Ach, this drama, it's a-killin' me.

Sex - gah, I hate talking about this. But I cannot bear to face my friends with this, and cannot bear to hold it all inside.

Esther, if this is you reading this somewhere down the line, do me a favor. If you're not, say, 25 yet, or about to get married, please don't read this until then. Show me that respect and courtesy, ok, sweetheart?

My husband has given up on sex with me, entirely. What I can give is "way too little, much to late." He says he's resigned himself to a lifetime of beating off to representations of other people having exciting sex lives.

He hasn't made contact of any kind in more than a week. He's physically present, but intellectually and emotionally distant. I can't make any contact with him. I initiated sex on Monday, but he was disinterested and completely half-hearted. Last night he was just *glued* to crappy MTV2 videos and Outback Steakhouse commercials. I gave him a backrub, and let the girls hang out, but he had no interest whatsoever.

He was watching the Ultimate Fighter reality contest show in bed. I was about to just give up and try to fall asleep, but decided to just ask him if he wanted to fuck me. He said no. Then followed one of the worst conversations I've ever been part of.

He's been unsatisfied for so long that he is unwilling to grant me my level of satisfaction. I'm happy with cuddling, and sex maybe 2-3 times a week. I get what I want, but he doesn't. If he's not going to get what he wants, then why should I get what I want?

I only ever want the same sex. Plain, vanilla, suck-fuck-sleep/get up and do stuff. Never sex twice in an evening, only lately twice during a weekend. Yes, I guess he's right. (Isn't that supposed to be enough?) He's done the same thing fifteen hundred or thousand times and it's boring now.

He's not going out looking for other pussy. (At least not now.) But he's not having sex either. He's just done with the argument. He's just done. He's just done with me. But he still loves me, and loves our little girl, and isn't looking to walk away from the marriage.

So, what? What does he *mean*? What does he think happens now? We just go on from day to day, knowing that there's no physical intimacy coming that night, or any night, or really any time in the near or distant future. Like the marriages of 50's grandparents - living in the same household but cold and distant from each other, each resigned to a long cold bitterly disappointed fate.

Doesn't this mean that the relationship is officially dead? There are things at the fringes that we can make work, to carry on our existence "together" indefinitely. Things we can relate on, mostly concerning our daughter, most of which will wither away as she grows older and more independent. (And also, I think, far greater of a burden than we have any right to lay on her. It is not her responsibility to make her parents' marriage work.) But sex, physical intimacy, is at the heart of the relationship, isn't it? If the sex is gone, just plain given up on, then isn't the heart rotted out of the marriage? Like leprosy from the inside out instead of from the extremities in.

If we are to have any hope of not being constantly shitty to each other in front of our daughter for her entire childhood, I think I have to end it. We need to sit down rationally and make long-term plans for how we manage a divorce while still co-parenting Esther. We are both entirely in love with her, and neither of us has any intention of bowing out of her life. So, of necessity, we need to be able to speak and interact and *be* in each others' presence, for the next sixteen-plus years.

Our sex drives are just not compatible. But in last night's conversation, painful as it was, there was no hate, and only a reasonable amount of anger. I don't hate him. He doesn't hate me. He says he still loves me. I'm pretty sure I still love him. (Although it's hard to really evaluate *how* I feel about him.) If anyone can manage this, I think perhaps it's us.

But I'm heartbroken. I have loved us, all being us together, since Esther arrived. I love feeling like a family with him and with her. I have loved the liveliness I've seen coming back into him since he found a new community to take part in over the last couple of years (softball). If the sex isn't going to work, then that just cannot exist either. The sex is part of the whole balance. If daddy ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

Heartsick. Oh, my poor baby Esther. You are just about to lose your "family." That thing you love more than anything else - Mama and Daddy doting over you together, basking in the glow of having created something wonderful. I'm sorry I failed you, love.

And to my husband, honeybear, I'm sorry I failed you to. Please know that I tried. I gave you all that I had, and I will always count it as one of my greatest lifelong failures, that I couldn't make up for the wrong I'd already done, and that I couldn't be the woman you truly need.

I wish I could cry. As usual, no tears when I really need them.

I'm gonna be OK.

Just a quick post today... I haven't put up any pics of Esther lately. And, ultimately, everything will be OK as long as I have her and she is happy. And she sure is happy!




She is my sunshine, the light of my life, the best and most wonderful thing I have ever done. There's nobody whose mama I'd rather be.

The elephant in the bedroom.

I can't believe I'm posting this here. But I am so preoccupied with this problem that I need to get it off my chest, even if here on this blog that nobody (much) reads, so I can actually have enough brain cells free to do my work. And I've got lots and lots of work that needs doing. So here I go, spilling absolutely my most personal problem for all the world to see.

