View Single Post
Old 22nd October 2009, 10:01 AM   #68
Ageing Grace
Registered User
 
Join Date: Nov 2008
Posts: 738
Re: Husband doesn't want sex

Hello, MMH & Lilybloom.

Thank you for writing here. You both strike me as paragons of patience & understanding! However wise, and however loving you are, it must be a struggle to maintain your self-esteem when there is such a void in your lives where intimacy ought to be. My life is pretty lonely these days, but this loneliness is nothing like the agony I felt while married: lying next to my husband; unacknowledged; unwanted; undesired. I admire your tolerance.

Stating the obvious, lack of marital sex is a problem when the couple's desires don't match. There are many happy couples who hardly ever have sex, just as there are many who still can't keep their hands off each other in old age!

Mismatched sexuality isn't always about frequency. It could be about individual styles of loving; a fetish that only thrills one partner; differing imaginations; changing expectations or, of course, the effects of age and illness.

Everybody knows that a healthy marriage is a balancing act. In all areas of our lives together, we need to give and take as we balance our partner's wishes with our own. Power shifts subtly from one to the other and back again: this actually strengthens the bond between partners and enhances intimacy.

What seems to have happened, in both of your marriages, is that the power balance has become skewed. Your husbands have made unilateral decisions about marital sex - in parallel, intimacy has become eroded leaving you (and quite possibly your husbands, too) feeling lonely and out of place. Quite simply, both men are behaving selfishly in the matter of sex.

Premature ejaculation is an expression of selfishness, too. That's why we forgive it in boys, but not in older men who should have learned the art of give-and-take. As Raymond says: excessive self-gratification, with or without pornography, often leads men to focus on fantasy and a quick ejaculation, at the expense of true loving sex. Again, this is selfish and causes a loss of intimacy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by looiuy View Post
this is NOT about a non-functioning male organ, it's about a husband who is not passionate about his wife, who is too selfish to think and use other ways to satisfy his wife
The reasons why a person might become selfish like this are many and varied. There could be an unpleasant past experience, buried for decades, which slowly poisons the mind. It could be a 'passive-aggressive' response to a power imbalance elsewhere in your relationship. It could stem from a fear of ageing, of feeling less virile than before. It could be caused by an illness, such as depression or diabetes. Or by an outside source of gratification, in the flesh or in fantasy.

In terms of the effect it has on you, the spurned partner, underlying reasons barely matter. There is an imbalance. Your desires and feelings are being permanently scorned in favour of his. No wonder you're unhappy.

Since you both say your husbands are unwilling to explore problems within the marriage, or in themselves, I don't think you'll get very far by searching for clues as to why this is happening. When you focus your own energies on worrying about him (what he thinks; what he wants; what he feels; what he 'should') - you are essentially pushing the balance even further towards him. That will make you even more unhappy, and destroy even more of what intimacy remains.

If you can manage it, I think you both need to take a much wider view of your marriage - and a more pragmatic one.
  • Are your needs & feelings being respected in all other areas? How much give-and-take is there, really, between you?
  • While you're thinking about it, are there areas where you have dismissed his wishes?
  • Has the balance in your marriage become rigid, rather than flowing evenly between you as time passes and things change?
I would ask friends and family for input on all the above, though I realise not everyone would like to do that. You could always post in these forums about it!
  • Are you still in touch with your own sexuality - do you still know what you want married sex to be like?
  • Do you still feel 'like a woman' in your own right?
  • It's great that you're both confident in your attractiveness.
    I know from bitter experience, however, that it's easy to become fixated on how attractive we seem to other people. Past the age of 21 or so, that's not a particularly healthy way to be thinking.
Feeling sexy is more about feeling alive than mere cosmetic appeal.

So what to do about it?

