So my boyfriend and I have different sex drives. His used to be a little higher when we first started dating but now after a year of being together, we probably have sex around 3-4 times a month. When we do have sex it’s really great and we’re sexually compatible when we actually have sex. It sometimes becomes frustrating for me cause I really value sex as a way to feel intimate with a partner. He will still do other stuff to sexually satisfy me but I’m not exactly craving sexual satisfaction from him (I can do that by myself) but i do want intimacy.
Recently I’ve been more open about how I feel about our sex life, not as a way to guilt him into doing anything but just to have open communication. We both have sexual trauma, he knows about mine more than I know about his and we’ve always tried to accommodate. I always understood that trauma makes his sex drive low and mine makes me sometimes have panic attacks. Sometimes though I get insecure about how we don’t have sex that often. the other night I mentioned how sometimes I get in my head about how maybe if I looked different, he’d be more enticed to have sex with me. He reassured me that my looks have nothing to do with why we don’t have sex often and that I should try more at initiating things. I explained to him that when I look at him, I just naturally want to be intimate with him and that I wished he felt the same about me. He told me that sex isn’t an intimate thing for him and that to him it’s just a physical act and he doesn’t feel anything (emotionally) from it. This really hurt me. I have experienced a lot of sexual violence in the past so sex is a deeply emotional and vulnerable thing for me. so it just hurts that I was having sex with him under this false idea that we were both connecting in a deeply intimate way. I started crying cause it felt like I was violated in a way. I told him how it made me feel and he apologized and said he worded it wrong. He explained how given his history with sexual trauma, penetrative sex can sometimes be triggering and makes him feel less than human. He said that he still feels intimacy during sex it just isn’t high on his list of things we do that makes him feel connected and close to me. I understand what he means cause certain positions makes me feel that way. I just can’t shake how i feel after he told me he feels nothing. Any thoughts or advice?
TLDR: my boyfriend told me sex is just a physical act to him not an intimate one, he apologized and he worded it wrong but i still can’t help but feel bad