touch me unless he's been watching porn... no thank you! And you know what kills me? After I sat many times over like an ass thinking he would stop, he won't. I told him it makes me feel ugly and unwanted and just discarded that he doesn't get aroused by me but has to use other women. I thought "My man isn't like that, he will stop, he knows it hurts me, and he wont hurt me". Boy, was I wrong. He not only keeps watching it alone but hides the page or clicks the home button when I walk in the room. I'm not a complete idiot. So again last night, I cried and begged him to please stop watching it alone. Touch me if you're horny, I'm right here, why aren't I good enough? And I get deny, deny, deny and now I'm crazy, I didn't see porn, he isn't watching that. I have problems, I'd better go see a counsellor. I'm an embarrassment, I'm being an Idiot... I'm told to f off, get out of his face, he's tired of my bullshit. Last night, I lay in bed with so much going on in my mind. I kept to myself, watched a movie and fell asleep. Woke up at 5:15 cause I rolled over and, hmmm, he was gone. I got up to pee and, lo and behold, there he was on the couch on his phone. As soon as he saw me, that phone was flipped over faster than you can imagine. So I asked, "Hey, wanna prove me wrong? Let me see your phone. Show me the last page you were on. Prove me a paranoid crazy woman, just show me something", and as I stood there crying, pleading to him to prove me I'm wrong he tells me he's tired and will show me later... And his phone is hidden. Weird how it isn't on the end table like it is every night for the last eight years! My last comment to him was, "If you can't show me your phone and prove me wrong, then I now know I'm 110% right." He isn't going to stop. He doesn't care how it makes me feel and what am I doing still writing this? No sex for three years, over-excessive pain and anger, that's how my life has been. But I do see I'm not alone. To any woman or man that has a partner that makes them feel this way – please don't keep hurting yourself by letting someone stomp on your trust and heart. You're amazing and don't let anyone tell or show you different. Sorry it's probably all over the map, I'm still shaking from this morning's hidden phone event! Someone, anyone, talk to me please.

My wife and I have been together for 15 years. We are very compatible and get on well but for some years we have been drifting and not appreciating one another. We have two wonderful children whom we both adore and who we love raising together. A few years ago my wife decided to focus more on herself. Where previously I would have considered that we were soul mates it was painful to see her separate from me and I couldn’t rationalize how the desire to set up a business meant no longer sharing her thoughts and feelings with me. I realized a couple of years ago that I was no longer her priority and then about a year ago I asked if she was still in love with me. She said no, nor did she know if she wanted to stay with me. I wondered about an affair but she always said that she’s too busy and that this wasn’t her. She is obsessed with time on her own, in part because of her perception that I am clingy and also mainly because she just needs a break from the kids and her day to day life. She went away for a weekend in June with some girlfriends. She mentioned that she’d met a guy there that she used to go to school with. Because I trusted her I thought nothing of it. Sex has been patchy between us since having kids and we started sleeping together more regularly after this trip away. I just put it down to the fact that she’d had a good time and I felt happy that I had been able to support her in doing this. We spent some time with her family in France this summer. I needed to return home to work and my wife was very keen to stay in France for two further weeks. This confused me as she hates the countryside and she gets stressed with being alone with the kids. Clearly she wanted some time apart from me. Just before I left she mentioned that this guy was to visit her with some girls. Again, I thought nothing of it. While I was alone back home I think we spoke about three times and the communication from her was friendly but very matter of fact. Things were awful when she came back and she seemed very cold and distant. I felt suspicious of this guy and asked our son where they’d both slept. He said one thing and my wife had said another. She’d left her inbox open on the PC and I saw quite a passionate email between her and him and a photo of them together during the original weekend away and I knew that there had been an affair. When I confronted her, her reaction was to say I was crazy and that we have problems. I told her what I’d read and then she admitted emotional infidelity but she denied sex because she had her period at the time. I asked her why she did it and she said because he desired her and made her feel like she did when she was young. It turned out that while we were apart she spent hours and hours on her own reading letters from when she was a teenager and listening to music from that time too. I guess she’s having some kind of mid-life crisis, something that she recognized and promptly signed up for therapy with a relationship counsellor I’d located a few years ago to try to do something for our stagnation. This discovery has prompted the most amazing rekindling of our relationship. We have started to have an extremely active sex life and are close physically in a way that we hadn’t been in years. We have started to diet together and to exercise more. I recently ran my first half marathon and I have lost 15kg. We are attending a tantra course together and have two weekends alone planned plus concerts and holidays. We spend our evenings talking and planning and sharing and feeling very connected. For the last few years she has been telling me that there is no such thing as unconditional love. What this experience has shown me is that this isn’t true: that I am still in love with her and that I love her unconditionally. I have told her that I forgive her and I believe this. I have also apologized sincerely for all the million and one things that I did over the years to make her distance herself from me. She feels now that I really listen to her. Our children are so important to us, but I feel that our relationship is more central to our family now. The children see that we are in the bedroom more than before and don’t sleep with our pajamas on but they are happy to play with each other and we still do a lot with them. The one remaining cause for difference is that I don’t really know what happened between them so much as “nothing really happened”. My view is that if this is the case then just tell me what happened and let’s move on. Of course I have doubts that they slept together or at the very least shared our bed but I’d rather know that than feel that she continues to hide things from me. And I’d rather know this now than to discover this years later. Her view is that she is an individual and entitled to her privacy. I agree but not with regard to infidelity. I don’t want to bring it up any more and she has said that she won’t tell me although annoyingly that she was going to tell me. He lives in another country and I’ll never meet him. It hurts that she had him come to stay with our family in France especially that this was literally hours after I left to go home. But that’s it. She did what she did and it’s over. Things are great between us now - really great. I actually feel that she could fall in love with me again. Maybe she already has. So should I just stop wondering what happened during this brief affair or am I entitled to know?

