DH and I have being together 18 years, have 3 DC and love each other. That is the most important thing is that we do actually still really love each other.
We both have had to deal with our upbringings.
I realised a few years ago that I was the scapegoat and I fought back and actually now have a nearly normal relationship with my mother. I was sexually abused by my father and have nothing to do with him, I reported him when I was 15 and none of my family have anything to do with him. He lives 150 miles away so is not in my life in any physical way.
My Dh has just started to realise that his mother and father were not the best parents in the world. They were all kept in line by his mothers emotional abuse and his fathers insistence that they never say no to her. So he is now starting to deal with this, he is pulling back from them as much as he can but is at the beginning of a long process. They only ever visit on an DC's birthday etc so we do not have to deal with them in our home. He visits them once a fortnight with the DC, I go every 2-3 month and phone every month or so. They only live 20 mins away. DH works with his father but they get on ok as long as they don't talk about anything heavy.
I have a chronic illness that he got progressively worse over the last year which means I cannot work any more. So I am now a SAHM. We do not have a lot of money, we just have enough but there is no real extras. Because of my illness we now have less than half what we used to earn between us so have had to make major adjustments in our life. We are not in UK so a different welfare system.
Our sex life has struggled greatly between the illness and the stress and there is always the sexual abuse lurking in the background. I have had counselling and for the most part have dealt with it but there are times when it rears it's ugly head again. This is one of those times.
We are putting so much effort in to trying to make sure our DC are happy and that my illness does not impact their life too much that we have forgot ourselves in the middle of it all. We can get babysitters (all school age, no babies) but have no money for nights away or dinners out but we both want to try and put things right again between us. We are both tired and I am very overweight between medication, chronic pain, lack of exercise, exhaustion and no motivation left.
Sorry this is so long but I want to include all relevant information.
I don't know if anyone can help but it helps me to write it all out. I adore him and he is my best friend and that is the only thing we cling to is that we definitely want to be together but we are lost as to how we readjust our lives to our new normal. We used to have sex 3 or 4 times a week and had plenty of money and tbh we lived with our head in the sand most of the time and I think we are now dealing with everything at once and are both sad. We are both in our mid-late 30s.
Thanks for reading.