My husband and I are sexually mismatched. He has always wanted more sex than me. This was to the point where, before we got married, he made me promise that I would not make him live a celibate life. Once we got married, there were arguments about what that meant. But ultimately, he was always pretty straightforward - sex needed to be happening two to three times a week. We weren't there yet, but I was trying, when Esther was born. And you can guess what THAT did to our sex life. I was just exhausted all the damned time. I wanted sleep about 100 times more than I wanted sex.

Finally, one day I came home and he gave me a letter he had written. In it, he expressed his extreme frustration with the way our sex life had been going (or not going), and said that if I didn't start meeting his needs he was going to find someone to cheat on me with. So I started putting out more. We got Esther out of our bed and sleeping through the night, and that was a HUGE help. I've been making a real effort to be more sexual. I make a point of thinking about sex. Any time I feel the slightest indication of sexual desire from my body - be it the merest flicker - I initiate sex with him. And he admits that things are better now. But now that we're actually having sex 2-3 times a week on a regular basis, he's raised the bar.

He doesn't just want sex - traditional vaginal penetration spiced up with mutual oral. I'm fine with that. That's the kind of sex I like to have. No. He wants dirty, filthy, slutty sex. He said during the act once that he didn't know what it would take to turn me into the dirty, slutty whore he needs me to be, but that he was going to make it happen no matter what. Another time he told me that if I wanted to be the only person he had sex with for the rest of his life, I was going to have to have that kind of dirty, nasty sex. He wants anal - wants me to use a strap-on on him, wants to do it to me. He wants (us) to swing, and go have sex with other people. And most important of all, he wants me to LOVE it. Love it, crave it, actively seek all of this out, and do it all with a smile on my face and then beg and plead for more.

Every time I meet his previous set of requirements, he moves the bar forward. It's like he's thinking, "Finally! I broke down that set of her barriers/borders/boundary of self respect. Now forward to the next set - charge!!!" I feel that this is just hugely, horribly, tremendously unfair to me.

I blame the easy, cheap availability of extreme, hardcore pornography. I logged onto his profile and checked his history (yeah, I only just figured out how to do that). He's constantly on sites like AdultFriendFinder and VoyeurWeb. He has a profile on AdultFriendFinder seeking sex partners! In it, he says he he's married but getting "very little" sex. Very little! 2-3 times a week is very little?! You fucking asshole. I'm giving more than I've ever given before and in your book, that's "very little" sex? I'm fairly confident he's never actually gotten a hookup off that site, given that there are about 50,000 local men (many of whom are much, much better looking than him) to about maybe 200 local women on the site. Plus, he's got no money to woo a woman. Plus, I don't know how much this "seeking sex" profile is just idle fantasizing, and whether he'd actually have the cojones to follow through if he got a response from a willing woman.

But anyway, looking through his history, I clicked on some of the stuff he looks at. Just the most hardcore stuff you can imagine. He takes some of these pictures and uses them for his desktop wallpaper. Right now, it's four naked hot chicks, lying side by side on a bed, holding vibrators in each others' vaginas. Before that, it was a couple about to have sex on a beach. Before that, it was two naked women kneeling side by side with their private parts towards the camera. Before that, it was a naked woman with clearly fake boobs, on her back, legs held open, who has obviously just been used both vaginally and anally. THIS is what he really wants. THIS is what he wants me to be. Lawyer? Who cares. Financially responsible? Not significant. Mother of his child? Whatever - not nearly slutty enough!

I make no judgments about women who actually enjoy that kind of sexuality. If that reflects their true sex drive rather than a chronic lack of self-respect, then good for them and may they experience a lifetime of sexual fulfillment. But I do not, repeat, do NOT have an inner slutty whore who is dying to be butt-fucked, penetrated with dildos, take two or three men all at the same time, have sex in public places, have sex with strangers, etc. etc. etc. That's just not me.

So far I've not been faking sex with him. I make an effort to cultivate the sexual desire that allows me to enjoy the 2-3 times a week we have sex so I am not faking it with him. But the point we are at now is the maximum I am capable of honestly maintaining. Anything more I do will be an act. And an act I will hate performing, solely for his pleasure, to keep the father of my child and an intact family. And I am just NOT willing to tolerate my husband finding a slutty chick to give him the sexual satisfaction he can't get from me. And besides, I am simply not a good enough actress to fake loving it, wanting it, craving it, needing it, doing it all with a smile on my face, and then asking for more.

