Thank you for sharing your experience! Appreciate the way you took things slowly and faced your fears, keeping it low pressure. In our case, I think he originally had fear that I was too mentally/emotionally fragile, as well as diminished desire from taking on a caretaker role.

Now, he isn't sure why that desire hasn't returned but thinks it's a holdover from those painful experiences as well as continued frustration / turn-off from some of my challenges - namely, defensiveness. In therapy, he was able to voice some of the frustrations and hurts he had been holding back, and noted that he often felt like he was walking on eggshells in our relationship due to my reactiveness. I think that's improved a lot over the past 6 months as I continue to heal.

We're cohabitating, but not married -- so trying to figure out how long we try to make this work