After being married and sleeping with my wife for 4 years, I have a hard time getting interested in the “act”. She is as beautiful as the day we met but doesn’t light my fire anymore. Yet I can get an instant erection when I see a lady walking down the street. Is there something wrong with me?
Not really. Every guy goes through these stages. Something to do with the ancient drive to inseminate as many women as possible and spread around one’s genes. If it persists, you should really get into marital counseling. I would suggest you go by yourself first. For what it’s worth, I have been married for ten years, and have gone through spots where I’m not all that fired up physically about my wife. Not for a while, though. Remember that the most erogenous organ is the brain; if you’re less than ecstatic with your bride for the time being, other women start to look damned sexy. You have to work to rekindle the passion in your marriage periodically, even after only four years. And it is worth it.
{hijack} Love the nick, Shal 
{/hijack}
I dunno, I enjoy sex with your wife…
Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m kidding, of course. Just couldn’t get the thought outta my head when I saw the thread name. FWIW, I’ve had the same expierence at times with my wife. It passes and suddenly you’re goin at it every night.
of course there’s nothing wrong…be creative:-) there’s so much that can be done to enhance sexual pleasure
Any kids, Lamsai? I remember reading a about hypothesis that both partners will lose interest if there are no kids after a few years. The idea is that it’s a genetically-based protection against dying without spreading your genes to the next generation. Even if your brain knows it’s because you’re using birth control, your genes may assume it’s because it’s time to more to more fertile pastures.
Of course, having a baby or two can do a number on your sex life too. You’re screwed if you do, and screwed if you don’t. Or is it unscrewed?
are you two actually spending any quality time together? or has your relationship become one where it’s seeing each other after work, at the dinner table, going to bed, waking up, going to work…
perhaps you need to just spend personal quiet time together, just the two of you, and let your brains do all the work, a flame just might spark suddenly…
Soulsing has hit the nail on the head.
My wife and I will be married 6 years next month. We are going through the same thing. Children seem to be the main culpret. Between raising them, work, and hobbies that we both enjoy, we just don’t have the drive or interest we used to have in our sexual relationship. We have realized that we need to spend some quality time with each other and have scheduled a small 2 day get-away that I think will really help the matter, at least I think so. We will see come June 17th!
Dragwyr wrote:
Maybe you’ll see come and maybe you won’t.
Survey-style questions such as this one are perfect for our new forum, In My Humble Opinion. I’ll send it on over there.
hope it works out for you Lamsai. i’m going through some rough stuff myself right now, and quality time is hard to find for us. good luck.
Lamsai, my friend, I have two words for you – Role Playing.
Okay, so you’re not feeling particularly horny around your wife? I’ll tell you why, and it won’t be sugarcoated. She looks the same as she did 4 years ago!
So what do you and her need to do? Fullfill your fantasies. Plain and simple. I know you have them – the nurse and the patient, the firefighter and the frightened victim, the boss and the secretary, the cable guy and the lonely housewife – you get the picture.
You have to ask yourself what turns you on. What have you always dreamed of doing with someone, but never could? Well, now you can finally make that happen. You need to be serious about it though, otherwise it’s not going to work.
The first time you do it, it may seem silly seeing your significant other dressed up in a costume (and also, her seeing you dressed up). But, this is why you need to be serious about it. The two of you laughing at each other is going to kill the moment.
Also, don’t restrict the role playing to within the house. If it requires you to go outside, by all means, do it. Like for example the cable guy and lonely housewife scenario. Put on a cable guy uniform, go outside, knock on the door, and let her answer it. You don’t have to go so far as to get a cable van, but, you know, be as realistic as possible. It also helps if she doesn’t actually see you dress up.
So, Lamsai, I leave it to you. You can either sit at home and shine your helmet. Or suit up in that firefighter uniform, and do your deed.
How does your wife feel about this? Is she complaining or noticing anything amiss?
When this new forum was proposed, we wondered what types of questions would find their way here. Now I knowsigh.
All I ask is that you try to keep out responses that obviously belong in the BBQ Pit, o.k.? Otherwise:
Welcome to the Not-So-Great Debates!
If you’ve lost interest already, can you imagine what she must be feeling? She probably lost interest after 2 years. No, I’m kidding.
All of the above is good advice. But it happens with women too. You guys start to get old to us too!! It’s times like these in your marriage that you need to be really careful that neither of you strays. That you remember the reasons that brought you together.
Marriage is like a job, you have to work on it every day.
I think so dude. I don’t have a problem getting an erection with her.
As Ultress says, you have to work at it everyday.
Marrying isn’t like buying; you never ‘close the deal’.
never stop courting her. we’ve been married 17.5 wonderful years, and I’d marry her all over again, no regrets with our relationship.
Dragwyr
I am not picking on you, Dragwyr, but I just wanted to point out that this attitude can get a person in trouble. Big, dramatic actions like running away for the weekend can be fantastic, but they are not going to make any long term diffrence without any lead-up and follow-through. People have trouble going from 0-60 in a few hours: the inertia of a monotonous phase in a relationship can not be redirected with one fell swoop. If you are going out of town in 2 weeks, you need to start building the anticipation now. Make an effort to spend a little time gossiping and giggling together about all the things you are going to do; find out what her expectations for this trip are and make sure she knows yours. Scrape up enough money to buy flowers or a negligee or a bottle of wine or new handcuffs, whatever you cn afford and is signigant to both of you.
Afterwards, you will have to find ways to spend time with each other that will work in day-to-day world, unless y’all have the money and the babysitters to do this on a regular basis. One thing that I have learned is that time together dosen’t have to be in big chunks, as long as it is consisitient. If you barely talk to someone for six months and then suddenly are stranded in a motel room with them you feel like you have nothing to say; it has been so long, and you have no idea where to start. Life is full of little day-to-day details that it is important to relate to one another, but when you save them up they all seem too insignifigant to bother talking about, or, worse, what was a slow and minor process of change can seem dramatic if it is revealed all at once. (I never knew you liked the X-files! Oh, I’m a raving fanatic now. Didn’t I mention that I started watching it last year when you were at work?)
I find that in those phases of my relationship that the SO and I can manage to schedule lunch together five days a week, everything goes better. It never seems like we talk all that much: this is no emotionally charged “quality time”, but the casual chatting means that we develop a much better sense of where the other is at at that particular moment in life and feel more in tune. When schedules make lunch together impossible I try and make sure we spends a few minutes in bed each night chatting about our day–it makes things go smoother the rest of the time.
My mother always says you have to have faith in a relationship, that monotonous periods when you maybe don’t even like the other person all that much are not uncommon, but that you have to remember that there were reasons you chose to spend the rest of your life with this person, and that those reasons will become relevent again if you are patient, and don’t do anything irreversable (i.e., sleep around) in the meantime. She also said that relationships are like the stock market–lots of ups and downs in the short term, but the over all trend is steadily better and better.
Just imagine that she is the woman walking down the street…
That is, notice when other men notice her and flirt.
Start getting suspicious
That makes you want sex with her, to prove yourself or something.
Then you accuse her of something, things cool for good, and you split.
That’s how I did it with my first wife (not four years, four weeks to cool). (Oh, the fact that we’d met on a set and had nothing in common after the run ended, but were still married, and got new jobs in different cities might have helped. But the flirting drove me nuts, and all your fellow actors flirt with every woman on stage.)
You want real-life advice? When it’s gone, it’s gone. Split now before you both get too old to rebound. Or have kids and make a real mess of it.
Sorry if I’m down on first wives, but divorce was the best step I ever took, and I’m not shy to say it. Or recommend it.