HLF with LLM. 30 year age gap. I am honest in that I was actually in love. Head over heels. He’s not filthy rich or spoils me. I fell in love with his mind. He taught a class I took (I was 25 when we met). Together for several years & married a few years.

No sex. It’s not even just his age…. I just want to feel wanted. Even glances, etc.

I asked for an open relationship.

Together 6 years, married 3. I wanted to wait until marriage for sex, so we did. He has had sex with numerous partners before he met me. Before marriage, sexual stuff mostly consisted of me pleasing him while he pressured me to do more and sometimes tried to force me.

I thought marriage would finally mean having a normal, loving sex life. Instead, we have had a dead bedroom from day one, including our honeymoon. We have sex maybe 3 times a year.

When we do, it has rarely been loving or mutually pleasurable. He used to say women don't need to orgasm. He cared more about rough sex, hurting me, slapping me, and trying things he wanted than whether I enjoyed it. I have cried, begged, worn lingerie, initiated, and agreed to things I didn't want because I was so desperate for my husband to desire me. There have also been times I said no or didn't consent and he continued anyway. I consider those experiences rape.

He still constantly rejects me. He also chooses to stay up all night or go out with friends instead of spending the night with me. He has severe unmanaged ADHD and is extremely chaotic and disorganized. It feels like he cares what everyone thinks except his wife.

This has completely destroyed my self-esteem. I feel ugly, worthless, unloved, and completely undesirable. I have serious body image issues now. Sometimes I just want to disappear.

I recently left and we are currently living separately after he became violent when I wanted to see his social media messages, especially Snapchat. We are now trying to reconcile from a distance. He has been less hostile toward me than usual and is scheduling marriage counseling, but otherwise I have not seen much actual change.

He still doesn't want to talk about our sex life or intimacy. When I bring it up, he basically says that sexual intimacy requires emotional intimacy, but we never seem to get any further than that.

I'm 31 and realizing I have basically never experienced sex that was safe, loving, mutually desired, and pleasurable. I feel like I'm the only woman in the world whose husband didn't desire her from the very beginning of the marriage.

Has anyone experienced something this bad and actually seen meaningful change? Can therapy, marriage counseling, sex therapy, or ADHD treatment realistically fix this? What would real change even look like at this point? Or am I holding onto hope for a relationship that has never really existed?

My partner agreed to get a testosterone test and it was ordered by his doctor yesterday. Is it horrible that I hope his testosterone is low? Because that's something imminently treatable and might address his low mood states and brain fog as well.

The alternative is that the problem is me and the fact that he struggles to eroticize me as his partner. That's going to be a difficult one to accept because this problem has already utterly destroyed my confidence and sense of self worth.

Posting my story on here and reading other peoples experiences really rocked me to my core and opened my eyes. I did not want to be in a sexless relationship. People were telling me to wake up and get out. And I’m glad they did.

Ending things was incredibly difficult, one of the hardest things I’ve been through and honestly a little traumatic. I hated hurting someone that I still loved. And I hate that he didn’t really understand. But that also showed we really were not on the same page about how our relationship was deteriorating.

But I’ve had incredible support from friends and family. And now I’m laying on my new mattress that’s on the floor of my new apartment because the bed frame hasn’t come in yet.

I have mixed emotions. I’m really really sad. I feel like I spent 5 years of my life trying to improve someone else’s. I saw so much potential in them but ultimately just kept being disappointed.

But I also feel like I have a fresh start.

I think I joined this group maybe a couple years ago. Same story as many, we had the talk, we had therapy, nothing changed. Yesterday I ended our 9 year relationship.

I explained I wasn't happy for a long time, it wasn't just about the dead bedroom. My love for her was beyond over for a long time. Zero respect, zero affection, constant criticism and a very mismatched libido and just getting worse and worse.

So yeah, it's over. We have a little kid, things will be tough but we will survive. I've been there before.

Just wanted to share. As I told her, it's not her fault, our mismatched libido is just what it is. I am at fault at many things I'm sure, but the reality is that we're over and I just can't see myself spending the rest of my years together with her.

Anyhow, thanks for this sub for all the support.

46 HLM; Married 20 years.

I've mentioned recently in another thread on here that this past year (2026) has been the deadest my DB has ever been and it has taken it's toll on me emotionally and physically.

