Okay, so you've semi-officially joined the "my spouse has decided that we're not going to be intimate or have sex anymore" club. Welcome. If it makes you feel any better, you are definitely not alone.

With the qualifier that none of what follows is based on anything but anecdotal personal experience (not statistics), after reading your letter it would seem to me that you have to accept the very real possibility that it is probably not going to improve in any meaningful way. Beyond that, even if you go through all of the soul-crushing, bang-your-head-against-the-wall-for-answers-until-you-bleed therapy that you can afford, it probably just won't improve over the long term even if it does for a short period.

That switch in your spouse is probably never going to turn back on. It may never have been on in the first place. Those first few years of passion and intimacy, over time, often reveal themselves to be less "romantic" and real than the way in which we initially replayed them in our minds. As humans, we're often just inclined to imagine a past that never really was. Much of the early stuff may have been the product of novelty in the relationship and a certain artifice that we put up because we think we can fool ourselves and our spouses for a lifetime of marriage.

I know my perspective is dark, even fatalistic. I hope that I am wrong in your case. And what is the point of even discussing it if I am right? Well, there are a few. First off, it is important that you know that you are not alone in this. It's one of the worst-kept secrets of long-term marriage: a huge percentage of partners at one point just decide they aren't going to fully participate in the marriage anymore and nothing you do will force them to. Second, you need to know it's almost certainly not your fault. There are about fifty reasons that this could be happening to you and virtually none of them, at their core, have anything to do with you. You've sort of just wandered into a common mine field. It could be genetic, adultery, the product of depression, the product of early childhood trauma, hormones, selfishness, control issues, cruelty, a combination of these, many other things. But in the end, this same thing would likely happen to whoever your husband was partnered with for any length of time and it's almost all about him.

Finally, once you accept the fact that (after giving it your best shot) you might just not be able to fix this, it gives you the advantage of being able to make informed decisions. It takes you out of the place where you are making decisions based on the inaccurate notion that all relationship and intimacy problems (or even most of them) can be solved. That is not a healthy place to be in my opinion (although some might disagree--maybe ignorance is bliss and baseless hope may actually lead you to succeed where a pessimist would fail). But that said, in the end you are probably just going to have to decide to stay or leave at some point based on simple cost-benefit analysis. Are the benefits of having a secure, intact (non-divorce) family where you can see your child/children every day worth enduring the grueling pain and isolation of the intimacy-free spouse? Your answer will probably be yes. That is not the wrong answer--especially until your children are grown. Than you can break out the calculator again and re-do the math.

I too am addicted to that show. I am an adult now but my parents were both decent and loving and flawed serious drug addicts. I don't think that you have to have a background like that to appreciate the genius of the show, but it definitely helps.

The show is comforting in its familiarity now. Virtually all of the episodes have a consistent rhythm to their editing. The show shifts gears to throughout the hour in a way that is consistent and engrossing. The introduction. The early build-up where the depth of the addiction is laid out in somewhat of an overview that will later be reinforced with painful and tear duct numbing footage. The sudden shift in tone and music as the early childhood photos flash in a painful but moving montage that gives way to photos of ostensibly happier days in the addicts adulthood before the real crash began. That "visual flashback" of sorts is one of the really compelling and moving aspects of the show. In the tsunami of reality shows that have hit the shore in the lasts ten years or so, this one somehow finds a way to stand out.

Thanks for the article on it and hopefully you spreading the word will lead to more viewers and more episodes (that is the only problem--the seasons are disappointingly short).

Thank you for that piece. I am a father and I was reading it as I got ready to go to work and I had to skip through large sections because I was starting to cry and my head was starting to hurt. Maybe if I had been reading it at night I could have let my emotions go and not shown up at the office looking like I'd just had a nervous breakdown.

There seems to still be so much pain there. I am so sorry that you and your family had to go through was you went through.