u/Iimewire

You know all those automatic comments parroting phrases like "potato quality too shaky camera only 5 seconds long nothingburger 💀 how can anyone believe in this? distraction from epstein files" that inexplicably show up on alien/UFO enthusiast forums from people who are clearly not alien/UFO enthusiasts? Well what if they're not actually bots, but from braindead human beings who spend their time on forums they disagree with, not only so they can be indignant assholes but because they actually can't wrap their heads around the unknown variables in ufology? What if there are people who are incapable of suspending disbelief, entertaining hypotheticals, empathizing with the circumstances of experiencers, having a modicum of faith in others, holding multiple ideas in their head at once, and noncomittally respecting incomplete evidence? What if there are people who don't understand if you try to film something thousands of miles up in the night sky with a cell phone camera it's going to blurry, and the whole point of anomalous phenomena is that it's elusive? What if these people are so dead inside they're incapable of being excited about being at the frontier of the most exciting mystery of our time? What if there are people who just lay down and need knowledge to be authoritatively spoon-fed to them at 4k on TV, and even if they were presented with live news footage of aliens landing on the white house lawn, would probably parrot another trendy phrase they learned from the internet, "AI slop 💀", because it's still not good enough for them to believe until it affects them personally? People who won't believe in something unless they see it with their own eyes (like people who don't believe in germ theory)? What if there are people with no curiosity, no real scientific or investigative spirit, no whimsy, no soul? And to think I share a subreddit and a planet with them? It raises my blood pressure. Those people wouldn't deserve the knowledge, because they don't seek it. I'd rather believe they're bots for my sanity, and that the only humans here are the people who actually contribute substance to discussions.

I (27F) have a "low libido" husband (28M) and we've been together for 7+ years so this isn't anything new. At the beginning I was a very high libido person with an extensive sexual history, but after being rejected constantly, I sort of lost sexual confidence and stopped trying, thus lowering my libido out of sadness, so we sort of match now and I don't nag him about it. But I still get physically pent up about once a month, so I ask him politely for "duty sex" and he obliges.

I just don't see myself as a sexual being anymore, and he says the same thing about me. He says he respects me too much to see me that way, and he is "disgusted" by sex in principle, seeing it as dehumanizing. I used to think he might have low T, but even after he lost tons of weight and started working out and supplementing thyroid hormone, no changes. He's always been like this, so maybe it's him. But it doesn't help my suspicion that I'm simply too ugly, so that belief persists as long as he refuses to pursue me that way. He's objectively a lot more attractive than me. I'm also insecure when he's around other women because he's very charismatic and flirtatious conversationally and, because he never wants to have sex with me, I don't have the evidence that he finds me more attractive than other women at all.

But I know he likes my personality. I do have evidence of that, because he's selective about who he considers interesting, funny, and smart enough to be close with. And it's not like we don't spend quality time together. Last night we played Satisfactory together for 6+ hours straight and we have sessions like that all the time. We work on coding projects together, we have deep discussions daily, we share a friend group, we share interests and hobbies, I feel involved with him and he definitely cares for me.

I feel like I don't have the right to demand more, but for the past seven years I've had to deal with the background perturbance of knowing I'm too ugly for my husband to want to fuck me. It's a blow to my self-esteem that affects how I comport myself every day. Your immediate reaction might be, "Well, ask him to initiate even if he doesn't feel like it!" but (even if that wasn't extremely disrespectful to him) you don't realize how forced and awkward that would be given how unwilling he is to act out any semblance of desire. He sees it as beneath him. As it stands, the duty sex is embarrassingly dispassionate and short-lived, with him just laying there. We love each other as best friends, but I haven't felt wanted in the entire time we've known eachother and I feel like that's got to be a ticking time bomb of some sort. Whenever I've brought it up in the past he's "won" and had me continue to grin and bear it, and I might be able to indefinitely at this point, as I don't see a resolution in sight. Any insights?