If you are presuming you know what she feels because you can’t talk about it and you have no way to tell her how you feel because she is letting you know she doesn’t want to hear it, you need to find someone to help you talk. If you don’t, the growing divergence in how you each “see” your home life going to ruin your relationship.
A marriage can survive without sex. A marriage cannot survive when communication is denied. It can survive when communication is impossible, but not when the two persons are with each other all the time, feeling intense emotions, and yet are denied a way to live their lives with those emotions TOGETHER. More to the point, human beings have conflicts. If they do not know how to face their conflicts and work through them together equitably, those conflicts don’t just go away. Conflicts that are ignored erode trust, erode intimacy, and eventually dissolve friendships.
I’m saying this: You don’t just have a medical problem on your hands. You, my friend, have a conflict. Refusing to face the conflict between you does not mean you don’t have one.
She needs to know that in spite how difficult you find it, you love her, you are more committed to her than to your sex drive, and you are not going anywhere, but you still have a need to share your emotions with her. I don’t mean she needs to “know” in the intellectual sense. I mean she needs to emotionally internalize those truths. You need to know that she is willing to do what she can to be able to have marital relations with you and, if that proves permanently impossible (as it might), you will both have the comfort of knowing that you will go forward knowing you did what you had available to you to do at the time. She needs to know that a willingness to try to find a solution does not imply that she will have to be the subject of invasive and painful “experimentation” for the rest of her life, with the spectre of being a “failure” if a solution is not found.
As it is, sexual intimacy is not the only kind of intimacy you are being denied. You are being denied emotional intimacy, too. You’re being denied the chance to really face this issue together. You are being denied the chance to make this a shared sacrifice and a shared suffering. You are being denied the knowledge that you do both have each other’s backs on this, that there is no recrimination, bitterness, or resentment going forward.
If you do not learn how to talk, if you do both go forward with a fake “mind-reading” method of knowing your spouse’s feelings–and your own, which you will never be able to take out to examine!–then you will inevitably start feeling bitter, resentful, empty and lonely, because you are living in the same house and sacrificing with someone whose sacrifices for you are never felt directly, but only in the imagination (if that).
Tell your wife you and she need to go to counseling together until you both feel that you can talk freely about anything and you both feel you have learned many ways to go about doing it. If she will not go with you, then go by yourself. There are skills you can learn with a counselor that you can bring back home to teach your wife.
