After months of tamping it down with denial and vodka, today The Loneliness demanded attention. Problem is, we're leaving for vacation.

TL;DR: I'm brand new here. Didn't realize this was weighing so heavily on me until today, when it all hit me like a tidal wave. I want to address this with him as carefully as possible, because we're leaving for a vacation on Tuesday.

The lack of sex had been bothering me (35F), but today I realized just how much it's gotten to me, and how lonely it has made me. This might sound odd, but loneliness is actually a really difficult emotion for me to identify. I'm sure some can relate. But now that I've identified it, it's all I can think about.

A couple weeks ago we went to a friend's party and everyone was doing shots of fancy spirits, and we got pretty drunk. On our walk home I took advantage of the liquid courage and I brought it up to him (35M). He said he's afraid to have sex because of the pain he saw me go through when I had an abortion, and everything will be different when he gets a vasectomy. But the abortion was years ago and this problem is more recent, and he's not being very proactive on the vasectomy front, so I don't buy it.

He woke up the next morning saying he didn't remember anything after leaving the party. Of course there's no way for me to know if that's true, but if it isn't and he remembers any part of it, you wouldn't know it by his behavior. Nothing has changed.

And speaking of drinking: I'm doing way too much of it, and I'm hiding it from him. I'm sure he knows, but for these past few weeks I've been trying to figure out why I'm doing this and I don't know why I didn't realize sooner what hole it was I was trying to fill (no pun intended).

Today was when I reached my limit: I realized that I was feeling irritated with things I used to love about him, that we spend our lives in different rooms -- him gaming, me watching TV, that I'm having breakthrough depression symptoms, that the times he comes to the living room to spend time with me annoy me -- even though I miss him, that it's the reason for my weekday drinking, and that it's creating so much distance that I'm feeling terribly lonely... and so I just hid in another room and sobbed and sobbed.

It's so hard for me to bring up to him -- "words of affirmation" is like 0% of our Love Languages, although we're usually fine with communicating our feelings and not bottling things up, but now that it has been bottled up for so long I don't know how to approach this. In the past I've always told him the minute I'm feeling upset about something and we communicate to resolve it in the present and prevent it in the future. But when it comes to uncomfortable conversations like this (I get that it's not easy for anyone, but just saying), this is uncharted territory for us. (Ironically, "physical touch" is one of our top Love Languages, we just show it with hand holding, nuzzling, kissing, and butt squeezes that don't lead anywhere.)

And of course the really inconvenient factor is that we leave for vacation the day after tomorrow. I don't know if having this conversation before that would clear the air, or completely ruin the trip we've had planned for so long. I'm leaning more towards keeping it bottled up just one more week, and having the conversation on the drive home.

I'm open to advice, and I'll pre-emptively answer some questions here that anyone may be thinking or wondering about:

• I'm done with drinking on school nights, drinking alone, drinking sad, etc. My eyes are opened to it and I don't like it.

• I definitely do not think he's cheating on me -- he never has unaccounted for time, he doesn't go out without me, he works with all men, and there aren't any "friends" he's talking about that might make me suspicious about the nature of the friendship. Plus, I could ask to go on his phone any time, and he even forgot it at home when he left for work the other day. I'm WFH and have all his passwords, but I didn't snoop into a single thing because 0% of me thinks this is happening.

• He has been with men before, but says (as horrible as this sounds) that it was kind of just a phase for him, and I believe him. He hasn't been with any guys since his partying days in his early 20s.

• Logistically, we mostly were having sex in the mornings. It's when I'm most horny, and we'd put his morning wood to good use. But now he wakes up earlier and gets out of bed right away. There are legitimate work-related reasons for the shift in his sleep schedule, but still. The sex was always vanilla but good. He locked giving me head, and always made sure I came. Always very loving and considerate, and then the occasional throw down if ya nasty, but those too were always very loving and considerate (just in a different way).

• NMNK; together almost 7 years. No major lifestyle or health changes.

• This vacation is unfortunately not terribly conducive to having sex.

Please help me?