My boyfriend and I have been together almost 2 years - he is 37 i am 31. He is very good to me and we are a close and physically affectionate relationship. Friends and family think he is really into me. But there are things that hurt me even if they shouldn't.
It's not that my boyfriend and I aren't sexually active, but I sometimes don't feel he has a natural pull towards me (he always says this is ridiculous). We live together and spend most of our time together and do it 1-3 times a week. He told me early on his preference was once a week but we end up doing it a little more often.
Very early on in our relationship he told me he didn't want to initiate due to hang ups he had. He also only finished some of the time. Both of these things have changed - now he strongly prefers being the one to initiate, and he almost always finishes if we engage. Other things have not changed even though I feel like it's usually good when it happens.
Sex rarely happens spontaneously. We cuddle a lot but it almost never escalates. Instead, if I don't initiate, after 3-6 days he'll ask if I want to do it. He has told me when he is by himself he watches porn and doesn't really think about me often when we're separate other than "flashes of moments" (not sure if he just said this when I got a bit upset). He claims not to watch it often - I know he does at least twice a week, he worked and now applied to jobs from home while I go into an office a few days per week. When I go on trips or away, he doesn't reach out with anything suggestive almost ever. I'm used to more pursuit in past relationships. I'm used to not even questioning whether they prefer being with me to being with themselves. He also rejects me, I don't want to say often per se, but enough times that I wonder. But he says it's normal.
When I communicate my concerns to him I think it makes things worse. If I get at all emotional he says my insecurities are a turn off and just make him feel pressured. I'm not in bad shape by the way - I get a lot of interest from other guys. But I feel like to him maybe I'm take-it-or-leave it in that way. Even when we go on vacation, even when I put in a lot of effort to look good, even when I don't try anything for a long time, the pattern barely changes. He says in past relationships he had to "try harder" to have sex as in pursue more. I have brought up before that maybe we are just too different in our mindsets. He says he is satisfied with our sex life as it is and that he is now older. He did get testerone over the counter supplements and I don't know what impact that has.
I want to be totally fair that my boyfriend has been really stressed for a while, having been unemployed for 6 months (he is trying really hard to find another job). He also has been on a low dose of an SSRI for 15 years. But our challenges have been going on from the start. And I don't know if he was like this before me - I don't think he always was.
I don't know if feeling like he is not that attracted to me is just in my head, as he claims. He seems so loving and then just... not "hungry." Like he does "it" because he feels like we need to and less because he wants to.