No one is to blame

There is a piece over at Salon by a woman named Lorraine Berry talking about how her sex life has been revived by her divorce. Here is the second paragraph:

I met my husband when I was 24 and he was 26. We married two years later, and except for nights we spent apart, I can't remember a time in the first nine years when we weren't physical. We lived in the Pacific Northwest, and we hiked often, finding it impossible not to stop and fool around in the many meadows and forest beds we created. 

But things go wrong:

But things changed.

No one is to blame for where that piece of me went for the five or six years when sex felt like an obligation, instead of what it had been in my 20s: fun, an expression of pleasure and love, and did I mention fun?

Isn't it odd that a couple's sex life can go completely to pot and it isn't anyone's fault? "It just happened. I don't know why."

Except she does:

Certainly, I played a part. Just before giving birth to our second child, I had blown a disc in my neck. Chronic pain, pregnancy and prescription painkillers are not a recipe for erotic bliss. Instead, I found the closeness I'd always craved holding my children, nursing, carrying an infant. My husband's job sent him out of town once or twice a month for days at a time, and I was in a high-pressure graduate program when I wasn't caring for our children.

By 30, I had turned into an invisible woman. I grocery shopped in sweatpants and hoodies. I glided through public space not making eye contact with men, sure that, as an older woman in a college town, I was past my prime.

And then her child makes an unkind comment about her appearance and her husband agrees. Major stupid on his part to be sure. But what about all those years in between. Do those not matter?

It's fine to say, 'I've been distracted and depressed by other things and sort of ignored our sex life for a while.' But if we do the arithmetic here, she lost interest in marital sex for several years!!!!

And then she turns around and is hurt because her husband gave up on her too.

And now she has a new partner and things are going great. Does she really think it's going to be different this time?