– Secret loneliness
Secret loneliness: You have a “great life,” but you’re miserably lonely all the time and scared. Oh, friend.
Is it “okay to live like this?” Sure, if you both want to. The more relevant question here is, are you okay with living like this? And from your letter, that’s a hard nope.
Stating the obvious, no one owes anyone physical intimacy, sex or otherwise, even within marriage. But what relationship partners do owe each other is mutual respect. Your husband is withholding physical and emotional intimacy without explaining why or making an effort to help you not feel alone; where’s the respect in that?
It’s entirely possible your husband has been getting his sexual needs met outside your marriage. But even if the root cause of the no-sex is beyond his control – health condition, past trauma, realisation of being asexual – his active decision to exclude you from understanding it for over a decade is not.
You’re holding down his home life, giving up something that matters to you immensely and not even getting the basic courtesy of a why. Meanwhile, he’s also cutting off any chance for the two of you to together explore solutions that might alleviate your situation, such as opening the marriage so you can find physical fulfilment with a third party.
You’re living with someone comfortable enough dictating the terms and conditions of your marriage to his advantage that you’ve been downgraded from equal partner to … friend-with-benefit-of-sharing-kitchen-cleanup? Physical intimacy aside, how much emotional intimacy can there actually be with a dynamic like that?
You are not stuck; you have agency here. With your eyes wide open about who you’ve married, you could decide that this daily heartbreak, without even a handhold to help you through it, is worth the value you find in the rest of your life together. Or you can decide that you deserve more than a quietly wretched status quo.
When you consider divorce, you’re jumping to visions of everything hitting the fan. I’ve often found value in questioning assumptions of things going wrong with “But what if they don’t?” What if you divorce, you find intimacy and things … work out fine? There’s an equal chance here of things going right as of going wrong, right? For instance, your child might well be happier and healthier in an environment where one parent is no longer feeling isolated and down every day, no? Even if you don’t end up finding an intimate partner post-divorce, would being on your own be worse than the agony of waiting for connection from a spouse who will never grant it?
When you’re tallying the balance sheet of whether to go, I’d urge you not to shortchange all the things you stand to gain, starting with relief from a crushing emotional burden. You are worthy of happiness and fulfilment, in whatever that looks like for you. You made an important first step when you recognised that your husband’s lack of physical affection isn’t due to you needing to be “more” than you already are. Be brave as you figure it out the rest of the way. Good luck.
