They had good sex for a couple of years. Presumably she found him desirable at first.
I suspect that many women have situational sexual desire. That is, only in certain situations they will have a healthy sex drive. For example, in a new relationship, on vacation, an anniversary, special occation, risky occasion, etc. she may really be into sex. But on a normal, mundane Tuesday with her partner of 10 years–not so much.
It’s not so much situational as high maintenance. Normal Mundane Tuesdays have laundry, and the Girls aren’t around, and she’s gotta get the kids to swimming and flute practice, oh, and she has to get the dress pressed for the recital.
On the cruise, she doesn’t have to impress anyone, that second drink was Really Good (and has 7 ingredients, 5 of which she doesn’t have at home), and hey, what else is there to do?
It might actually be an issue of focus. Vacation, anniversary, etc. You are focused on your spouse…Mundane Tuesday, there’s just so much more vying for your attentions.
Guys on the other hand think: “Grunt. There’s a hole. I think I try sticking something in it”
I feel the need to clear up some things.
I am not avoiding sex specifically because of the mess. That is one of the reasons it is a bit of a chore for me. I am just not a fan of sex. I never have been. My husband is the best lover I have ever had, and I orgasm most of the time, but for me an orgasm is just not that spectacular. We do have sex about once a week or so, depending on work, but it is not something I look forward too. Oh and I don’t get anything out of manual stimulation either. I have all the ahem gear and only pull it out a few times a year.
Because I don’t get much enjoyment out of sex it makes the little things, like clean up and scheduling so much harder to want to deal with.
Oh and I have never had an UTI so that is not a problem with me.
For those women who get into it once they actually start having sex, getting started is the hard part. Getting started can be exactly like taking out the trash, or exactly like getting on the treadmill.
I’m talking about saying “I’m not going to make excuses for why I can’t be bothered to have sex when I know that I enjoy sex once I make up my mind to have it.” There are women who like sex once they are in the moment but who will essentially make excuses not to get in the moment (and I could easily be one of those women) because it’s really easy to put it off and to act like it’s no big deal. But the more it gets put off, the less appealing it becomes. This is the cycle a number of us have to work to avoid.
I wonder if it’s reasonable to assume that marriage has always followed this pattern but where before people kept their private lives private aside from their close friends, now in the age of the Internet everyone can anonymously share how unhappy they are with their married sex lives.
So I guess I’d ask if marriage has EVER worked, in terms of both people being sexually satisfied until they’re too old to get it up anymore?
I can’t understand the appeal of getting married and locking yourself into a situation where if your partner decides they don’t want sex anymore or becomes unattractive to you they can sentence you to forced celibacy until one of you dies…
I’m 29 and galavanting around having all the sex I want, threads like this seriously make me wonder why my friends keep harping on me to settle down! I’m gonna have to get em drunk and see if I can get them to tell me how often they actually have sex with their wives haha
Because You’re seeing only one very specific slice of marriage. Nobody knows me better than my Wife. She is my soul-mate and we are a much more powerful team than we are as individuals. We have created two fantastic kids, and seem to have not screwed them up too much in doing so.
I just don’t get ‘it’ as much as I’d like.
And threads like these have a self-selecting population.
Mine did for 11 years. Then my husband died. There are lots of different experiences in the world, and most of the happy ones are the ones people aren’t bitching about on the internet.
The mundane Tuesday has been stressful for the guy as well, but he still wants sex. Those tasks do not make the sex drive go away in men like they do in women. I’ve spent all day taking care of the kids and doing housework and I still want sex. I’ve spent 10 hours shingling the roof and I still want sex. I can spend all day in stressful meetings and I still want sex. I wouldn’t turn down sex any more than I’d turn down a massage.
And are those stresses the real reason for the lack of sex? Even if they are, they are normal day-to-day stresses. How can anyone expect to not have those stresses in their lives.
I think it may be easy to externalize the problem and blame the stresses. Speaking for my situation, the amount of stress has not changed anything in terms of how my wife wants sex. Maybe the OP can speak to his situation. The only time my wife truly seems into it is when we are in a special situation like vacation or anniversary. Other than that, she has no interest.
Ya but you could have had all that withOUT the actual legal marriage that says she can divorce you and put you through financial hell if you stop getting ‘it’ as much as you’d like.