I am at such a loss as to what to do and feel that I cant talk about this with anyone I know. It just feels embarrassing or too honest. My boyfriend and i started dating a year and a half ago. We immediately connected as friends and a month later, after a night of drunken fun, we had sex. I was just getting out of a toxic relationship and wasn't ready for a relationship or public dating but we continued sleeping together for months. It felt passionate and fun and I actually really enjoyed who he was as a person. We talked to each other every day and I looked forward to it. I started being able to see a future with him and fell in love. Eventually, though I was terrified of being vulnerable to hurt again after my past relationships had ended so badly, after 4 and a half months of this, I took the leap and committed to an exclusive relationship with him. We used to have sex all of the time, sometimes multiple times a day. As I committed to him and only him, i thought we would be so happy and everything would magically fall into a place. I guess still had some hope for a happily ever after. When we became exclusive, the sex came to a screeching halt. We talked every day. He cuddled me and spooned me at night and softly kissed me goodnight and goodbye in the mornings, reminding me that he loves me. We spent every night together and carried on with routines, but still no sex. Feeling shy but like I had to do something about our sexual drought, I initiated things when we would be in bed and he would hold my hand and tell me he was tired. Night after night, I shyly pushed myself to touch him and kiss him and hope that things could progress but he always cut me off. Months went by. The happily ever after train I'd accidentally secretly hoped for had been derailed. "Was it me?" I wondered. "Did I need to work out more? Maybe he wasn't physically attracted to me?" I decided to focus on my own confidence and hoped the rest would follow. It didn't. Many awkward conversations about our lack of a physical relationship transpired though. He assured me time and again that it wasn't because of me. He just wasn't in the mood. When he knew more he would let me know. One day, he handed me his phone and I saw porn that was bookmarked on his phone. My heart dropped and in my mind, I immediately sunk to the ground on my knees in defeat. He still had a sexual drive. It had to do with me. I've developed such a resentment for the fact that I've been in two unhealthy relationships with men who constantly used my body and I found someone who i truly love, but he doesn't want to be physically intimate with me. I've had a rough sexual background that took years for me to move past, cope, and see sex as being a beautiful thing again. My boyfriend knows that I've been a little damaged in the past but how could I ever tell him that I had to move past being raped by three different men to the point of being drugged, beaten, threatened, and/or passed around over 100 times? For years I saw sex as a punishment and it feels incredibly unfair that I've worked through it and I want so badly to experience positive intimate sex in a caring loving relationship and I can't. How is it that I could deal with these things, but he didn't want to have sex with me because he just "doesn't feel like it?" If I told him how broken I have been, he would REALLY never want to have sex with me again. When we've had discussions about it, he's implied that I'm superficial for needing that in my life and made me feel shamed for bringing it up at all. I worried that having an open discussion with him about it could make things feel even weirder but at that point, it had been months and months since we'd last had sex so i felt I didn't have tons to lose. He tells me to give it time. I gave it more time but found myself looking to fill my sexual drive in other ways. Before i knew it, I was web-camming with a stranger just so I could feel seen. It only happened one time and didn't feel worth it to me. Just sad that I had gotten to that point. More months went by. I found myself hitting a joint in a car after work with a friend and he kissed me. After months and months of not feeling touched, it felt nice to feel so wanted again. He kissed me and grabbed me and I insisted on keeping clothes on and then as we were kissing, he came. So now I had not had sex with my boyfriend in at least nine months and I cheated on him with someone that came in about five seconds in his pants. I drove away, horrified at my actions, crying. I told him that I had cheated and how far it had gone (minus him going in his jeans) and that our lack of affection was escalating to me looking for other things and that was a problem for me. I told him that if we didn't reconnect sexually, we were doomed. He didn't say much. However, a few days after, he grabbed my hand in bed and put it on his hard-on. I felt optimistic that maybe we could have a sexual relationship again. Then he came in my hand in about five seconds. The same thing happened later. It didn't used to be like that. I know he's capable of having sex. A few months after that, he woke me up with it while we were spooning and then got behind me. I was so happy to be having sex again and it felt so great. Then it happened again the next week in the same positions. Then the next week, woken up and in the same positions. I took initiative and got on top for a while. His alarm went off during, I jumped off to turn it off, and he got soft. He said he'd gotten off already. I'm 90% certain he was lying. So now, he's finally giving me just enough sex to get my by to where i wont break up with him but it feels like he doesn't want to look at me and pretend I'm someone else? The sexual aspect is the primary fault in our relationship and it feels like if I got better, so would we. Any plans I could be building for the future, I'm hesitant with because as our physical intimacy is this rocky, it feels like our relationship is unstable in my mind too. I've thought of many possibilities as to why we are here. Was he gay? I've seen his porn history so no. Was there someone else? I really don't get that feeling either. I wonder if it's hard for him to see someone he loves in a sexual way? Is that common? I've heard of the madonna vs. whore thing. As soon he confessed his love for me and "won me' he stopped seeing me a sexual way. I miss being touched and feeling wanted in every way. I want to be kissed, touched, and feel passion again. All I'm looking for is to feel like i'm enough with someone. I love him and we've somewhat build a life together in the last year and a half. He talks about the future all of the time and how we should buy a house, etc. Should I throw in the towel and give up on our relationship? Am I ready to give up a good relationship because of sex? I have no idea what the reason could be that he doesn't want to have sex with me but it makes me feel incredibly undesirable in every way and as much as I hate to admit it, has really hurt my confidence and made me needy, annoying, and desperate. Am I beating a dead horse? Am I hurting myself more? Should I say or do something or should I run?

