Long term DB lumbering toward a solution

Hello, All. Buddah here, and I've been posting for a couple of weeks with ... ahem... mixed success. But I've never really introduced myself or talked about my situation.

I am in a decade old DB (hlm/llf) that is slowly drawing to a conclusion. It began about the time of the conception of my son. He is the only child involved (special needs, but certainly not the insurmountable obstacle that it could be). While my relationship with my wife has been dying over the last few years, I've been taking advantage of the time to really build up a good father/son relationship with him.

My marriage is only barely older than the DB, but even the wedding night / honeymoon shares the hallmark rejection of a db that I see in so many other people's story. But for myself, while it was a red flag, I pin the start of the DB proper to be the last time the two of us had sex. Fortunately, I got a great kid added to my life out of it.

During the pregnancy, I gave her a pass, because the human body is weird and does weird things. It wasn't a hugely difficult pregnancy, but it had it's ups and downs. Afterwards there was a treated bout of post partum depression that I patiently waited through, because the human body is weird and does weird things. A year passed, and then a year and a half, and we talked back and forth about it, but physical intimacy (non-piv sexual contact) was rare and sex itself never re-entered the marriage. At one point six months passed after the post partum depression was behind us, putting us at almost 2.5 years of minimal contact. I started looking for answers online, joined a couple of discussion boards, read some books and this caused our first meltdown. I tend to look for answers in books and other similar sources before I do anything else. I'm kind of a nerd like that. But reading these books, and talking about our problem online with a bunch of strangers was a bridge too far in her opinion. I pointed out to her that I have to talk to someone. She wasn't open to it, and handling that kind of need on an anonymous message board has got to be better than taking it to a sympathetic friend that she is likely to encounter face to face afterwards. I ditched the books for her sake, which wasn't a big sacrifice, because I had read them already.

Over the course of the next year, we were going through some rocky times. I was in school, a degree that I am now completing, and she was having to bear more of the financial burden (not all) because of that. Money was tight and we were living at the edge of our means. She and I are two very different people. She is a strong type a, everything has to be her way and right away. I am a strong type b, and in several of our fights I had to tell her that herway is a right way to do it, but it is not the only right way, and if she wants to ask me to do something she needs to let me do it regardless of how I do it, so long as it is done. Eventually the strain from these problems combined with my frustration over the DB led us to therapy which got us talking about some of our problems in a different way. One problem that surfaced was that she doesn't want more children. I do. It was something we talked about before marriage, but that she has changed her stance on. I get that she has a right to feel like she feels, but it is something that because of the gravity of its effect on our marriage shouldn't be a unilateral decision. In therapy we came to a placeholder decision that after I finished with school, we would seriously discuss the option to adopt. She doesn't want to be pregnant again, there are other options. I'm willing to go for that. We also talked about our desires for our sexual intimacy. I said that I am happy with several times a week or more, that I would consider a couple times a week to be a good compromise. She would rather have it a couple of times a month, but would be fine with once a week. This was pointless in retrospect because we hadn't been having sex for years, didn't start having sex as a result and haven't had sex since.

We stopped seeing the therapist after a year. and things went back to the dry doldrums of rare acts of physical intimacy, and nothing else. I tried everything that I could think of to try and turn the tide on this one. Nothing worked. After another year or so went by we were going out to a birthday dinner, my birthday dinner, and she let me know that she had decided that she would get her tubes tied. I figured that this was an indication that she was willing to begin working on our relationship, moving towards a healthy marriage. But after that conversation, she waited 14 months for the surgery.

We saw no improvement after the surgery, falling into a few years of some physical intimacy (essentially mutual masturbation, where most of the time, I get her off and she rolls over and goes to sleep, leaving me to handle my self, or about a quarter of the time it truly is mutual).

Since the beginning of the year, there has been no contact whatsoever, which more and more, I've found that I am fine with because I've decided to finish the degree, get a better job and move on (and then get into a high quality relationship, finish the next degree, get an even better job).

I am not a perfect husband by any means. I am sloppy. My socks are probably on the floor, I have a pile of books on my bedside table and I have a hard time sharing my feelings some times. But, I am a damn good guy, too. I'm a hell of a dad, great at my job, morally centered, willing to fix my problems along the way and I always try to offer a helping hand, if I can. So, like everyone, I'm a mixed bag. There are plenty of things about my wife that I love, but a few things that I cant live with anymore. Mixed bag.

There really isn't too much more to add, though I am sure that I forgot to include plenty along the way. This is, at least, a good overview.