My gf and I have been together for roughly 4 years now. We are both very happy in our relationship and you could say it is pretty much perfect.
About 1 year into the relationship she had to deal with a couple of things that were tough on her mentally.
1. a family member of hers was abusive towards her in the past (hidden cameras). He got charged but having to deal with this again was very hard for her.
2. she had to get surgery for an HPV infection. Look up „conization“. Obviously this was also very tough mentally and physically.
This all happened roughly around the same time. We weren’t intimate (still affectionate) a lot or even at all for some time. She did go to therapy which helped, but since then things never really normalized. She says she’s in pain everytime we have sex and the doctors just told her to use more lubricant, longer foreplay, reduce stress etc. needless to say these things helped but didn’t solve the issue.
We’re both just clueless atm what to do. Having sex once a month or even less isn’t enough for a healthy relationship imo. And another problem I‘m having is that sometimes I feel like she just does it for me, that I‘m happy. She almost never initiates anything and seems very careful with her affection so I don’t hope for „more“.
We already talked a lot about this issue and she knows that I only want to be intimate with her when she wants it too. Her main concerns is that she doesn’t want to disappoint me.
Does anyone have advice what we could do to fix this?