I don’t know if this is a dead bedroom, porn replacing intimacy, or if I’m just slowly losing my marriage
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My husband (52) and I have been married since June 2024. I love him deeply, and I believe he loves me too, which is why this has been so confusing.
I also know I’m not blameless.
Early in our marriage, I had a lot of anxiety surrounding sex. I struggled to orgasm, and I would become upset afterward because I felt broken or like I was disappointing him. He eventually told me that my reactions were affecting our sex life because sex had stopped feeling fun and started feeling stressful. Looking back, I think he was trying to tell me he felt pressure every time we were intimate.
I’ve worked hard on myself since then, but I worry the damage was already done.
Now our intimacy has almost disappeared. He sleeps on the couch most nights watching TV or working until 5 or 6 in the morning. We rarely go to bed together. Sex is infrequent. To fair he’s always had this pattern all his life- he doesn’t sleep well. He has very poor sleep habits.
He says he’s getting older, doesn’t feel sexy, worries he’ll finish too quickly, and says he can’t make me orgasm. I’ve told him I don’t need perfection. I just want to be close to him.
Then I discovered pornography in his search history. More recently, I found that he’s been looking up nude pictures of celebrities and other women. He doesn’t know I know.
One moment that still plays over in my mind happened while we were out of town. A woman with a very large chest held a door open for us as we walked through together.She even posed for him. I noticed my husband looking at her while we were at the table, and whether it was a brief glance or something more, it hurt me deeply because I was already feeling insecure. Since then, I can’t stop comparing myself to women who look nothing like me.
He’s has a pattern. I see him paying attention to Big chested women. I don’t have them. That stayed with me.
He also tells me he wants a future with me and that he loves me. He’s currently unemployed and finishing school, so I know he’s carrying a lot of stress, and I know he had a difficult childhood. I try to remember that.
But I’m lonely.
I miss feeling desired. I miss feeling like his wife instead of someone he shares a house with while his sexual energy goes elsewhere.
For those of you who have lived through this:
Can a marriage recover after intimacy becomes associated with pressure and disappointment?
If porn became part of the picture, were you able to rebuild trust and desire?
If you were the spouse who pulled away sexually, what was really happening inside that your partner didn’t understand?
I’m not looking for people to tell me to divorce him. I’m looking for honest experiences from people who found their way back—or who realized why they couldn’t.
Posted Jul 11, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC · edited