You're clearly not getting anywhere by discussing it with your husbands. So don't. Actions speak louder than words!
  • First, your own self-love.
  • Get creative: take up a new sport, return to your old passions, join an art class, learn a new language, go to comedy clubs, jazz clubs - whatever floats your boat.
  • Make it your priority to fill your own life with joy and enthusiasm! Get back in touch with old friends, or make new ones. Accept invitations to do charity work, join church groups, visit new places.
  • Surprise yourself. Fall back in love with your self!
  • Next, your relationship.
  • Where you found stagnation, rigidity and control (on either side), change it! Don't talk about it, just do it. If you always do the accounts, ask his advice on family finances. If he always drives, take the keys and the wheel. If you wish he'd empty the dishwasher, just ask him. Hand him one end of the sheet when you're folding laundry. Compromise on how the family eats; just shake the rules around a little.
  • Where you feel under-appreciated, invite praise! Women are terrible at this: we get peeved when we're not praised, yet we're always putting ourselves down. Who's to know we wanted applause? Say "I'm really pleased with this dish I cooked / wall I painted / achievement at work / amusing story / new haircut / etc, ISN'T IT GREAT?"
  • Where you want more everyday affection, try to stay open for it without chasing it. I realise you've been doing it for a lifetime, but could you have simply fallen into 'closed' habits? When you both walk with hands in pockets, the possibility of holding hands has gone. If your hand swings loose, sometimes close to his, then the possibility is there. Maybe you could move a little closer when you're sharing a task, or a joke - you know: seduce him. Very gently.
  • Then there's sex.
  • There's no way you can force someone to initiate sex. As you know, pleading and yelling are both horrendous turn-offs. What you can do, however, is make yourself appropriately (and un-pushily) available. See if you can picture how you'd behave if you wanted an old friend, who'd never thought of you 'that way', to start thinking! Gently - subtly - slowly and nicely - available.
  • This works better if you completely abstain from initiating sex. I know it's hard, and feels weird, especially when you've built up loads of coping mechanisms to deal with your situation. But it's humane, low-risk, good fun once you've got started - and it can work!
  • One other idea, totally opposed to the above, is to mutually resolve to have sex every day for a year. This has also worked wonders for many stagnant couples! You start off agreeing that "you don't have to enjoy it, just do it anyway" and, apparently, you find fairly quickly that you're enjoying it after all. There's a sound logic behind this; I'm just not sure either of your partners would agree to it. What do you think?
  • There's a very simple technique to delay ejaculation, which I would tell you about if this were a more free-speaking forum! Beats me why they don't teach it to boys in high school, but the majority of men seem completely ignorant of it until somebody shows them ... Look it up on one of those other forums, Lilybloom, it will at least improve the experience for you both, if not resolve the bigger issue.

I'm very sorry this has been such a long (and rather dull) post. It just seems that so many people are suffering this painful, and private, problem - the more ideas we each put forward, the closer we might come to finding solutions that work for some couples.

When you become used to the idea that sex in your marriage is bad - or non-existent - that silent strain undermines so much of your relationship, doesn't it? The easy intimacy goes, we start to feel nervous around each other and everything starts to feel hopeless. But I don't believe it is - at least, not always. The process can be undone; it's finding the right mindset that takes time and effort.

My little story:

The first Mr Grace and I had stopped having sex. You know, we were always tired or busy - then one of us was ill & had to sleep in the spare room - then we'd sort of lost the habit - and started to feel awkward about sex - so we didn't do it at all - and stopped hugging each other, stopped kissing - and eventually almost stopped looking at one another. He pushed me off him a few times, and then my wounded pride stopped me trying.

After a lot of hard thinking (too little, too late) I decided on pretty much the approach I've outlined above. I chose to believe our downward spiral could spiral upward again, and I chose to feel positive. We got along much better, enjoying each other's company and having fun together again.

After even more time I tried again, only this time with all the tricks & trimmings I knew he liked (but had stopped caring about, because my pride was injured). He burst into tears. He said some lovely things, then he said "it's too late".

What he meant was that he'd already committed to someone else. It really was too late. He got involved with someone else because of the way we were; we were already downhill, she wasn't the cause of our problem. When he said "it's too late", he meant it would have worked if it had happened sooner.

With hindsight, I know that marriage wasn't a good one; it would have ended anyway, once I'd sorted myself out. I learned a very big lesson that time, though.

I learned that pride and dignity are two different things. Fragile, hard and brittle, pride has no place in a loving relationship. Dignity is honest, strong and flexible. It empowers love.

AG

Last edited by Ageing Grace; 22nd October 2009 at 10:10 AM. Reason: formatting
Ageing Grace is offline   Reply With Quote