Marriage sucks - it really does...

The BBQ Pit
#1

Well, I’m 28 and been married for a few years now. The wife is very sweet and has a great time with her hobbies and taking care of things about the house. Tells me I’m a great husband.

But the problem is - no sex. Ever. Not even kissing or touching - except for rare occasions.

Very strange, and it wasn’t like this when we were dating at all. Just a week or so after we were married, and poof! That whole aspect was gone like a, well, just gone! We go out to dinner or something each week still, but everything’s platonic. It’s like being roommates.

We’ve talked about it many times, and she just doesn’t feel like it anymore - can’t explain it; it’s sort of a performance anxiety thing with a few more aspects. I try to be understanding, but I can’t fathom it - actually she’s a bit surprised at herself too. Naturally she doesn’t want counseling, and as of late she doesn’t want to talk about it either.

So, I’m a bit :frowning: .

I’ve heard about other marriages like this, and I’ll have to say I’m with the rest of you guys (and gals) out there suffering with a enigmatic, frigid spouse. Sucks. Just sucks…

#2

That’s what divorce is for.

#3

Rubish. That what mistresses are for.

#4

Bait and switch. :slight_smile:

If she refuses to try to work it out maybe you should take a long seperation before it’s too late. Your wife sounds like a great friend but if you want a love/lover then she is only in the way.Obviously if you have kids it makes the situation difficult. Eventually you’ll probably have an affair and probably make the situation even uglier.

You have to make it clear how important it is to you and that you are not going to let it slide for the rest of your life. Or you could be a squid and just complain for the rest of your life.

Obviously your wife shouldn’t have more sex than she wants too but she should maybe have matched up with a frigid guy in that case.

(can you tell I read Savage Love, :wink: )

#5

Well, unless you’re happy to live in a sexless marriage for the rest of your life (and i gather from the OP that you aren’t), i have to go with goldfish’s assessment on this one.

As the sex advice columnist Dan Savage said in response to a similar query a while ago, your wife has essentially engaged in false advertising, letting you think before the marriage that she was into the whole sex thing, and then springing on you afterwards that no, actually, she doesn’t like it at all.

If you hid a gambling or alcohol problem before the marriage, and only sprung it on your wife after the wedding, that would be grounds for a divorce. The fact is that most people go into marriage expecting a reasonable sex life, or at the very least they go in expecting to know what sort of sex life they are likely to have. If you go in thinking your husband or wife is a two-times-a-week sort of person, and they end up being a three-times-a-year sort of person, then you have every right to be pissed.

Of course, there are plenty of couples who are happy with a very inactive sex life. But this is the sort of thing that should be a mutual choice, and that should be made clear before the wedding. Letting your partner think that you like sex as much as he or she does, and then turning into an iceberg after the wedding, is grounds for getting your ass dumped, in my opinion.

#6

Hrm. If anyone does have a good idea about this, I’m interrested in hearing it. One of my best friends is in a marraige that apparently is sexless, and she’s pretty frustrated about the whole thing.
And before you even suggest it, ‘helping’ her is right out!

#7

I wouldn’t bust out with the divorce yet. There’s a lot of ground to cover if you actually love one another before you go through the hassle of splitting.

Seeking counseling is a good idea, but some frank discussions of the topic should be had first and foremost. There’ll likely be some fighting and arguing involved in this process, but it’s a necessary step.

You have to help her understand that not wanting sex at all in a relationship is not normal. She should want to have sex with you, provided you are an amicable partner. No offense here, but in many cases like this both partners share an equal role in the dying sex life.

She may not really love you anymore, she may simply not want sex with you, or she may feel romantically unappreciated by you. These are all issues that need to be looked into, and not just with counseling necessarily. You can simply sit down and discuss it.

Believe me, if you have a good relationship with your wife outside of the bedroom, it’s definitely worth trying to work on that aspect and keep the marriage. Good partners are ridiculously hard to find these days. :slight_smile:

#8

I don’t have a lot to add except lots of sympathy and another voice for talks and counseling. If you’re not happy with this, you have to address it; you’ll just get more and more unhappy and resentful, and she’ll just have to deal with it. It’s incredibly deceitful to marry someone with no intention of sleeping with them.

