Hi, long post alert! I’m not a parent but I am looking for some advice from other women with life experience. I’m 23, I’ve been in a relationship with my boyfriend for three and a half years; the majority of that time spent living together. From the outside it would seem that I’m happy with my life. But to be honest, I’ve been unhappy for the past year and a half. It’s something I have buried into the back of my mind because i do love my boyfriend and would never want to hurt him. He really is the dream boyfriend: he is nice to me, and now he has a good job he will always pay for things. I just feel like we don’t have anything to talk about anymore, and our sex life is non existent. I feel very guilty about it but I am now never in the mood to have sex with him at all. years of having the mirena coil hasn’t helped my sex drive, but I don’t feel attracted to my boyfriend any more and I think that’s the main reason we don’t have a sex life. It’s a topic that we don’t discuss but is obviously in the back of both our minds. I feel incredibly guilty about this. I feel that my previous relationships have always fizzled out with me feeling trapped and ending them. And when I felt the signs that it was happening with this relationship I buried them because this is the first person I’ve truly loved and i thought we were soul mates. I told myself I should stick at it and those doubts would go away. It’s difficult to describe. I love being with him because it feels so normal to be around him, he literally is my other half. I’m so used to being around him, and we’re very cuddly with each other. He spends a lot of time at work now with his new job so we bought two kittens to cure my loneliness. Now he works away on the weekends and each time I’m alone with my thoughts and start to think what am I doing in this relationship. Im staying in it out of guilt, fear of change, fear of being alone, financial reasons- there’s no way I could afford to live on my own and I have no where else to go. Now I have my cats to think about who I love like their my children. I just feel so trapped. I feel guilty about thinking of leaving but then guilty that I’m wasting his time pretending to be completely happy. I could continue to live a lie, it’s easy to focus on the positives but surely that can’t work forever. Surely I would crack one day and that could be years away and I’ll have wasted both of our lives. It’s scary that I have thought i would spend my life with this person and with one decision I could change the whole course of our lives, potentially for the worst. I just feel so lost. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this and wondered if anyone had been in a similar situation and what their experience was?