I’m all for people sticking together, but I don’t see how a guy benefits from this, especially if in a thread like this the majority of the people talking about not liking sex are women and the majority of people wanting more sex are men…going by this sample, logically most women are going to lose their drives before the men they’re married to.
I’m in an open relationship and my GF and I love eachother and we’re close and everything, but we both know if one of us slacks off in the sex department, the other is fully capable of going out and finding someone else. If we don’t want the other person to stray, then we have to make sure to bring out our A-game for eachother. And in the end we’re both happier for it because like working out, once you get started, you realize that it’s awesome and feels good and that you should be doing it anyway.
The ability to stray is kind of like the stench old garbage produces if you don’t throw out the trash. You SHOULD be throwing out the trash, and that stench just reminds you to stay on it. How’s that for a comparison haha 
True, good point!
Yep. I don’t like getting up early, but if I’m going to get fired because I don’t, I’ll get up early. If my GF is feeling “not in the mood” and I say “oh, okay…I guess not tonight then, that’s okay baby…” and spank it in the shower, she’ll stay “not in the mood”. But if I go “oh, okay…well I’m gonna go out with my buddies for a drink” she knows I might find some other girl and it’s remarkable how fast she’s suddenly “in the mood”.
You don’t have to stray, but the possibility of it can do wonders for a partner’s low libido.
You can call this manipulation, but if I agree to a relationship, part of that agreement is that we provide sex when the other person wants it, the way we were when I agreed to be in the relationship in the first place.
If I became 500lbs and stopped grooming and stopped putting in effort to attract my wife, I couldn’t blame her for finding physical relief elsewhere.
I was with my ex for almost eight years, and while we were only married for the last year and a half, we essentially acted like we were married for six (lived together, said we’d be together forever, shared finances, etc.).
I was a sex maniac with him for the first year. I wanted it multiple times a day, every day. I was 18, and he was my first boyfriend ever. He was a sensitive, eager-to-learn lover, and we had a lot of fun.
After that first year, my sex drive began a slow and steady decline. By the time we split up, it was almost non-existent. We were having sex once every other month. We didn’t even have sex on our wedding night.
I simply didn’t want to. Once in a while we would have a talk about how it’s important to him, and I would make an effort to try to get in the mood. I remember once at around year 4 I started researching herbal libido enhancers and ordered a bunch of stuff to make myself a tea and capsules. It didn’t help.
There would be times when I could convince myself that I wanted to have sex but my body wouldn’t cooperate (desert-dry down there). But most of the time I just plain old didn’t want to. Wasn’t on my mind. I felt bad for him when I thought about how long it had been since the last time we had sex, but it didn’t seem like there was any way for me to get in the mood.
When we did have sex, I enjoyed myself. A lot. But when I wasn’t in the mood, his attempts to turn me on just seemed ridiculous. Kissing (my favorite sexual activity) seemed gross and absurd. I couldn’t even remember how or why it ever turned me on. Instead of forcing myself to have sex anyway (we tried that, just once, and we both hated it), I’d help him out in various ways that ended up feeling demeaning and gross.
In the last two months of our relationship, I went to a sexual health doctor and got my blood tested for anything that would be inhibiting my libido. Nothing was wrong with me. Nothing.
Our relationship killed my sex drive. And I realized afterwards that I had never actually been attracted to my husband. But I didn’t understand any of that at the time. I was afraid to look too deeply into our problems. I just thought there was something wrong with me.
Now I’m with a guy who can get me “juicy” in approximately one second. And I want it all. the. time. Problem is, HE doesn’t want it all the time. Ha.
Hey, since my analogy has been well-received here’s another one that I think women with diminished sex drive should take into consideration.
Imagine you had a tough day, and you really needed to talk to your husband about it. You needed to ventilate and work through it verbally, and have a sympathetic person say, “that sucks, I’m sorry.” And you specifically asked your husband to do this for you,* and he said, “Ah, I had a tough day too and I’m really just too tired and not in the mood.”
That would probably feel pretty devastating. But I think for a lot of men, sex offers that same kind of emotional connection and caring. I don’t know if it’s inborn or because they’re socialized not to show emotions other than angry and horny, or what, but I bet it’s true for a lot of guys. And their wives are just looking at the request as coming from a shallow horndog, and missing all the emotional import.