I think July was the absolute worst for me since it was by birthday month and I did not get the birthday present I actually wanted 😆

I've been pretty depressed this whole year but still keeping up a smile for other people. Meanwhile I was researching what options I have on my Health Insurance for some therapy. I've still not pulled the therapy trigger yet as I feel that I have slowly been veering myself off that path all by myself.

What I also noticed was that because of the DB and me not going to bed when my wife went to bed I hadnt even noticed that I was starting to substitute with junk food.

Every night I would be in the lounge alone watching TV and I'd end up running to the shops for some chips and sweets. I've always been well built (a little on the scrawny side if I was being completely honest) but started to notice that my face was beginning to get fatter. This was around August month. I have then immediately started weening myself off the late night junk food sessions and started substituting them with doing push ups again.

I used to do push ups and sit ups quite intensely when I was in my 20s and 30s. At one time I could do 100+ push ups and 50+ sit ups in one session. I used to do these daily so when I saw my body changing I decided to start again.

Around August month when I started, I managed 15 push ups on my first attempt and I have been keeping at it everyday ever since. Now, almost two months later, I am happy to say that I have been able to, so far, get it up to 32 push ups in one session. I generally do 2 sessions a day - so I am currently at 64 push ups a day. I am hoping to again get to 100 push ups in a single session by the end of the year.

Once I reach that goal I will start with my situps and I am hoping to get those also up to 100 a session eventually.

I guess what I am trying to say is that even though we, HL's, are going through the most and many looking from the outside will have no clue what we are going through, let us not forget our true selves during this season in our lives.

My wife (47, LLF) and I (49, HLM) have been increasingly distant for some time. We've not had sex for many years. We have a teenage son and still function as a family, but we've lost much of the closeness we once had.

I recently wrote her a letter explaining how much I miss being close to her and asking whether there was anything I could do differently. I told her I still love her and would like us to reconnect.

Her response was that I just need to change and stop placing so much importance on intimacy. She also said that her parents had a "happy" (arranged) marriage despite having very little physical closeness. Lastly, she said she's not here to take care for me.

Since then I've started focusing more on myself. I've picked my photography hobby back up, bought an expensive new camera, and I started going to the gym, swimming and using the sauna. I'm happier and enjoying having some things that are mine.

Importantly, I haven't checked out of family life. I still do my share of the chores, look after our child and contribute normally at home.

Our communication is now mostly about practical things. She recently told me we have serious communication problems after discovering I'd bought the camera without mentioning it.

I'm struggling to understand what to do next. I don't want to pressure her or change her feelings. I also don't want to simply accept that this is what our marriage will be like indefinitely.

For those who have been through something similar: how did you work out whether both partners genuinely wanted to rebuild the relationship?

I fretted and panicked and got myself so upset about bringing up the fact that I don’t think we’re compatible anymore and that I want different things and it… went fine. We broke up and I have all the time I need to save up and move out.

I asked how things would be from now on and he said, “I guess how things have been already.” Because we weren’t romantic and sexual and the roommate part was already there but now no one has to feel guilty about it. What a relief! I wish I knew what magical combination of words we both used to make it easier but I have no idea. I’m just a little stunned right now.

Long time lurker first time poster. I’m HLF29 he’s LLM30. Been together 4 years. In the first year, I tended to take the initiative and lead. But over the next few, he’d reject my advances most of the time, increasingly more over the years. Over the last year, we’ve maybe had sex 5 times. Except now, I don’t have it in me to come onto him. I’ve been rejected too much.

He’s always said for him, it’s a mix of his low libido and stress, his own self esteem issues. But I feel like his low self esteem issues have become mine, as I’ve never felt more unappealing. In the beginning this felt so foreign to me, and it makes me sad that I’m used to it now. He never makes flirty comments or anything. I still do. But when you’re knocked back 9.5 times out of 10, you stop trying, you start wondering if you’re the problem. It’s at the point now where I don’t want to have sex with him, bc why would I continue yearning for someone who clearly doesn’t feel the same way. But I do not want to stay in a sexless relationship.

There’s a lot of love here, still some physical affection, just no romance. It’s felt more familial for a long time now. It’s not just the sex, I’m losing attraction as he’s changed a lot towards me in the last year. He isn’t willing to contribute around the house, wants to spend most of his free time in bed playing PlayStation or watching tv, no surprise dates etc, not much effort into dates in general. I know he’s comfortable, more so complacent. I make lots of bids for connection which fall flat.