#9

Well Copaesthetic, the OP said they have talked about it and she is not forthcoming on the info and she doesn’t want counselling. He even said she doesn’t even want to talk about it anymore. Seems she has made her decision and it’s time for Thrasymachus to make his. But hey, maybe she’ll let him have a mistress and everyone will be happy.

“Good partners are ridiculously hard to find these days.”

Not like the good old days where your parents would just find them for you. :wink:

#10

This is why I fucking HATE Savage Love bullshit.

ONE: One never need to justify leaving a relationship. You can leave a relationship because you fucking feel like it that day, and as long as you are up front and honest about the fact that you are leaving it is all totally legitimate. All this justifying is just a way to make it the other person’s fault, which is just fucking ridiculous cowardly bullshit. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. Relationships are at will, and if you don’t want to stay in one, you are allowed to fucking leave.

TWO: People are allowed to change. Hell, they can’t help it. No, you shouldn’t actively diguise who you are when dating, but there’s no reason to assume that that was what was going on. It’s just another way to make an unfortunate situation into someone else’s “fault” so that you don’t have to deal with any guilt feelings. No person can promise not to change, and blaming someone for changing is as fucking stupid aw thinking that you have to make it the other person’s fault before you can leave if that’s what you want to do.

THREE: You accept or reject people for who they are, you don’t get pissed at them for not being what you want them to be.

FOUR: An abrupt change in levels of libido can have a physical cause. Has your wife talked to her doctor about this?

FIVE: If it isn’t a physical thing, than there is some issue that she apparently can’t talk to you directly about–she may not even be able to put it into words. Consuling can help a great deal in discovering what this is. It may very well reestablish your relationship. Be prepared, however, for the possiblilty that what it will reveal is just that you have become very different people. If that’s the case, don’t spend one second trying to decide who’s fault it is. See two and three.

SIX: This is a bit cliche, but is your wife tired? Exhaustion kills libido in women. This may not be the case in your situation, but I know several couples where the woman is doing a disproportionate amount of the work–especially keeping the household running–and the anger and resentment, often deeply buried, sparked by that keeps the libido down. In every single one of these cases the man thinks that he does an equal share, but it’s pretty obvious to an outside observer that he dosen’t. You might try tripling or quadrupling the amount of stuff you do around the house and see if it effects her libido.

note: I don’t think that this is normal for most, or even many, couples, but it is apattern i have seen often enough that I think it is worth watching out for.

#11

Yeah one of my good friends once warned me very carefully
“The sex stops the moment you say I Do.”
I have come to learn thats only a very slight overstatement.
If you have discussed this with her and she is unwilling to help, well, I’d say its time to either seek counseling or leave.

#12

I know, CarnalK, I read that part too. What I’m saying is that talking about it is the first necessity. If he’s going to have to find the stones for divorce, he’ll have to learn to put his foot down and say what’s on his mind.

He needs to tell her that this is serious for him, and they need to talk about it. There is no “No, I don’t want to talk about this” in that kind of discussion. I would reply with “If we can’t communicate, then we shouldn’t be married.” See? Communication is the problem, not sex. Sex can be solved, communication issues can’t.

Also, as I said before, there are a lot of issues that I’d need to know about before I’d recommend divorce. We’re assuming here that his wife went frigid with no warning, or that she was “pretending to like sex as much as he did”. Maybe she loves sex, but Thras’s idea of foreplay is shouting “Nookie Time!” and waggling his thing at her.

I’m not suggesting that’s the problem, but it could be. Then suddenly her position doesn’t seem so bad, right?

Basically, divorce may be the only option left, but I’d need a lot more info before I suggested it.

#13

Is her boyfriend bummed out too?

Kind of a rotten way to put it but you may want to do some extra leg work to verify that she doesn’t have someone on the side.

