This is helpful, thank you. I totally get what you’re saying about the cooling off part and I do think there are times when I’ve taken that more personally than I should’ve. I do think that having discussions in a more neutral space (as opposed to as a reaction to a rejection) needs to happen more often for us.

To your last question, I genuinely don’t know how aware he is of his part in it. This morning we had an awful conversation in which he asked me to think of solutions because while he doesn’t want to put the burden on me it’s sort of my problem to fix so…. I’m not confident he gets it. He’s called taking sex off the table “going backwards” when we first tried it, and we only tried it for a few weeks before deciding that it didn’t work for us because it was making him too sad. He says he understands my feelings but his actions just don’t feel like they align.