How can we repair her trust?
Long version:
I've known my girlfriend for over two years now, and we've been together for a year and a few months. We love each other very much, and for the most part everything in our relationship is great. We spend a lot of time together, we have many things in common, and we're good to each other.
However, our relationship has always been strained despite this. We have mainly had conflicts about sex. She felt pressured by me and stressed, and it's now evolved into a strong distrust of anything intimate between us. It's making her very unhappy in our relationship, and we need to fix it.
I should probably state here that this is currently an online long-distance relationship. We are very serious about each other, and have every intention of meeting up in person when we can. We haven't yet due to the huge distance, other commitments such as university, and so on. I'm not posting this thread to discuss that, and am only mentioning it so that you can better understand the events that have led to this problem. I'm not posting this in the Cyber Relationships or Long-Distance Relationships boards because I feel this is a general trust issue and the circumstances of our relationship are mostly irrelevant.
Since this issue has existed since the beginning of our relationship and escalated throughout it, I think it's probably a good idea to summarise the major points in our relationship, particularly the conflicts. So, here we go.
We first met in Q3, 2008. We were both with other people at the time, but quickly developed feelings for each other despite this. Our partners cheated on us and those relationships soon ended, leaving us both free. Our feelings blossomed into love, but she wasn't ready for another relationship so soon. This hurt me, but I understood and waited patiently.
But then she began to doubt her love for me. She said she felt too distant from me, that she couldn't even remember what I looked or sounded like. We had exchanged photographs before but I guess that wasn't enough, so I sent some more to her along with a voice message. This seemed to remedy the problem, and we started to grow closer again. She loved me.
Even though she still wasn't ready to commit to a relationship with me, there was still intimacy between us and we would sometimes talk about how we'd have sex. Eventually, we even went so far as to have cybersex (in text form) a few times. This was great, but also the start of our problems.
I loved cybersex with her. It made me feel happy with her, emotionally close to her, safe with her, loved by her, and connected to her. It's not that I didn't feel happy with her before that, but it just made everything so perfect between us. I was glad that she wanted to be that close to me, and it made me feel special to her. Unfortunately, she then stopped it after we became a couple. I tried to subtly initiate it several times, but she didn't go for it. I didn't even really think anything much of it then, but after a long while of this it nagged at me and I had to bring it up with her.