11.

“My wife and I divorced about 3 years after getting married, having never consummated the marriage. It was really, really weird and nothing like anything I ever expected.

We were exhausted, but that was to be expected. She has fibormyalgia and Chronic Fatigue syndrome, so I figured the odds of us having sex on that night were low. That’s fine. Then, when we did try the following day, we ran into some of the predictable problems that other posters here have: lots of pain for her, me not really being prepared to hurt her. So, we set to work with gentle stretching exercises as best we could to try and get it to work.

But then, she started to get really critical of everything I did. This was gradual. About two months in, she told me she didn’t want to try anymore for a while, because every time we were doing anything, I’d get ‘too desperate’ that it would lead to sex. The problem was, as I explained, I was sort of desperate. For moral reasons, she wasn’t open to doing any sort of head/handjobs anything like that–in either direction. She’s Catholic, but had agreed during premaritial counseling that it would be okay to have oral sex once we were married, even though it wasn’t 100% compatible with her beliefs. That went out the window in this case, because she wanted to be sure ‘we got the basics right’ before moving onto the immoral part she didn’t agree with. Fuck. Every time we try to have sex, she freaks out that I’m hurting her, and that I’m doing it wrong. It becomes nervewracking to even try, but we keep trying. Sex within our loving marriage is something we’ve both wanted all our lives.