Yeah, sex is typically an offshoot of loving the other person, because they are your best friend.
This sounds like just two people fulfilling roles. There’s no relationship. There’s just obligations to meet.
That’s not a successful marriage. Not in an era when people aren’t obligated to stay and try to make it work.
What was the point in even getting married? What kept the spark of love alive or deep commitment to one another through out a 5 year long distance engagement? Right now it sounds like you’re incompatible as a couple. She waited five years to marry you assuming babies would soon be in the way.
That couldn’t have been a surprise to you. What do you want from the relationship? Not sex not family? Nothing wrong with that for you but what about her?
It sounds like you’re isolated and estranged from your family. Maybe her relatives can come over and help out?
I’m also wondering what about this marriage is worth saving. They aren’t enjoying each other’s bodies. They aren’t looking for the same things in life. She wants kids and is already over 30 and he’d not ready for kids. He wants her to get a job and she doesn’t want to work. (and yeah, starting work AFTER giving birth is a crazy Idea, it’s SOooo much easier to do that before kids.)
What’s right about the marriage?
(And at 32 she’s absolutely right to be worried about declining fertility. If she wants kids, she should find a man who is ready to start a family now. I can’t tell you how many of my friends waited until they were in their mid 30s and then had a lot of trouble conceiving.)
I apologize again if I came off as a misogynist jerk there. I hope most folks know me a little better than that.
IMO @doreen, with a topper from @puzzlegal, nailed what’s wrong. There’s no there there. They have a license to cohabit and seemingly nothing more.
The OP isn’t talking with us about anything but his resentment and his withholding of sex on more or less economic grounds. We know next to nothing about anything else about the relationship.
One possibility is even he doesn’t know anything else about the relationship. part of why I challenged him in post #2 to think about what he’s getting that he values. Not becuase marriage is all about taking what you want; it isn’t. But if you can’t articulate a list of what you need and want, and compare that to what you’re getting you have no way to think aout your satisfaction or dissatisfaction. And of course she should do the same thing in reverse.
Equally, he should be doing a “what does she need / want from me and am I delivering that to her in a way she understands, appreciates, and accepts?” anaylsis at the same time. As should she be doing the same to/for him.
I’m so very confused. Did you not have these discussion before you got married?
I suspect that we may be going into the thread with different social assumptions (if this is the same relationship):
I do NOT presume to speak for the marriage and cultural assumptions of that culture and nation, and wouldn’t be surprised, rather, I would expect that it be rather different from what I consider the “norm” here in the US, which in it’s own rights, has hugely different assumptions across economic/social and religious groups.
Speaking entirely anecdotally, about some of my wife’s friends of Taiwanese and Saudi extraction (Not remotely the same, but to illustrate the differences) the gulfs of understanding when all parties try to communicate the norms left both sides shocked between expectations regarding living conditions, children, deference owed in-laws.
In other words, using the term marriage is correct, so many of the assumptions, responsibilities and roles were entirely different despite the similarities at the base.
So I’ll leave it to the OP to try to clear up the assumptions and responsibilities in their relationship across the board (especially with the earlier mentioned family issues) before I given even my ham-handed advice.
The OP is also from the UK, which gives a further (small) twist to cultural issues wherein his assumptions differ (some) from those of the US-centric majority speaking to him.
You did not. I am a woman, pride myself on being an old-school feminist, and I didn’t think you were misogynistic at all. In fact I think your post, as usual, was quite wise.
We don’t know much about the OP’s situation (or anyway, I don’t - maybe he has been sharing more info in other threads) but apparently he has married a Vietnamese woman who he hasn’t had needed discussions with about significant issues in a marital partnership: for starters, who is expected to hold a paying job and what the plans are regarding whether and when to have children. This is a huge red flag, and it’s suggestive.
