Dear Abby

I have blogged a lot about my relationship with my wife of almost 25 year, my wife whom I met the summer after my freshman year at college. We are now at a crossroads in the marriage--though she would claim that we are not, that everything is fine if I would only see that. For me the crisis feels less about what I should do about the relationship than what I should think or feel about it. But maybe not. Maybe I do need to do something about it. One way or another, it scares me to think of going on the way we're going without something changing, inside or out. I'm posting this as an open Dear Abby letter to all of you. Read the tale and then tell me: what path, kind readers, should I take?

In the picture you see us on a perfect day in the summer of 1976. I'll call that a starting point, though she had already been my girlfriend for three years. It was a day full of adventure, discovery and romance, and it was only one of many. Within six years of that perfect day we were married, with our first child, our first underpaying jobs, living in an apartment we could barely afford--in short, within six years of this picture being taken, our childhoods were over. With responsibilities, bills, early hours at work, late night breastfeedings and our collective and individual anxieties about our future, things began to change. Gradually, we began to have less sex. But the fact remained that when we did have sex it was as close and romantic as it was the day the picture in this post was taken.

Now, several chapters later, we still have sex. But the fact is, the sex isn't good. It's bad. I never thought there could be such a thing as bad sex, but there is. The heart of what's bad about it for me is that my wife will not take pleasure from me. It's all about getting me off, which may sound good to somebody whose spouse doesn't even do that. But my wife has now openly and calmly declared that she loves me, loves our life together, loves sleeping pressed up against me, but isn't interested in having orgasms anymore. She used to come easily and freely but, interestingly, only from intercourse--at our hottest and most sexual, as I've blogged before, I wasn't allowed to go down on her or any other kind of direct intimate contact--just screwing. And when there was lots and lots of that I certainly wasn't complaining. But I'm complaining now.

Maybe what I'm complaining about most of all is something very small and very simple: she won't kiss me in bed anymore. Ever. Not all the toothbrushing and flossing and shaving in the world makes any difference. We used to make out endlessly in bed. We haven't kissed in bed in years.

I remember the first time, a couple of years ago, when I realized that I wasn't reaching her sexually any more. Of course I went straight to blaming myself. But now it's becoming clearer that this is her choice. Or maybe just where she is in pre-menopause. But either way: I've tried to talk about it, I've tried to get her into therapy, but she's not budging, and I'm not taking the rap anymore. She went for therapy once, very briefly---about five years ago I found msyelf writhing happily around in a bed in a Washington D.C. hotel room with an old girlfriend and then walking around for a week in a blissful erotic haze from the experience and then getting back to L.A. and dragging my wife to counseling--without, by the way, telling her about the old girlfriend and the hotel room--because I wanted that erotic haze to be about her again, about my wife. She bolted from the therapy after a few weeks--when we were actually getting somewhere, I thought-- and now categorically refuses to consider going back, and gets so pissed off when I bring it up that I now know that's over: I'm not bringing it up again.

Both my wife and my therapist say the problem is my mindset---that if I love her I can love her as she is and find joy and pleasure in the setup as it is. And there are days when I think they are right, and days when I can talk myself into that, and days when we have sex that I can enjoy in spite of the one-sidedness of it.

But I finally admitted to myself this week that I don't like having sex with her anymore. Too much inequality, too much trying to make something happen which isn't going to happen, no savoring of the moment, no discovery. I'm actually losing my attraction to her. I'm not getting as turned on. It just isn't feeling good, either physically or emotionally. There was a great time in the shower a few weeks ago, which I wrote about here, but the fact is I was mostly happy that I was actually able to enjoy it so much--because it had been a while since I had.

Every time I actually think about leaving her over this, about telling her that I'm not ready to settle into what we've settled into for the rest of my life, the thought feels ludicrious: are things really bad enough to warrant shredding up my life like that? But every time I think about never having that feeling of her being turned on under my touch, never feeling her come, never kissing her in the dark of our own bed in our own home--that feels equally untenable.

So what do I do?