Sometimes it helps me to just fire off my thoughts and situation here, regardless of the judgement or anything I might get. So here it goes…

Something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember, is being a little smellier down there. Nothing I did ever seemed to make a difference and. I kind of just lived with it. However, last year my husband was cheating on me and this seemed to exacerbate the situation into what I can only assume is bacterial vaginosis. I had talked to him about it a few months ago and he seemed understanding. I didn’t make a doctor’s appointment for a multitude of reasons - lack of child care/support to get to the appointment (my husband was notorious for getting angry when I asked him to watch the kids so I couldn’t do anything), embarrassment, I thought I could try some things and it’d be okay. By the time I realized it wasn’t going away or getting better, we were in an insurance change so I held off on making an appointment. I just confirmed our insurance was in place this weekend and reached out to make an appointment. All of a sudden, my husband got very angry with me acting like it was my fault, I was dirty, not taking care of myself which showed I didn’t care about him, etc. I tried to explain all of what I did above - including that I never even had time to shower when I asked if the kids were awake, let alone make and go to appointment. He the went into why this was impeding our sex life (which okay, fine valid the smell can be gross, I get that!) and acting like it was because of cleanliness (he has ocd). I tried to explain it wasn’t because I was dirty and he kept going on about it, so I reacted by saying something like something along the lines of “oh, so it was okay to sleep with a dirty slut, but not me” making it clear the dirty wasn’t meaning cleanliness. And he responded saying “she was NEVER dirty like you and never had a problem”. Which felt really pointed and cruel. He then proceeded to say things like “if we weren’t together and you went out with someone, they wouldn’t go on a second date with you”. When I expressed that I had been in a long term relationship with this never coming up in this way, he responded by saying “it probably drove him crazy every day”. It made me feel really awful because I get that right now the smell is not great and I’m working on it, I get how that might make him not thrilled about sex or touching me. But the things that he was saying just felt so cruel and unnecessary. I’ve been working so hard to rebuild my confidence since the cheating, and this just absolutely destroyed it and made me wonder why I’m even trying.