I would love some thoughts...

I have been finding a lot of comfort in following this forum the last few months! I am hoping to get some input on my own ongoing uncertainty about my long term relationship. I have been with my partner for 15 years. We met when we were both 22. I am anxious preoccupied in general although it has never been a big issue in our relationship because my partner is so secure. I feel incredibly comfortable and safe with him. I guess what I should have said there is that I have had a tendency to display protest behaviours in the past but it never escalated to a two- way issue because he just seems to deal with it well. I have improved a lot since we had our first child 5 years ago and I feel like I’m getting better all the time with my communication, especially with what I am learning on this forum.
The problem is this....I am unsure what my feelings are for him. Here are the reasons: I have not wanted to have sex with him in 14 years. I often turn my cheek when he leans in for a kiss. I often feel like I have no interest in the topics of conversation he brings up and wish he would stop talking and leave me alone. I find him a bit boring and I’m frustrated that he doesn’t share appreciation for a lot of the things I do. After reading about Anne12’s posts about the concept of masculinity/ feminity - I think I sense more feminity from him than what I find attractive.
So what do people think. We have 2 children, we have a friendship. Why do I have these doubts and would it be selfish to break up our relationship because I feel I am missing something?
I should also note that at this point, although I am working on it, I am far from secure. To be honest I have never discovered who I am and when we got together I had no concept of what I found attractive, what I wanted, what was important to me. So I feel like, because he was such a great friend I just went with it.

claire81 , you're not a terrible person. You got together young and didn't know how much you had to unpack. Society doesn't talk about insecure attachment, it talks about passionate love, white picket fences, and happily ever after. A lot of people struggling with this on these boards are in their 30s+, and I don't think that's a coincidence. It's because they didn't know to ask the questions since society doesn't broadly discuss it, or that the questions have answers, until life got painful enough.

If you have a secure partner, and the relationship is still stable after all this time with a close friendship, I wouldn't leave yet. I whole-heartedly agree with mrob and have posted in the past that the only way to heal your own insecure attachment is to do the work, committed and self-motivated. However, there are benefits to having a secure partner if you want to be in a relationship in general and are working through this stuff.

Like often attracts like, and insecure attachment folks often (unconsciously) are attracted to each other and "bored" by secures. Your ambivalence for your husband, believe it or not, is totally normal for an AP, and I can almost guarantee you would happen with any secure partner (if you were able to find another) if you haven't yet gotten secure enough yourself.

The benefit of having a secure partner in this part of the process, though, first and foremost, is they don't trigger you. I'm earned secure from AP, with so many years of dating every avoidant guy you can imagine. Anyone with an insecure attachment style spends plenty of time getting triggered by things, often by themselves, because of the unprocessed background trauma from earlier in life getting projected all over things. In the case of AP specifically, this is anything that activates your fear of abandonment. If you do not have a secure partner, then you have someone with their own attachment issues butting heads with yours. AP and AP generally don't attract each other (the boredom you feel with your secure would be amplified with someone more anxious than you, and you'd simply be put off by it). But pair AP with FA or DA, who respond to their own triggers by distancing and avoiding emotional issues, intimacy, vulnerability, and conflict resolution, and suddenly you've got your triggers plus your partner's behavior constantly triggering you on top of that (they respond to stress by wanting to move away while AP at the same time want to relieve anxiety by moving closer). And it'll feel passionate and overwhelming and cause an enormous amount of stress as it will never, ever be stable. This undermines one of the tasks you need to do to earn secure, which is learn to recognize and manage your own triggers, which for AP means learning to self-regulate, until you've healed enough that they start to just go away.

In the process of earning secure, you need a lot of focus on yourself and free space to do that. I'm not going to lie, it's a tough, painful process that can easily take a couple years -- but don't let that dissuade you because it CAN be done! A long-term, committed secure partner should be able to give you a safe home base while you're doing the work. Another insecure can't do that because they can't de-personalize your needs and can't communicate when they can't deal with the situation. Part of the belief that having a secure partner is the "magic bullet" that fixes your attachment is they model healthy relating and stability and don't upset your nervous system. In my opinion, without your own work, this allows you have a secure attachment with that partner but doesn't change your overall insecure attachment style and the challenges that go with it.

Back to your situation specifically. AP feel "boredom" with secures because they have issues with their own identity and their own self-acceptance, but there's a disconnect with yourself that makes it hard to understand that. So those feelings of ambivalence, that are actually about yourself, get projected onto your partner. This is NOT intuitive, and takes real introspection and digging into your past and your pain (pain from before your partner) to understand. But it's related to APs not being able to regulate their own emotions properly, looking to others to do it for them, and being conditioned to also feel they need to regulate everyone else's while everyone else regulates you. It's a boundary problem. Yet what it feels like is, your attachment wounds aren't getting triggered, your nervous system isn't getting overwhelmed, so you must not feel the highs of attraction and instead feel bored. But if you dig enough layers down, you'll see this isn't true.

You would have to talk to your husband about this, very deeply, if you haven't already, and continue your therapy. I don't think at all you should tell him you doubt your attraction to him, but you should tell him about your AP attachment. That you have baggage stuffed down that's impacted your relationship and connection to yourself and you want to address it because it's made you unhappy and disconnected from both yourself and him, but you need some space and patience because it's a rough process. The space I found I needed was to pick up some of my own hobbies and challenges I wanted to do, not for anyone but myself. Not to impress anyone, not to validate myself, just because I was interested and maybe embarrassed and never tried it because it wasn't "cool" enough or I didn't feel confident in my ability to do it without failing (and then learning to fail gracefully). And not do it to branch out and meet new people to distract myself with heady new connections, really just having some space to make a couple things my own and learn more about what I liked and who I am.

It's a lengthy process that will change you, and there's no guarantees that when you do connect with yourself that your husband will be the right match. But if he's secure, as your own boundaries strengthen and improve and your connection with yourself grows and your ability to communicate and to understand your own needs improves, eventually I'd expect your emotional connection with him and appreciation for the long-term love and friendship you share would grow too and the attraction will start to return. Or, you'll be secure enough to have confidence and trust in yourself that you two grew too far apart and can end it amicably. Either way is a win! But I think it's too soon to throw in the towel just yet, when you're early in your process of getting more secure.

Good luck