FUNNY! I did a Google search for relationship advice and clicked absentmindedly through links and landed on yours. I felt comfortable writing, so I hope you can help me.
I am 28 and married to a man I have been with since I was 19. He is kind, caring, loving, thoughtful. He is what every woman ought to dream of marrying. We have been married for three years. When we were engaged, I panicked about five months before the wedding, and ended up in the arms of another man.
I quickly felt awful, told my fiancé, and he forgave me after we talked through it. I actually left my fiancé at the time for 48 hours. I felt the panic of being alone, the technicalities of the breakup and how I hurt him. I hurt him so much, I went back home and back into his arms. We married five months later.
My wedding day was magical, as is any wedding day, I think. I did love the man I was walking towards. I’ve always loved him; never in love with him; never had that moment; never passion or romance. It was always thought-out, logical, and safe.
My past as a teenager was sordid and difficult. He is one of the least sexual men I’ve ever met. To this day, our sexual relationship is limited to maybe a few times a month. That’s not due to time passing: That’s how it’s always been.
We live together well. We don’t argue; we can talk about anything. He is my best friend. I feel like he’s my roommate. I don’t feel love in the marital sense. I am deeply unhappy, and feel a big part of my life is missing.
He talks kids, but I can’t bring myself to have children with him, because, deep down, I know I’ll leave one day. But how? How do you leave a man so wholly committed to you; so kind and wonderful?
He has no idea how unhappy I am; it would tear him apart. My fears lie in the life connections we’ve made. Our friends, our families, our house, our dog. His whole world will fall apart; and what reason can I give him for all that? “Gee, I’m just not happy.” It seems so petty.
Hope

Hope,
There are two problems in telling someone “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” First, it’s a mixed message, and mixed messages always contain a lie. Second, when you say that to a man who loves you: What will he think? “She loves me; I just need to do more.”
That’s not the case at all. You don’t want him to do anything. You want out. Because of the circumstances you grew up in, you were the “bad girl” who found a good guy to marry her.
Five months before the wedding, you tried to call it off by cheating, and he was such a passive male he accepted what you did. He has issues of his own.
Some people would say intimacy is only a small part of life. That’s point-blank wrong. It is such a big element for you, that you are prepared to lose everything else in the marriage, all you have built around it, because of that one element.
Your insides rebel against the idea of intimacy and children with a man who isn’t right for you. The good stuff in your life is built upon a lie, like building a house on land someone else owns. This man is a man who belongs to another woman, so you should anticipate losing it all.
Sometimes we have to punish ourselves when those around us are too weak to give us the consequences we deserve. That’s the only way we can get to where we need to be: To the truth; to what is right.
Wayne & Tamara