Now; I'm not a Mum, but it hasn't escaped my beady eyes that Mumsnet is a hotbed of controversial discussion and debate. As part of my own 'journey' in coming to terms with my sexless relationship, I was desperate to read the experiences of others and to gain solace from the knowledge that it wasn't just me in this god-awful situation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mumsnet was where I found a veritable feast of anecdotal evidence of other women leading sexless marriages and relationships. (Incidentally, Mumsnet, alongside the online Daily Mail, are probably my best tips for UK focused reading matter in this area.)

Nienna's story of her sexless marriage breaks my heart, just because it is so similar to my own. As much as I'd love to have kids, I am just so glad I didn't (as she does) because that would have made it a hundred times harder to leave.

Comments are pretty much as you'd expect with suggestions of counselling, mutual enjoyment of porn, upfront communication, is he gay? blah blah blah.

Tick, tick, tick to all the above in my case - to no avail.

But this comment from secondtimer1 stood out most for me:

Nienna, I put up with it for over 20 years - tortured myself constantly, ached with frustration and self-loathing most of the time -and sorry to say but, trust me, the kids are fully aware of the tension and your unhappiness. You will never get him to change - just as you cannot change yourself., He may be dysfunctional, he may be gay, he may be terrified of losing control - at the end of the day he is who he is, and only he can change himself. You need to do things that lifts your self-esteem and make you accept yourself as a passionate loving woman. A book that helped me was "Women who love too much" - it's about co-dependency but it helped me to understand where my motivation to keep the marriage going for so long came from.

I haven't read this book but I think I should.