I have been married for 12 years. My husband and I are happy. We do not have a perfect marriage but who does? From the start of our marriage we never had much of a sex life, even as newlyweds. We would average maybe four times a month on a good month. He is not very affectionate toward me either. I had never felt attractive in my marriage. I am always the one who initiated sex and most of the time I got turned down. He does not kiss me and never performed oral sex for me at all, but expects it from me every time and sometimes just that for him and nothing at all for me. Later I found out he was watching porn A LOT. This broke my heart, because he never wanted me. About nine years and two sweet daughters later I found out that he was cheating – it was a one night thing. He swore that it meant nothing. For me to stay I demanded he tell me everything. I also found the other woman and talked to her about it. The stories matched up – apparently the plan was to cheat with her but he could not get an erection despite her best efforts. I asked him if he had kissed her (he never kisses me) and he had – not only that but, because he couldn't perform, he gave her oral sex! He never does this for me! I was very upset and left him. He was devastated and apologised and said he would be a better husband and do all those things for me, blah blah blah. So for my children and the fact that I love him we worked it out. He has done much better – he still will not kiss me but he will occasionally do oral. And he is more affectionate and I can honestly see that he is trying more than he ever has. Our sex life was great – five or six times a week and much more passion than ever before. But for the past two weeks he has not touched me, despite my attempts. When I asked him about it he said he was just in a down spiral (I forgot to mention he has cycling bi-polar disorder) and that his sex drive decreases when he has a down phase. I tried to understand and be supportive, but I checked his phone last night and his history was absolutely full of porn! So his sex drive is decreased but he can watch porn and not want to have sex with me? I do not understand this and it makes me feel disgusting! I even offered for us to watch together but he did not want to do that. My body has changed a lot since having our children, and he knows how insecure I am about it. He says my body has nothing to do with it it's just his bi-polor decreasing his libido. But i don't know about that seems like if libido was decreased it would be decreased for everything not just your wife, and be perfectly fine for porn. Can anyone help me understand this?

