Just looking for input here.
My partner and I have been together since 2018. Around the start of covid we took a break for a year at his request. It was a complete split so not much contact or communication during this time. During this time, he says that while going out one night he was drugged and sexually assaulted. Very soon after we began talking again and seeing each other, he broke down and confessed to me that he had been assaulted and that he was HIV+.
Flash forward to today and he is undetectable and in otherwise perfect physical health. We now live together again and have moved out of state with each other. But since getting back together, we almost never have sex. Currently it has been more than three months since we have, and maybe only 4-5 times in the last year. Prior to this we had sex 2-3 times a week.
It’s hard for me to ask him about what he’s feeling towards our ntimacy because it always goes back to the trauma of the assault. I love him to death so I never want to frame it as “well I know this terrible thing happened to you, but what about MY sexual desires”. So I tend to never bring it up. The last time I asked about it was two months ago and all I asked was if he is talking about it in therapy at least—because if I can’t help him through this at least maybe his therapist can.
The kicker is he doesn’t see his therapist often. He just went three months between appointments. So if I’m banking on his therapist to champion these conversations for him, I’m probably going to come up short.
What is a way I could broach this conversation with him without making it seem like I’m only interested in having sex for my own interests. I want him to enjoy sex with me again too. I don’t want an open-relationship, and I’d rather not have sex at all than to have sex with someone other than him…at the moment at least. I don’t want my inability to navigate this conversation with him to push me to a point where I begin to want to have sex outside of our relationship, but I also want him to make more of an effort in his therapy.
How can I talk to him about this without making it seem like I’m putting myself over him?
1 comment
You just need to talk to your partner otherwise your relationship is going to fail it sucks about the SA but you need to live too.