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.