Let’s fastforward a year. She’s positive that she’s got vaginismus, which is a pretty raw deal. I am trying to help her, but she won’t go to a doctor, because she’s embarrassed by our lack of sex and how long it’s been. Eventually, we go to a FANTASTIC doctor who is caring, smart, sex-positive, and good. She gives us a lot of hope. She also says she’s about 95% sure my wife doesn’t have vaginismus. She gives us some vaginal dilators (yep, they’re dildos. But stark Jonny Ive-designed dildos that don’t look like dicks, so as not to make my wife feel bad for having a dildo) and they graduate in size from small to about 2 inches smaller than my dick (I should add here, to be both fair and self-aggrandizing, that my dick is above average, and the lady is small. So that’s just a thing we’re going to work on.)

Then, she refuses to use the things. Says they feel cold and foreign. I suggest we just get tipsy and make out and play with them, with no commitment to firm plans of inserting them. Just get COMFORTABLE with them. Be familiar with them. She doesn’t want to. She says lately, I don’t seem to know how to kiss her anyway. I suggest that, some time when I’m not around, she just take a hand mirror and get a look at her private parts to see how they might be inserted. She says that sounds offensive, patronizing and disgusting. We continue living like roommates.

A few weeks later, we’ve been out with friends and are organically tipsy and kissing in the front room of the house. I get playful and say ‘c’mon, come get naked with me.’ I lead her to the bedroom and we start fooling around on the bed. I convince her it’s a good, fun time to try to escalate past fingers and onto one of the dilators, if she’s comfortable with giving it a try. She consents. I grab some lube and the box with the dilators in it. This is the first time she’s looked at it since we got it home. There’s a bulb-shaped lube applicator in the box, along with some diagrams and stuff. I take those out to get to the smallest dilator in the box, and she freezes. She points at the lube applicator on the bed and asks with …I mean, just terror…’What are you doing to do with that?’ and she’s just totally freaked out. I explain what it is and she starts to cry and says she doesn’t want to do this anymore.

We never did make it. She told me eventually that she never loved me, and that she thinks I never loved her, either. Now, she’s dating a fella who was my best friend until about a year ago when she decided to switch from me to him, and she’s got him all excited and ready to wait for marriage with her. Again.

I should add, and I do feel shitty about this: He bullied her into sucking him off in a matter of weeks. When he told me about that (fairly nonchalantly), that’s when we stopped being friends. Though, he swears he didn’t mean me any harm by telling me about it.

I’m divorced now, and I’ve had sex now. I abandoned the idea that I should wait and slept with a really lovely girl on our third date. It’s actually easy and fantastic. It’s actually everything I ever thought it could be.”