Which makes jsgoddess’s idea so important. If your spouse is looking for emotional support and connection from you, don’t you have an obligation to suck up some of the “I don’t feel like it now” stuff and just go for it?
*we will leave aside the issue of him wanting to FIX everything and not just listening.
I think it’s important to say again that this isn’t just about women with a diminished sex drive but about either partner in a relationship. I think we hear more men complaining because it is more common for their female partners to be the ones not really eager to have sex, but I think there are a lot of couples that are the other way around but neither party is as likely to talk about it because we do a pretty good job socializing girls and women that to say you aren’t getting enough sex is slutty and we do a good job socializing boys and men that to say you don’t want to have sex all day every day is emasculating. So the OP’s situation is both more common and more likely to be publicly talked about.
Sensitive, new age guy post of the year.
It did make me laugh
Ok, that’s you. Why does your wife have to be like you? Women and men respond to stressors differently (generalizing, but it’s mainly true). There are probably many men who would not want sex after 10 hours of shingling–though they may never admit it, given the societal pressure on men to be always at the ready, so to speak.
They may be. They may not be. I remember when our kids were little and I was a SAHM with rug rats climbing me all day long. The LAST thing I wanted was to be touched in ANY way. I craved intellectual stimulation, not physical affection then. But I completely agree with you re the stresses–it’s unrealistic to expect them to be absent, just to be in the mood for sex.
I am not picking on you, but I chose to quote your post for the reason that it reflects the general POV in this thread. Why is the man’s need the default standard? I’m just curious–we’ve heard that the wife may be ill or need therapy or “she’s just not into you”. Why is this her problem or “fault” for not matching her spouse’s libido? Yes, some have tried to allow for that, and have even stated that that should NOT be the case, but overwhelmingly, this is “the woman in my life doesn’t want sex as much as I do–how can I change her?” How come the question isn’t “how can I decrease my sex drive to match my wife’s?”*
Which is not to say that I think your needs or desires need to STFU and just Go Away. But surely there is much more at work here than just “she’s not interested and I’m desperate.”
*It sounds absurd and on some levels it IS absurd. Your libido is your libido. But it’s just as absurd to expect your partner to match you um, head to head (so to speak) in this area.
As Markxxx said, compromise is what’s in order. That and counseling, IMO. But in order for compromise to work, BOTH parties have to be honest about where they stand now and where they’re willing to travel to meet halfway (or whatever division seems equitable to them).
I say this as a now separated wife who was much like the OP’s wife. I had a handy list of excuses ready and I used them often. But in my defense, I did tell my husband, repeatedly (not at first, probably when I was in my mid 30s I started being vocal about my needs in bed) what I needed to get my motor running.
And guess what? I bet almost every woman/wife in this thread can guess what I’m about to say now: he didn’t listen**. I was quite clear and I repeated it. He needed to prime the pump. Too bad, so sad that seems like work to him (and possibly you). Priming the pump means actually paying attention to me–NOT expecting good sex w/o some effort. How about a nice compliment–along with nice compliments upon occasion without an agenda aka want sex tonight?
How about him SHOWING me that he found me sexy? How about not dismissing my input in other areas, then expecting me to be all attentive and sex kitten when he wants it? Having to talk myself into sex and psyche myself up to actually feel desire and be turned on was too damned much work. And for my husband, it didn’t matter how much sex we had–it was never enough. Tell me again why anyone would bother, given that scenario? (I realize my situation is not the same as everyone else’s–I’m just sharing it to broaden the POV here).
This door swings both ways. I refuse to see this as anything but a couple’s problem, with both male and female culpable. I also see no reason for a partner to “fake it to make it” on a regular basis so that the other partner can be reassured that he’s as manly as he thinks he is or whatever preconceived notion of frequency that he may have. My husband had a definite idea of how much sex he was entitled to and how much we “should” be having, no matter what. Yeah, that attitude did wonders for my desire…
The problem becomes (very quickly) so overloaded with emotional baggage and hurts both large and small that it’s no wonder libido is killed outright. The killing is no one person’s fault–it’s like collateral damage. IOW, problems in the bedroom most likely signify problems outside the bedroom. In fact, IMO, major problems in a relationship probably first become known in bed.