As someone who lived in Indonesia for 17 years and traveled extensively in Asia, I knew so many marriages between SE Asian women and Western guys. The culture/gender matchup itself is not a definitive reason to assume anything. Moreover, some of the couples I knew turned the nasty stereotypes upside down: as in, yes, the Asian wife did choose to pair with the Western man in part because he was from outside her culture, but not because she wanted economic security, rather because she wanted freedom to pursue her career without stultifying expectations for women, and Western men on average were more accepting of independent women.
Having said that, this situation makes me wonder if some of the more disheartening factors that come into play in some (not all) cross-cultural marriages where the wife is SE Asian and the husband is Western are relevant here. I’d be curious to know more about how they met, what their courtship consisted of, how they decided to reside in the UK v. making a home in Vietnam, etc.
Also, why is the OP’s family so disengaged? I hope it’s not because they are racists upset because the OP married someone from a different ethnic group!
Are you saying that you’ve been married for 2 years and never had sex with your wife?
So you agree with the following?
Where in the OP’s description did you get that?
He holds down two jobs. She has no job, which is (if we believe the OP) because she doesn’t want to get one, rather than some practical reason that she can’t.
The wife is frustrated because they are not having sex to get pregnant.
The wife is threatening divorce.
That sounds like someone wanting a meal ticket and a sperm donor to me, rather than someone who loves and wants to share life responsibilities with her partner. I’m particularly offended, as an old-school feminist, that she seems to be A-Ok with not trying to bring in any income at all while he is exhausting himself working 2 jobs. What is this, 1955?
For a marriage to work, especially a parenting marriage, here are some necessary factors.
If your wife has no friends, and your family doesn’t want to meet her, and she’s already expressed a desire to get out, the odds of success aren’t great. And those are only the problems you’ve mentioned here, I’m sure there are others.
Sorry dude but this doesn’t sound like a salvageable situation to me. I would unwind it in the gentlest way possible.
I feel like there are a few big ticket items that you need to on same page as your spouse, or the marriage is doomed. “Who should work” and “do we want to try for kids” are two of those.
And if you want kids at all, and the woman is 32, you should be trying now, it real soon now.
I think she should ditch him ASAP if she wants kids and he’s not on board. And he should ditch her if he is running himself ragged trying to support them and wants a partner who helps support the household, and she just doesn’t feel like working.
And most marriages include sex.
I’m pretty flexible. If you mutually don’t want sex, if you want lots of kids, or none, or if one of you supports the other, or you both work, hey, cool with me. But if you disagree, on not one but all of those… That’s a pretty rocky marriage, with an awful lot of potential for hurt on both sides.
I’m aware of it but I didn’t want to knock her up accidentally
The irony is she’s spent more money than I have so the meal ticket response is not correct.
The responsibilities are pretty much I work and she runs the household, which is fine, the job aspect is less about money and more having her socialise and being around other people rather than just being stuck at the house all day. I wanted her to be a bit more independent so if anything happened to me she wouldn’t be totally at the mercy of events.
The resentment coming from me is that I have worked extremely hard to get to us being in a house and laying the groundwork for building a family, but now I see it all slipping away from me and the last 8 years have been for nothing.
I had sex with her back in VN
From her own savings, you mean? Does she have financial resources apart from what you can provide?
The sunk-cost fallacy is alive and well in all of us. The only thing worse than wasting the last 8 years is wasting the next 8 as well.
Here is a different fellow struggling with a different relationship problem no less severe than your own. You might learn something from his plight.
The thing I most learned from participating in those threads was how dedicated the OP was to rejecting the one and only solution that would actually solve his problem; namely separating from this woman. The parallel to your current situation (and my own previous situation) is quite obvious to me. It does not yet seem obvious to you.
His original thread from ~3 months ago:
A follow up thread from ~ a month later:
I wish you well whatever you choose. Him too.
Many and probably most married people want to have sex with their partners. With the existence of reliable forms of birth control, not being ready for kids yet is not sufficient reason to avoid sex.
Something is off here.