When I pleasure myself now, my husband is no longer necessarily the person I think about. That change scares me more than I expected. I still love him. I just hadn't expected to feel this far from him while we were still newlyweds.
I'm 24, and we've been married for 18 months. Intimacy has been difficult from the beginning. We've now gone three months without anything, which is a strange place to be when I still think of our marriage as new. There hasn't been a long, satisfying stretch of married intimacy for me to look back on. This has been part of our relationship as husband and wife from the start.
The absence of sex is one thing. Noticing that my own desire no longer automatically leads back to him is another. Self-pleasure hasn't disappeared, but he isn't necessarily at the center of it anymore. I don't have a neat explanation for that. I only know that something I might once have taken for granted now feels uncertain.
I don't want to turn a fantasy into a verdict on my marriage. What goes through my head in private isn't the same as a decision about my life. Still, I can't simply brush this off as meaningless when it comes alongside three months without intimacy. The timing is part of why it unsettles me. It's hard to separate what I'm imagining from what I'm missing.
I love him, but I don't feel loved anymore. Writing those two things together makes the distance between them plain. My love for him hasn't given me the reassurance I want from being with him. And saying I don't feel loved doesn't tell me what he feels. It describes where I am, with all the uncertainty that leaves.
Being a newlywed makes it harder to know how to speak about this. Eighteen months sounds so early to be struggling with something that has already been difficult for so much of the marriage. The calendar doesn't make the loneliness smaller.
I'm too shy to open up to family and friends. This is private in more than one way: the lack of intimacy between us, and what happens in my own head when I'm alone. Asking for support would mean finding words for both, without making either sound simpler or more definite than it is. I want to be able to admit that I'm scared without having that admission stand in for everything I feel about him.
For now, I can say what has changed, even if I can't explain it. Three months have passed without intimacy. I still love my husband, and I don't feel loved. In the one part of my sexual life that is entirely my own, I no longer necessarily picture him. That's the part I've been too shy to say out loud.
