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.

Well; here we are. Tuesday morning and a busy day ahead with three back to back meetings. Need my head switched on. Woke early to find a text from...Mr Text, my erstwhile dissaffected Brummie friend:

I don't want to do anything involving gratification for myself. 
I just want to kiss your whole body, and (when you tell me you're ready) hold your arse and lick your clit for at least an hour, while you grip the back of my head and buck your hips like a wild animal.
 
Not so much a Fuck Buddy or Friend With Benefits (we've only ever met once and it was all perfectly above board) but more of a Sext Buddy, if indeed such a term exists.
Late 30s, he's also entrenched in a ltr with a (much older) woman who has 'gone off sex' for the past 10 months. I suspect he's still in denial mode, despite my telling him very clearly that without sex, a relationship is on shaky ground. I don't think he hears me.
 
What started as a mutual interest in French cinema, literature and politics turned into the bizarre situation we now have in front of us, which frankly bears no relation to any of the afore mentioned high falutin' interests. Learning that we both had shared the same unwilling celibacy gave us a connection in more ways than one and so it slid progressively further into such forms of ?intimacy?. Whatever.
 
I don't love him; I don't want us to get together as a couple and I don't see us having what would be termed a 'proper relationship'. But for the moment, whilst I am in my adjustment phase and moving from long-term unwilling celibate to fully-fledged sexual being - it's enough.
 
As Survival Tactics go, solo masturbation on the back of such finely honed words will set me up nicely for the day, thank you very much.

We're often told that men are visual creatures...that they'll sleep with more or less anyone and, if they stray, that it's 'our fault' for not putting out.

But what to do when your Signficant Other has no sexual interest in you at all?
Granted, if it's a mutual decision, then that's fine - but what if it's not? How the hell are you supposed to cope with that? And worse, what to do when he's more focused on fulfilling his sexual needs elsewhere - to the absolute exclusion of yours?

So; this is my story. I'm a thirtysomething woman (desperately) in need of a good seeing to....

I'm drawing comfort from my favourite Blondie Song 'Atomic' -
"Make me tonight...make it right....make it magnificant ..tonight - ATOMIC!"