possum

I'm a guy. Married 25 years. We men have some physiological reasons to need ejaculation on a pretty regular basis and we certainly have a lot of psychological things going on in our heads with respect to sexual desire, arousal and dealing with a social world involving lots of nubile females that are NOT our partners.

We don't need a partner to ejaculate. We've all got plenty of experience with that. What we need out of our relationship with our partner is to BE LOVED. We want to BE WANTED. We want to BE NEEDED. We need a second party to make us feel special, make us feel 'manly', compliment us, tell us we're 'the best', 'the only'. What we don't need is to be treated as a chore, as an obligation, or as an invonvenience. When we're rejected by our partners, it hurts us (a lot). Guys are conditioned to shake off being hurt and to not get emotional so we have difficulty dealing with this. We play tit-for-tat games with our partners and starting hurting them back (passive/agressive). It spirals downhill from there.

It sounds to me like you guys have spiraled pretty far down the path of hurting each other for your respective hurts. You have a decision to make here. Keep up the affair (you're having one) so you can keep hurting him and punishing him for hurting you and punishing you for hurting him...

...or get off the merry-go-round. Find out what you do that hurts him. Apologize and learn to stop it. Help him understand what he does that hurts you and find ways to stop it. Put each other first in your respective lives.

Another observation: Sex is the canary in the relationship coal mine. It's the first thing to go when the relationship is starting to head down hill. I bet there was a LOT more going downhill in your relationship when you were not having sex earlier on. Sex is also one of the last things to improve when (if) you rebuild the relationship.