I really thought I was willing to try to put on that act, to keep my child's father in our home. But something happened on Sunday. He finally broke through another one of my barriers. I got so tired of saying no that I just couldn't do it one more time. I let him do anal sex to me. He was kind and gentle. He made sure it didn't really hurt me. And it didn't hurt afterwards. But I didn't want it, I told him before he did it that I didn't want to, and he still did it anyway. And then the next time we had sex he started trying to play with my butt. I got pissed and asked if now that had to be an every time thing? And he said that he intended me to get broken in to it, because he intended to do my ass on a regular basis from now on and didn't intend to do it "excruciatingly slowly."

I think so much less of myself now for having allowed him to do that to me. I have a lower opinion of myself now. I am ashamed of myself. And although he didn't go for my butt again the last couple of times we had sex (it's Friday! We had sex four times this week so far including the Sunday incident!), it's clearly just a matter of time. As far as he's concerned, he's got a lifetime of ass-fucking his wife to look forward too. How much of that can I take before I don't love myself at all anymore? Before I see myself as a dirty, slutty whore whose most valuable aspect is her availability to provide sexual release in a number of ways?

I don't see any way out of this except for divorce. Esther is old enough now that we'd been talking about day care for the socialization aspect anyway. He's starting a new part-time job next week at his old employer, now under far superior new ownership and management, and they would have him full-time in a heartbeat. He'll be back in his industry, which he loves but I don't share his passion for. And his best friend would be available to be his roommate - they could swing an apartment between the two of them.

Now I'll bet that would be a real rude awakening for him. A divorced, 36-year-old, paunchy guy with a skin fungus condition that gives him red blotches in all sorts of unflattering places, making $12 an hour - get him now, ladies! I know y'all can't wait to proffer up your hungry asses and mouths to his uncircumsized man-meat! Four or five times a week! With smiles on your faces! And then beg for more! I'll bet the immediate result would be that he would actually not get ANY SEX AT ALL for a good long time. When we were broken up for a year, before we got engaged, he told me he only got laid once and that was completely unsatisfactory. And he was skinny and hot then, and if he didn't have a whole lot of money, neither did anyone else in our age group. If he couldn't get a basic lay at that point, I'm pretty sure he's not going to get nasty slutty dirty skanky sex with anyone, where he's at right now.

I just can't pretend anymore. I think I'm going to wait a couple of weeks so he can settle into his job, and then tell him I want him and his buddy (who has been living rent-free in our downstairs "studio" apartment) to move out and get an apartment together while I get the divorce rolling. Hopefully he can be civil about it for Esther's sake, so that we can co-parent effectively, if separately. I can certainly be civil if he can. While I am really fucking angry at him, it's all in the area of this sex issue. If sex - this constant pounding by him against the barrier of my self-respect - is off the table, then I won't have anything else to be angry at him about.

I'll certainly miss the good things about him, the things I love. The way he and I can have conversations using big adult words with lots of syllables. The way he cuddles me at night. The wonderful massages he gives me any time I ask. The way he supports my career choices. The way he makes me laugh. The way he makes me feel safe and protected. But the big thing - the way he used to make me feel unconditionally loved - is gone. He doesn't love me unconditionally. The degree to which he loves me is directly proportional to the degree to which I perform like a good little slut.

I'm thisclose to done. I have to get out of this situation before I stop loving myself. My self-love is more important to me than his strings-attached "love." I won't dump the father of my child on the street, but I have to preserve my self-respect somehow.

And you know what? Once I'm free, I'm FREE. I'm 36 years old. I've had enough sex to last a (normal healthy American female) lifetime already. I'm going to devote myself to my child and my career. I'm done - effing DONE - with men. If I need some lovin', my trusty right hand can do the job, no mess no fuss, done in 5 minutes without breaking a sweat. I have (a few) friends. And I've been a loner most of my life. I can be alone, if need be, for long periods of time.

Divorce. Over sex. Let's see if he's willing to throw it all away, over sex. Because for him, it's just sex. For me, it's my whole self. And I'm willing to throw away five years of marriage and 11 years before that, to save my self.

[Excellent - I just got a call from my closest friend (whose 9th anniversary is tomorrow and whose husband is stationed for work in Indonesia) asking me to come out to dinner with her and her sister-in-law at a really good Chinese restaurant after I put Esther down tonight. What perfect timing - I really need some girlfriend time right now.]

OK, it felt really good to get that all off my chest. I'm willing to put this out there for the whole world to see, because nobody I know personally knows I have this blog. Funny how it's OK for total strangers to know my most intimate personal problem, but not my actual friends? (No, I won't be telling my friend tonight that I'm down on myself because I let my husband have anal sex!) Perhaps I'll take the post down later, or perhaps not. Anyway, hopefully putting this all down in writing will release enough of the stress and obsessive thinking so I can actually get some serious work done. Because I have a serious lot of work that needs to get done.