**The fact that he didn’t listen was quite clear when we were discussing the end of our marriage. I asked him point blank, WHY he had never (and now you will know what gets Rigby’s motor running) stroked my hair or told me I was pretty or hot (or pretty hot) or flirted with me or showed that he was attracted to me and he said, “I thought that didn’t matter. Afterall, we were married. I didn’t think it was important.” I’ll let you all imagine my reaction to that.
Not in and of themselves, no. But they create a certain thought highway that runs in a completely different direction than happysexyfuntime, and as with any highway, the faster you’re going down it, the harder it is to change directions. I mean, if you were doing 60 in your car and wanted to turn off onto a different road, you wouldn’t just whip the wheel around and expect to make a peaceful, productive transition to doing 60 down the new road. You’d think that was just nuts and a recipe for disaster. Well, our brains don’t make that screaming left turn any better than your car does, so getting propositioned while we’re barreling down the gotta-gotta-gotta highway of laundry and dishes and trash and that presentation for tomorrow tends to not go well.
But special times when we don’t have the gotta-gotta-gotta pounding in our brains all the time, times when we’re going out so there’s no cooking and no dishes, there’s a babysitter dealing with homework and bathtime and “OMG, he’s looking at me,” when our brains are just kind of puttering along the oh, this is nice side street…that turn’s a lot easier to make. And if it’s something we typically associate with sex (and I mean relaxed, pleasurable sex, not gotta-put-out-so-he-won’t-bitch sex), it’s a much smaller turn to make, more like going around a mild bend in the road than making a turn.
I don’t know that it’s even more common, honestly. I know a lot of women who are pretty vocal about never being able to get any, and when I was hanging out on a wedding-planning board, chronic sexual frustration was a constant topic of discussion. We’re not talking about the same handful of people bitching all the time, either; it was dozens of new posters in every 5-page thread. There was even a thread about ways to trick him into fucking you, which is a depressing read. Especially when you realize most of these people are still in their 20’s and not even married yet.
Not that more than one or two of these women would be willing to say these things in mixed company, out of respect for their SO’s feelings.
Yeah, there’s probably a study or a billion that would actually say what the stats are, but I agree with you about the way a lot of women seem to clam up about this sort of thing, around men especially.
With small kids (mine are, thank god, older now) I’d just be TOUCHED OUT by the end of the day. Kids were hanging on me, demanding my attention. I had no privacy. I wanted no more external demands on my body.
After hours of someone want my attention all day long with the sort of intimacy that happens between mom and baby/toddler - even preschoolers, I just wanted to be BY MYSELF.
Once we figured that out, and took steps to deal with it (like having the kids do an overnight with Grandma, or having my husband give me the day off by taking them out for hours in the middle of the afternoon while I sat in a bathtub), it got better.
Somehow I read that as the kids doing an overnight in Croatia. That seemed… more extreme, somehow.
I figured out when was the right time to ask. Nowadays, I never ask at night anymore, but early mornings or after naps is nearly guaranteed. Oh, and of course that old standby: jewelry.
My husband and I have really differing schedules, too - I often wish we could have sex in the a.m., but he stays up until 1 a.m. on work nights sometimes and it’s difficult to get him up simply so I can get to work on time.
I actually enjoy having sex and wish we could do it more often, but both of us are tired from our kids and our jobs, my husband doesn’t feel very attractive because he’s recently gained some weight (we’re both working together to lose it) and half the time I’d rather relax in bed because I spend all day either working, cleaning or cooking.
Plus, and this might be relevant to the OP - sometimes I can’t tell if he wants sex or not. He gropes me constantly, and has for years. Unfortunately, he considers that both affection and a come on, so I’ve gotten to where I can’t always tell the difference between the two. Things are compounded by the fact that, when I assume it’s affection, I’m probably shooting him down sometimes without even realizing it, possibly making him think I don’t want sex and therefore perpetuating the problem. We’ve talked about it, but he just doesn’t get that for me, grabbing my breasts repeatedly makes them practically numb to sexual interest. Same for grabbing my ass - it’s so constant I can’t tell when he wants sex and when he doesn’t.
Anyway, I sympathize both with the OP and the OP’s wife - that stinks that you’re in that situation, and I hope you find something that suits you both.