My girlfriend doesn't want sex. In the 4 years we have been together we have made love about 9 times. She has two boys aged 10 & 12 and she works part time and we don't live together. I help her out with stuff like buying her a bike so that she can join her boys, a new TV, a new cooker, plus I took a loan out to buy her a car. She says that she only has sex with me like it's payback for what I do for her. Am I being used?

Hi there. Apologies for the length of this post. My boyfriend and I (early 30s) have been together 2 years and live together. We have discussed a serious future together including marriage and kids. Initially we had a very good sex life (at least twice a week) but I’d say over the past year or so, things have been dwindling. I think I have a higher sex drive than him, and often if I try to initiate sex - I often get turned down and he will say he is too tired. He often has long shifts and early starts but sometimes this is even the case on his days off. I’d say sometimes we have sex once every 2-weeks. I’m finding this difficult as I would like to have more sexual intimacy. I’ve tried talking about this with him many times but he often gets very defensive and doesn’t want to talk about it. I feel he is embarrassed by it almost that I seem to want sex more than him. The relationship is otherwise great, he is affectionate and intimate in other ways but I feel when it comes to sex - he just doesn’t seem interested in me sexually. I don’t know what to do. It makes me feel really insecure and anxious when we go so long without having sex as it is important for me. And sometimes I feel depressed when he isn’t interested and I don’t feel desired. So I realise this is a pretty bad thing to do..but I did it out of desperation more than anything else. I realise this is an invasion of his privacy and I feel terrible but I checked his phone history and found he has been using porn very regularly - and unexpected categories like GILFS/ grannies/ MILF/ older women/ really large women. He is 30. Im the same age and large breasted but not fat. He has also watched gay porn including searches for things like “twinks” (had to look up what this meant) and also males orgasming. It makes me so distressed knowing he watches this yet is not sexual with me. I realise straight men sometimes watch gay porn but I was besides myself. I think he obviously watches this when I am out but it hurts me that he seems to be able to browse lots of porn but not be sexual with me. I understand that most men watch porn even in relationships, but surely if we are having less sex than I would like this is a problem? He clearly seems happy with sex with me once every couple of weeks because he is satisfying himself several times in between. I feel very hurt. I can’t bring this up as I obviously invaded his privacy and have probably made things worse! I thought about casually asking him directly if he watches porn but think he will likely hide it. Would be grateful for any advice. Thank you!

My husband stares at other women no matter where we are. We have a terrible sex life. We have gone as long as six years without sex. We have been married for 17 years. I feel like I have to get to the root of our problem. It is driving me crazy.

I have been with my husband for 18 years. Our sex life wasn't great but it was enough at the time. After being rejected by him when I tried to initiate sex I stopped trying. When we decided to have our daughter we had sex only a handful of times. After she was born it stopped, that was 10 years ago. Last year I met a guy at work, I felt great and it boosted my confidence as my marriage was a sham. I did have sex with the guy as I wanted to know if I still had a desire for sex, which I did. After this happened I went to councilling as I was so confused, she gave me the strength to confront my husband and ask him why he didn't want to have sex with me. When I talked to my husband about it he said it was my moods that turned him off wanting to have sex with me. I explained my moods were the result of him not showing me any affection which has led to a vicious circle. We both agreed to try which we did for a few months. We did have sex however he struggled to maintain an erection and could not ejaculate. This upset me as I felt I wasn't enough for him I told him this and he said I was. After this I stopped initiating sex as I wanted to see if my husband would try, that was 6 months ago and he hasn't tried. I am now at the stage I don't know what to do as if I talk to him again he will agree to try but will then do nothing. Having sex with the guy at work made me realise that I need to have a sex life but I'm not sure my husband does!

As soon as my bf and I go to bed he falls asleep and he gets up and dressed very early on the mornings we don’t even cuddle. He looks at porn he, he stares at other women, he flirts with other women and he masturbates but never instigates any physical passion with me. Quite often he says we’ll have sex on Saturday (for example) this feels so clinical and contrived, no spontaneity and so scheduled. He says he has had exciting sexual experiences in the past but when I try to get a bit freaky he says he feels uncomfortable because he was falsely accused of rape many years before. I know I have a high sex drive and there isn’t much I haven’t done in the past so I don’t want to push him into anything he isn’t comfortable with but I am feeling undesirable and unwanted. Although he isn’t aware I know other men find me attractive and I even have a friend who wants to be in a relationship with me, with sexual advances but I love him. I really don’t know what to do.