I thought I would make a post with the purpose of showing that the seemingly excellent relationships that others have were not always what they are now. Perhaps others would like to participate?
There’s a lot of talk about communication here on the forum - to think it’s cliché is to be completely mistaken.
The act of not communicating honestly with the OH will create greater and greater resentment over time - sometimes years - resentment that will create distance, arguments and possibly rupture. This is my story.
I’ve been in a relationship with a man for 20 years - we’re a couple in our mid-30s.
When we moved in together, we discovered that there were some aspects of the relationship that we both didn’t like - but as we didn’t have good communication, these aspects turned into bigger and bigger problems as the years went by.
Everything has always been beautiful between us, but we were not sexually 100% satisfied and we were closed on the subject.
Each one of us secretly blamed the other for the less good aspects of the relationship, and the resentment grew. When we finally started to “communicate" - it was in a wave of confrontation, which only helped to make everything worse.
By then, we had already spent more than a decade of common life under the same roof.
It was decisive for us to accept that both of us were wrong in not communicating effectively what we feel and want and in listening to the other for all those years.
What were our problems?
We had sex once a month, sometimes less and it drove me crazy. One day I caught him watching porn and I was devastated by it, I thought that he preferred porn to me. I created a problem with my own image, started to hate my body, I stopped wearing makeup and refused to wear lingerie anymore.
When we had sex, it was 100% vanilla and a lot of foreplay with kissing and stuff - I hated it, but I didn’t tell him anything because I thought he did it because he liked it. Turns out, he hated it too and he only did it because he thought women liked it, and he avoided making love to me because it was so much easier to just jerk off than have boring sex. If only we had communicated…!
What happened when we communicated what we really felt, without the intention of blaming but rather of finding solutions?
We slowly started giving hugs and kisses again (outside of sex of course! 
), however short they were, every day. We went back to sleep hugging each other. We started talking more and more about sex and kinks, using Wikipedia and other sites to explore.
Over time, we began to have more and more sex, more and more rough, with more and more dirty talk. We bought lots of sex toys. We began to masturbate in front of each other and we don’t hide it if we do it alone. We started watching porn and filming our own scenes. 
I started to want to please him and fill his kinks with lingerie and shoes, put on makeup and paint my nails again. He told me he couldn’t be happier sexually - I feel the same way. 
I have an almost perfect relationship today, but it almost ended because of bad communication in the long term.
Everyone who encouraged me to separate at the time was wrong! It’s so easy to tell others to end their relationship… 
A long-term relationship is about teamwork and hard work. Sometimes breaking up is inevitable, but it should not happen before all possibilities for reconciliation are exhausted. May this bring hope to someone. 
a lot of people need to be reminded of this.
