If these people want to keep having a marriage, several things could happen.
a) She could get some therapy. That'd be good. This really does sound as if it changed how she feels about herself/her body/her connection to her body/etc. Maybe. Or maybe she just likes not having sex now. That does happen. But if so, then she should like, learn to communicate about that.
b) So could he! It would be especially useful for him to disentangle verbal appreciation and overt love language from generic "passion," which as Ambyr notes is a thing he's noticed he'd like without actually differentiating the two.
(I went out with a guy much older than me when I was 21 or so, who had had people insult him in various ways, and who really did just appreciate being told pleasant things about how he looked. And he expressed that! Which meant I got to do it!)
c) In fact: Then LW could learn to express the fact that he'd like that *to his wife*. Including the parts where he misses her, and would like more, not as pressure, but as a way to talk about where all this is going. (It could go to divorce, which would be *sad*, but not a tragedy. On the other hand, it could go to, possibly tentatively at first, re-establishing a connection.)
Really, I don't know if he needs to Confess This Bonking. Or if he does, he maybe should do it after they figure out how to have a marriage again, if they do.
no subject
OK!
If these people want to keep having a marriage, several things could happen.
a) She could get some therapy. That'd be good. This really does sound as if it changed how she feels about herself/her body/her connection to her body/etc. Maybe. Or maybe she just likes not having sex now. That does happen. But if so, then she should like, learn to communicate about that.
b) So could he! It would be especially useful for him to disentangle verbal appreciation and overt love language from generic "passion," which as Ambyr notes is a thing he's noticed he'd like without actually differentiating the two.
(I went out with a guy much older than me when I was 21 or so, who had had people insult him in various ways, and who really did just appreciate being told pleasant things about how he looked. And he expressed that! Which meant I got to do it!)
c) In fact: Then LW could learn to express the fact that he'd like that *to his wife*. Including the parts where he misses her, and would like more, not as pressure, but as a way to talk about where all this is going. (It could go to divorce, which would be *sad*, but not a tragedy. On the other hand, it could go to, possibly tentatively at first, re-establishing a connection.)
Really, I don't know if he needs to Confess This Bonking. Or if he does, he maybe should do it after they figure out how to have a marriage again, if they do.