Starved: how do you go back?
I need to vent because I genuinely don’t know how people handle this.
For context: I’m 30F, married, kids, and in my first AP relationship. I never thought I’d end up here. I was always the “good girl,” loyal to a fault, and my husband is the only person I’d ever slept with.
But over the years, especially after kids, I started realising how deeply starved I felt for affection, intimacy, and honestly… pleasure. The sex in my marriage was never great, but for years I convinced myself that sex was mostly about pleasing your partner anyway. Then something shifted in me. I started valuing myself more and actually paying attention to what I felt and wanted.
That’s when I realised: the sex I’m having with my husband is not pleasurable for me.
I can literally tell him I didn’t orgasm, and he’ll apologise… but not really do anything about it. I’m the one buying toys and taking care of myself afterwards, which he fully knows about. He’s an amazing father and genuinely a wonderful man overall. On paper, he’s the kind of husband people dream about. But our intimacy is just so disconnected.
It often feels completely centred around what works for him. For example, if I’m on top, I like grinding and rolling because it actually stimulates me and helps me get there. He prefers me bouncing up and down because that feels better for him. If I try to move in ways that actually feel good to me, he’ll lose his erection and then somehow it becomes my fault for “changing positions too much.”
I’ve tried talking to him about intimacy and what I’m missing multiple times. I truly have. But it just never seems to fully land.
Eventually, that loneliness led me to finding an AP. We talked for months before meeting, and the connection was unreal. Last week we finally met, and the sex was honestly mind-blowing. Sensual, attentive, passionate, sweet… I finally understood what people mean when they talk about feeling desired and connected during sex. It wasn’t just physical. I felt seen. We had sex multiples times times in the course of a few hours which is crazy in itself cause that had never happened to me with my SO.
And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
It’s not even guilt that’s eating at me. It’s the realisation of how deprived I’ve been for years. Now that I know what intimacy can actually feel like, how do I go back? How do people return to “normal” after that? How do I be intimate with my husband again without feeling sad about what’s missing?
I love my husband. I genuinely do. I don’t want to blow up my family over sex. We have little kids and a good life together. But now that I’ve experienced what I was missing, I honestly don’t know how to put that genie back in the bottle.
How do people do this?