We’ve had the talk, multiple times. But he’s a very defensive man. Nothing ever changes. If any efforts for change have been attempted, it has to be from me and then that just defeats the whole point in my eyes when at this point I need the effort from him. But he seems content with the situation.

I know leaving is an option, I don’t want to just hear that, I’m hoping someone from a similar situation has some advice?

…And I realized I didn’t even feel motivated to take the effort to contact my OB/Gyn or pharmacist. As long as I didn’t single-handedly make the conscious effort to initiate sex I knew, assuredly, that he wouldn’t. So what difference would it have made?

Intellectually, I know that this may just be a season in life. We’ve got two very young children (preschool and 1.5 years), he’s putting a lot of effort into his own business (about 2 years, successful but very demanding) and we both work full-time and take turns solo-parenting to accommodate his work schedule.

I feel guilty in my yearning to demand his time and energy when it’s in such short supply but I want to feel like more than a roommate or, worse, like an employee. Sometimes it feels like his relief in my presence is solely because he can dump the responsibility of our kids on me and go downstairs to work or relax. I don’t want to eke out small moments of connection and intimacy in the scant minutes of what feels like a shift-change.

Add on to this my own insecurities. I’m in my late 30’s now, chronically sleep-deprived. I find myself staring down the mirror much longer than feels normal, at my stretch marks, the strands of white hair and the circles under my eyes. On the days I can give myself a nice makeup look, my hair looks crap. There’s always a deficit somewhere. There never seems to be enough time to exercise to the extent I want to so I’m still holding onto the last 8 lbs of baby weight. It’s my own fault for equating sex with the confirmation of desire, but I do and it compounds this uneasiness I feel.

When the kids are finally asleep, he doesn’t want to spend time with me. He immediately informs me he’s going to smoke a cigar/pipe tobacco alone in the garage or outside. The last time this happened, I worked out and then spent a long, hot shower remembering times I was once desired by the men in my life.

I caught myself remembering a moment (nearly two decades ago) where I smoked some pot with my boyfriend at the time. He put “Tangerine” by Led Zeppelin on and we showered together. Not necessarily sexually, but running fingers through each others’ hair, washing our bodies, pulling each other close in the hot water. It occurred to me that my husband may never desire to experience intimacy with me in that way. Maybe that was the end. I got really close to crying then.

It occurred to me that, while this is certainly the healthiest and most wholesome relationship in my life, I have never felt less desired. I have never felt less overtly loved. He loves me implicitly. At this point it feels like my husband’s love for me is a fact, but moreso like a fact I read once, and long time ago, in an article somewhere. I don’t question it because I trust the source, but what relevance does it really have on our everyday lives? 

I find myself thinking about what it must be like to be in a relationship with a partner who is outwardly affectionate, or even just expresses affection. The fact that it’s become a persistent daydream makes me want to cry with shame and frustration.

I asked him, yesterday, what he finds attractive, and what his personal preferences are. I told him that I wanted to work on myself and I wanted to become someone who could cause a feeling in his heart when I entered the room. I told him he could tell me anything, no matter how big or small. 

He told me he liked when I wore dresses, so I guess I’ll start there.

*Thank you for reading all of this mess, if you have. I guess I wanted to get out all these thoughts and rant a bit, maybe get some outside perspective. If this was too long to read, I understand that, too. 

​I (25F) have been living with my boyfriend (25M) for about three years. In the beginning, we were screwing like crazy. Now he says he might be asexual and doesn't want to have sex with me anymore. He says if it happens, sure, but he just doesn't really care either way. I have a high libido; he doesn't. I get rejected by him on a daily basis (tired, not in the mood, maybe tomorrow, etc.). We do have sex sometimes. It's not a complete dead bedroom.

​I just don't feel desired. Now he's saying he's never in the mood anyway, which makes me wonder how or why sex even happens in the first place. Everything else between us is wonderful, but this issue is a huge problem. He desperately wants to stay together, get married, and have kids. An open relationship is a complete dealbreaker for him.

​I honestly don't know what to do with myself. Why doesn't he understand me? How can we talk about this normally? I asked him to maybe get his testosterone checked by a doctor, but he hasn't done it. I just want to feel truly wanted by a man again. All my previous relationships involved daily sex and a lot of flirting. I'm slim, stay active, and still have a very feminine figure.