NC for this because it’s hard to write.
Speaking from sad experience. It’s not a bad idea to marry someone who you know is a good person and who will treat you well, even with a few mental reservations. Nobody’s perfect, right? It’s interesting to read your updates, particularly about your childhood and the Love of Your Life. I relayed to your initial post and recognised a lot of the factors you mentioned. My dad spent twenty-five years knocking my mum around, and he also aged out of it. They’re still together and pretend none of it happened. I wonder whether you’ve ever been in therapy, and have considered how much damage that’s done to the way you view relationships.
You speak a lot of truth(or your friend does) about how certain things fade, and what is left can often be enough to sustain a marriage. To stay faithful and married to someone when you no longer want to be (in the absence of infidelity/abuse on either side) is a tough choice, but not an unusual one. It’s a less common decision than it used to be, but I know from reading on here there are a lot of marriages that fall very short of loving, but are not bad enough to blow the whole thing open.
That said, I’d be really really wary of marrying someone who you can’t imagine living without. When I started reading your OPI thought ‘I bet she doesn’t really fancy him, she probably talks herself into it.’ Then I read your update. You sound ambivalent. Sex pesting. Sometimes you fancy him and sometimes not so much. That won’t get better with familiarity, babies, ageing and all the other things that kill desire. You might find what’s intermittently pleasurable now slides back to bearable and then quickly becomes repellent. Then what?
I agree with you about the beauty of his sentiment about how your family life could be, that’s very appealing, as do many of the other attributes you’ve mentioned. In some ways he sounds marvellous. I also married a man who was handsome, in his own quiet way, solvent, kind, a very nice man, my friends all think he’s wonderful; but I knew deep down that he wasn’t right for me. I reconciled it to myself that if all else failed, the most important thing was he was kind and would never hurt me.
Now, nearly two decades in, we are sexually, emotionally, completely adrift from one another. I can’t bear the thought of him seeing me naked or touching my skin. He is stubborn as a mule and lives in denial about many problems we’ve had over the years. Sex got worse after children, then worse again, and now we’re in a contact-free marriage and live as friends. We are resigned, I suppose, that this is it. It’s not very pleasant to consider but it is a commitment.
For the most part we’re kind and decent to one another but I know I’m not showing my kids how wonderful marriage can be and I’m very aware we’re potentially wasting our best years. Even if we never split, we have only one life, and this is how we’re spending it. Sometimes I look at him and think ‘what was I thinking?’ Of course, if we hadn’t married, our lovely DC wouldn’t exist. So I’m glad we did, but I also wish we’d called it a day when we first realised it was effectively over. I wonder what the eventual fallout will be for them. We’d be through the worst of it now and out the other side. Then again, who knows what greater damage we might have done to our kids if we had introduced other partners, split the home, and all that entails. This doesn’t matter to you, but I just want you to really think about the worse case scenario before you take an irreversible step and bind yourself forever to this man by joint parenthood. You don’t know how he’ll be when it goes wrong.
TL;DR I don’t think he’s for you. Don’t walk knowingly into a life-long compromise.