Dear Emily,

I have been living with my boyfriend for 10 years now. We are the right age to get married, have talked about it, but are absolutely afraid of doing it.

We used to be very loving to each other. We still kiss and hug but the sexual part is now almost nonexistent. We aren’t married yet, but we act like an old married couple already. We are not even over 35 but we only make love once every two months or once if it’s a good month.

I feel he is being distant to me as I am to him. We rarely say I love you to each other.

I do not miss him when we are away from each other and I even encourage him often to go on vacations alone. I have no doubt that I care for him. But it’s not the kind of love that would want me to have sex with him. I love having sex if possible every day—I am that passionate, but just not with him. I want him to be the one to tell me it’s over because I won’t. Is there something wrong with me? —MARZ

It looks like you’re both running on empty and it’s clearly perplexing. One would think that after 10 years of cohabitation, you’d already be starting a family. Craving for sex but not with him is definitely alarming!

Aren’t his hormones working anymore? Unless he has a physical illness you aren’t aware of, what about him turned you off, so that you just remained off? Did he utter something disgusting, a tiny habit of his perhaps that grated on you, an abhorrent body odor you couldn’t be honest about?

Life is made of bits and pieces of happy and sad moments that turn humans into unforgiving pillars of stone. Or it could be small puddles of misunderstanding that just deepened into this vast river of animosity.

Have you reached out to anyone—family or friend—to vent about your ambivalent feelings, if you cannot open up to him freely?

It’s easy to get rid of him and start anew. But before you become a statistic of throwaways and disposables, peel your life as you would an onion and see what you can salvage from your 10 years in it. As well, open a door for an honest conversation with him. You might discover you’ve been a square peg in a round hole all this time.

Don’t force yourself to make do with Band-Aid solutions to make it work. Life is too short for misery.

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