My (31M) partner (30F) suffers from endometriosis. Anyone who knows anything about this condition knows that it is catastrophic for sex and intimacy. It's been extremely difficult to navigate and as a result, our sex life has been a very difficult part of our relationship for the past few years. We have (had?) excellent sexual chemistry and loved to try new things. Our frequency slowly dwindled for a few years until sex was such a sore point that we took a complete hiatus to work on things via individual therapy. That proved ineffective, but we started to try again and had a small amount of success. Again, this was short lived and we are now again taking sex off the table for an indefinite amount of time. I would estimate that over the last 2 years we've had sex about 15 times, often going 3-4 months without any sexual contact.
Let me start off by saying that this is in no way invalidating her pain. I am fully supportive of her and would never pressure her, I wouldn't be able to enjoy sex knowing that she isn't into it. She has tried multiple treatments that have helped a bit with her pain, but the end result (due to a number of factors) is that she has almost zero libido. She says she is more of a responsive desire now, but even when I try to initiate slowly, it's like sex doesn't even come up as a thought in her head. Scheduling sex was not good for us.. we felt forced and almost invariably our "intimacy days" would end up being days that her pain was quite bad, leading to me feeling down for multiple reasons.
A relationship where sex is almost nonexistent has been straining us both. We are in couples therapy but haven't gotten to the point of working on intimacy yet. It's at the point where we are barely even non-sexually intimate because she is almost afraid of anything leading to sex. She has expressed multiple times that she enjoys sex when we have it, and I have found methods to make it more enjoyable for her taking into account her condition. This hasn't helped her desire sex any more, though.
Non-monogamy is really not something I'm interested in. I want my partner and committed to figuring out how to make that happen. Problem is, everything we've tried has not worked and I'm really losing hope. I hate myself for how disconnected I feel without sex because I know this isn't her fault, however I am a sexual person at my core and I know it's self abandonment to pretend that sex isn't important. I am really afraid that this issue is going to hurt our relationship more than it already has.
Please, if anyone has experience navigating this type of situation, please please share.