I Give Myself Very Good Advice, But I Very Seldom Follow It

It turns out that 9 years of being told you're not very good at a variety of intimate behaviour and that your spouse has no interest in performing a variety of sex acts you might be interested in is really going to land a blow on your self esteem.  It's not kindness, strength or love to determine that they must be right and you need to change or constantly accommodate their needs at the expense of your own simply because they have more sexual experience than you do, even though they don't seem to want to change the limited variety and frequency of any intimate contact.

Especially when, after six years of marriage, you find out that the person in question had spent the last three years actively seeking sex with sex workers and strangers of both genders, and had done the same thing without telling you throughout the period prior to your marriage.  He quit for the first three years of marriage, and that's when he stopped wanting anything to do with you, either.  That's really not a thing you should feel bad about.  You probably shouldn't spend a further two years thinking about how you can change this, because you can't.

Or so I would tell myself if I were giving myself advice.

I'm afraid to go forward.  I'm just as afraid now as I was when I was 19, wondering whether I was doing things because I liked them, or if I was doing them to get them out of the way.  I still wonder whether love is Stockholm Syndrome, or if I've just been doing it wrong.  I use that phrase slightly hyperbolic-ally, but I wonder.  I don't know what it's like to be actually attracted to an obtainable person, it's a thing I learned to do in the case of an individual who pretty much used and betrayed me throughout our entire relationship.  I would say a real person, but I had an enormous crush on an upperclassman in high school.  He graduated and came out in college.

So I ask myself, what am I doing wrong?  How do I go forward in relationships with anyone when I barely know what I want or like in another person, and am terrified of settling and re-arranging all my expectations in a different way simply because another opportunity might come along?

I have some very good male friends.  I don't want to sleep with any of them.  But I'm to the point where I don't know that I want to sleep with anyone that I don't know and trust as well as I know these men.

So maybe physical relationships are not for me.