#14

Get a grip Manda JO. His wife doesn’t even like kissing or touching- either she don’t like him or she don’t like “it”

No one is saying that you can’t break up on a whim. People are just saying this is a legitimite reason. It isn’t always someones fault but sometimes it is. People are giving their opinion on what he should do. No reason for you to have a stroke. I don’t get who you are ranting at. If you actually read the OP it says she doesn’t want to talk about it and she doesn’t want counselling. Should he take her to Prof Xavier?

#15

Copaesthetic makes a lot of the points I was going to make, but let me give you a different spin on things.

Stop calling your wife “frigid”. It’s disrespectful and probably untrue. Being frigid is not the same thing as not being interested in having sex at a certain point in your life. And it’s very hurtful fo her to hear. How do I know?

I was that woman. I married young, I loved to have sex before we got married, but then I got pregnant (is she? Did you guys recently have a child? The first trimester is very sex driveless for a lot of women). I went through this three month period of just not wanting anything to do with sex. Hormones are everywhere, I was tired and generally had too much going on with my body.

This three month period left my husband sullen and angry with me. He would claim to understand, but I knew he didn’t. He would pout about it. Gradually I began to feel like myself again, but more often than not, I didn’t want to have sex with him because of the way he acted. Foreplay became a thing of the past. He started casually joking around with his friends that I was frigid, in front of me. The longer it went on, the more guilt I associated with sex. I felt guilty everytime I turned him down, but at the same time I felt put upon by his approach.

Think carefully about your actions. Are you sure that you are giving her the attention she needs outside of the bedroom to feel receptive inside? Do you belittle her feelings about sex? Don’t rush her, but see if you can bring back the spark, the romance of sex, of being with someone you love. Alternately, see if she would be interested in something a little less vanilla…handcuffs or silk scarves, blindfolds.

I personally think it’s bad advice for people to tell you to divorce her because she hasn’t wanted sex lately. I submit that there is something else going on, something causing her feelings, and therein lies the root of your problem. Find out what that is, and work from there.

~J

(As one other poster stated, there is a slight chance that she just doesn’t want to be with you at all anymore… you do need to at least ask her to ascertain the situation, and to let her know how serious you are about this. If she loves you, and you let her know that this makes you feel that the relationship may be over, she’ll start talking to you.)

#16

Copasthetic, I agree with you (said the same thing my first post, 3rd para. :slight_smile: )

#17

Someone should have told my folks that. Both of the kids (me and my bro) are out of the house and I think my folks are going at it more than ever. And they’re in their fifties.

I think Thras’s problem isn’t very common. Anyway, it could be something medically wrong with her - like a chemical imbalance or something.

But if she’s not willing to talk about it or do anything about it, then that’s the real problem.

#18

Thrasymachus, is your wife on hormonal Birth Control - pills, depo, etc? I switched pills shortly after we were married (like, a week) and lost all interest in sex, completely. It happens. I’m sorry, because I know how it can cause problems.

I wanted to want to have sex. I just didn’t want to at all, and there was nothing I could do about it. I stopped taking the pill, and my libido came back.

#19

Jaade provided an excellent example of what I was talking about.

What I don’t want to see here, is Thrasymachus get a divorce and remarry three years from now only to end up in the same situation because his own behaviors may turn his wife off of sex. Men often change quite a bit themselves after marriage.

#20

CarnalK, my point is that this isn’t an issue of blame. There’s nothing wrong with having a low sex drive. She isn’t obligated to have a sex drive at all. If she won’t go to conseling, if she won’t talk to him, then he has to decide if he would rather be with this woman withut sex/affection or be on his own. It’s just a choice, it not about fault or blame. She dosesn’t deserve to be accused of “Bait and switch” or of breaking a contract (mhendo), or of being " incredibly deceitful" (genie.

If she’s just changed, she’s not being a bitch. It normal and natural to change over time. I do think that there might be other issues going on, and that before leaving it might be beneficial for him to encourage her to go with him to conseling one last time before leaving. But I don’t think that there is any evidence that she has done anything wrong.