The relationship with my partner has been going for about 13 years. After the first ecstatic few months of sexual connection, (with the associated romance chemicals surging through us both), our sex life basically went downhill over some years. It got to the point where I felt like I was being abused in our sexual life. What a terrible thing to feel with the person you love the most in the whole world. It's too complicated to explain the intricacies of these feelings. Some of it may have been based on a basic level of incompatability in sexual styles and approaches between my partner and I. But for me, after some sexual abuse issues in the past, sex between us became traumatic. Subsequently, it became traumatic for my partner to engage with sex for me too and we stopped sleeping in the same bed about 5 years ago. This has improved our general relations with each other as it has taken the pressure off. To compensate, we are very affectionate with each other, hugging a lot and being generally very loving towards each other in our everyday lives. Over the past six months or so we attempted to reintroduce one night a week of close connection together on the bed. This did mostly lead to much more satisfactory sexual experiences, but still very tentative. Recently however even this one night has become a pressure that neither of us was able to maintain. So, at the moment, we are back to no sex but lots of hugging and affection again. I too am going through menopause, which may be complicating things further. Amazingly, we are both committed to our relationship and see ourselves together for a long time with or without sex. But I know it would be better if we could find some truly effective strategies to meet again on this level. Sorry for the long rave, it's hard to discuss this without specific details and I've kept this very general compared to how complicated the feelings and issues seem to be.