Every time I lost the desire to be intimate in a relationship...it didn't come back. That's just my experience. Over time with someone, you don't usually continue to have horny steamy sex. Even for men it becomes more about the love and intimacy, but men will take what they can get where as women generally don't have that within them. When you don't love someone, you don't love them. If a person is not connecting to you on multiple levels it's basically like trying to recuscitate a dead person. You can perform the act but it won't bring the person (or the relationship metaphorically) back to life.

Is if fair to him? Yes and no. Is life always fair? No.

I suppose you feel that you stepped into a traditional marriage with rigid gender stereotypes and now you have grown to need a more egalitarian and compromising partner. Maybe you feel guilty for growing and changing. In some ways I feel guilty that I out grew my ex-A. Mostly, I'm relieved and I set him free to find someone that can meet his needs maybe.

When we commit to relationships, marriage especially, we take vows and/or make proclamations of now and until this day forth...forever. Obviously this is not wise but our culture does it anyhow and marriage is not a bad thing persay. Just that we know divorce happens about half the time even when both parties have good intentions and say their vows from the heart.

You cannot help falling out of love with someone, though I understand it makes you feel guilty. I also suppose you have come to some realizations about the way he "loves you." Learning more about him and his disease your eyes are open to how his "love" is all about control and making you conform to some pretty rigid expectations and also having you be an extension of him rather than a full and capable person on your own. It would seem that at this point in your life, that's not what you are about. It worked for many years while you were raising a very young child etc... but now that you are looking at having a grown son and what you want to accomplish with your 1 shot at life now....It's different than what it was and your current husband doesn't seem to fit in as well to your image of a happy future.

So...it's about a lot more than sex. It sounds like you are having existential questions. Your recovery has triggered a lot of growing pains, vulnerability, discomfort and you are not the same person that married him. This is about your life and whether you can envision staying on the journey with him or not. I'm guessing that having sex with him would feel like being untrue to yourself when you have so many mixed feelings and don't know if the future for you will involve him or not. You are closer to being a healthy and whole person and it is conceivable that he's not cabable of having a relationship with an independent minded woman who has more self-esteem and doesn't "need" him so much.

Cut yourself some slack and don't do anything you don't feel like.

Also, I can say from my own experience that my break up from my ex also coincided with me losing a lot of weight and choosing to live a totally different lifestyle that was much more healthy. He was 300 plus pounds, smokey, unhealthy, irresponsible, and I just couldn't have that in my life. I had to close my eyes through the last few years of us having sex. I did that though cuz at least I still loved him in some intimate way....but when that was gone. It was game on. I wanted a real relationship, real sex and real intimacy. I was pleased with the changes I'd made and I wanted to connect with someone who celebrated the "new me" not someone that was poopooing it and trying (consciously or subconsciously) to drag me backwards. I was so sick of feeling lonely, trapped, and misunderstood while in a committed relationship with another person. It made me question WTF am I committed to this for?

Not sure if this helps or not but it's my ESH.

Consider the question - is it fair to you? is it fair of him to expect loving intimacy in the face of his anger, lies and so forth? My ex would blast me at night then expect me to be all lovey-dovey the next morning, as if the angry hateful him was just a compartment visited and now we are in a different room where all is rosey and loving and intimate and why am I acting so frigid? Standing back away from it now I can shake my head at the absurdity of the notion that a person can behave horrendously towards their significant other and still expect things in the bedroom to be status quo because they are "in the mood". Life isn't always, or often really, fair. My first ex didn't really think there were any serious problems in our marriage until I stopped having sex with him; and by then that I was already pretty much done with it.

Thank you all for the replies, especially yours Pinkchip. My AH says he understands why I have pulled away, yet when he makes advances on me and I'm not responsive he gets angry and I honestly just don't feel right about making him feel that way. It's my codependent guilt that flares up. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about how men are the only ones turned on by the physical appearance of their mate, but as a woman I have to say that looks help a bit when it comes to sexual attraction. My AH has put on a lot of weight in the past few years and doesn't take care of himself. He doesn't eat well, started smoking a pipe recently, and eats a lot of carbs, LOL. He does play tennis still, though, but he won't join us for hikes or neighborhood walks. Anyway, that's really not all that important but it doesn't help our situation. It probably wouldn't matter, like in Minaret's situation. Attraction is more than looks, but the looks do help to generate the 'feeling'. Of course, I am looking for a real emotional connection as I work through my steps and my life and my 'stuff' and I don't think that's what AH is looking for. He seems to think that having sex would fix all our problems. Sigh, if that were only the answer, we'd all be having lots of sex to fix our marriages, right, LOL?