My two older and my two younger sisters were born less than a year apart - I don’t think I have to ask. 
That’s rough - you have my sympathy. I guess the bottom line for you is if everything else she gives you makes up for a complete lack of physical intimacy. If not, well, it’s hard to blame you for being a human being who wants to be happy.
I haven’t decided yet.
I totally see where you’re coming from, but in this hypothetical party’s defense, sex isn’t everything in a relationship. Even in a relationship devoid of physical interaction both parties can benefit from lots of other aspects in the relationship - even more so if they have children and need to be relied on as good/stable parents.
ETA: just the pairing of the two words: sexless marriage, makes me sad.
You’re right. It isn’t. For me, then, that’s where the cheating doesn’t make sense. If it’s important enough to risk the relationship exploding in my face, it’s important enough to address honestly and openly. If it’s not important enough to address honestly and openly, it’s not important enough to risk the relationship for.
ETA: Agreed with your edit, too. It’s a sucky situation.
The medications my wife is on decrease her sex drive. She can go for weeks without it. I can go for days, sometimes. Trying to get matched up can be a problem. Most of the time it isn’t even worth the effort to try, just to find out that a back rub really is only a back rub.
She does try, about 3-4 times a year, to have sex with me. And I appreciate the times that she tries. It’s been this way throughout most of our 12 year marriage. So, maybe it is my fault with putting up with it for so long. If I try to talk about it with her, I get something like, I’m sorry, I will try more often, but it stays the same.
I really can’t cheat. Partly because I don’t feel right about it, and partly because the Army has rules about that (Legally, there are no open marriages in the Army.) So, I take what I can get. I used to think I was good, maybe not great at sex, but now I wonder. If I was to cheat, it would only be to see if I was still any good. But I don’t think I will.
Just my 2c.
SSG § Schwartz
I didn’t vote because I don’t personally have a fixed position on this, but this probably comes under option 5 You Forgot.
I had a friend come to me for advice on this exact matter recently. The relationship is good (he actually used the word “blissful”). She feels that as she doesn’t want full-on sex, just “some sexual contact” (which I took to mean oral and/or masturbation, whether mutual or not I didn’t find out) that should be enough for him.
Advising him to cheat seemed out of the question (he felt it would be a deal breaker because of the deception as much as anything) and due to the above, having an open relationship is not an option either.
So I advised him to start going to a brothel. Note that they are legal and regulated here, there is virtually 0% health risk. I hope to find out how that went shortly.
A brothel isn’t cheating?
My marriage is almost identical to one of those stated above, except instead of three years, it’s been eight. I stay because I love him no matter what and because he’s forgiven me for some terrible transgressions (an affair) of my own. Do I hope things change and improve? You bet. But I’m staying as long as he’ll have me.
Why not? Marriage shouldn’t be dissolved by our primitive apelike desires for physical satisfaction.
He needs to man up and have a come-to-jesus conversation with her; or man up and leave. It’s not even about the sex – no one has the right to decide what another person needs and wants. Doing so is especially egregious in the context of a relationship. Wow. Just… wow.
And there’s this, too.
Wow. But I have to ask…how did you know she was Panamanian?
And to those with sexless marriages…you have my sympathies. Are any of you happy? Do you get your happiness elsewhere? Would you have married your spouse knowing what conditions would be like down the road?
Marriage is a relatively new institution. People have been bumping uglies since man and woman came around. Nobody should be ashamed of their bodies or their desires. For centuries women have had to pretend to be less interested than men in sex, have been pressured by society to hold out on them, to use sex as a weapon and a tool for bartering. Your lame attempt to roll back the clock by chastising people to stay in their sexless marriages and relationships, condemning their desires and needs must stop.
Idiot.
Yeah, I was outta there. Lack of sex was a symptom of a larger problem (and to be fair, I left mostly due to the larger problems.)
But no, not gonna live without it ever again.
And hey, to be fair, in my current happy marriage, I go through times of high stress where I’m not as interested, but I make sure he’s…er…taken care of. And sometimes that leads to happy fun times for both of us, because I get into it, and sometimes he’s just happy and I’m happy for him to be happy. Cause with school and work (for us both, law for me and MBA for him) and a child and two dogs and three cats and a house and a yard and things to be done I sometimes just go, you know what? Nah, I just wanna sleep. But he doesn’t. And sometimes I make sure he gets what he needs, even if it isn’t what I need right that second.
We had extensive business holdings in Panama and for the first year-and-a-half of our relationship, flying together to Panama multiple times.
When the sex stopped and the relationship started to deteriorate, we started traveling separately. I was fed lines like, “both my parents and grandparents marriages were destroyed by infidelity and it scarred me terribly so it is something I WOULD NEVER DO.”
Because of our business, we had mutual access to each others’ business emails and when he failed to return some prostitute’s phone call, she emailed him and I saw the message. Pretty stupid to have handed her a business card, huh?
Hey, show some respect for those apelike desires - they’re the reason that we’re all here.
Wow. I honestly have to say you might be the single most interesting person on the dope. Your stories (sometimes heartbreaking) are always so…well, interesting! You have a very intriguing life, I hope you continue sharing stories.
I mean, today the wildest thing I did was eat a cobb salad.
Well as I said he wants to remain in the relationship, if only there was a way to get past this sex thing. I like both parties very much, I’d hate to see them break up. I saw the options as:
[ol]
[li]carry on as is[/li][li]leave[/li][li]cheat without her knowledge[/li][li]cheat with her knowledge (or at least, have that conversation)[/li][li]the brothel option[/li][/ol]
I just saw #5 as the lesser evil, given #1 wasn’t an option by his account. #3 and #4 would likely have amounted to #2.
No, I don’t believe it is in this context, or I wouldn’t have suggested it. While it’s clearly being physically unfaithful it at least preserves emotional fidelity. Sleeping with some random woman he meets somewhere carries the possibility, I’d say likelihood, of feelings developing on one or both sides.
Well, thank you! I appreciate that – although I have found some incredibly interesting people here and I feel far from special in that regard.
Shall I tell you that I hiked ten miles along the San Francisco coastline today, finishing up with a lovely lunch at a chef’s table where I watched some pigs heads being sawed open by the sous chef? It was great fun, actually!
Eh, if the marriage seemed otherwise worthy to me I’d keep trying to find solutions. I say solutions and not solution because there could (and I think probably would) be more than one cause. In one case I’m familiar with, the solutions involved such things as him having a stash of porn that she didn’t know about (and as far as I know, doesn’t), some sex ed (her knowledgeability was seriously lacking, and being a woman of very narrow views and very little imagination didn’t help), acomodations with regards to hours (he’s a morning person, she’s a night owl), and eventually the decision on her part that she was ready and willing to have children (she finally relaxed during sex/sex attempts for the first time in their marriage). And that’s only the parts I know about.
If the marriage didn’t otherwise seem worthy, that’s what divorce is for.
All or most of the purposes of marriage are “primitive apelike” ones. People marry for affection or sex or having children; not because they want to design computer chips together.
or 6. Talk to her about what he needs and how his needs exist – and he has a right to have them – whether she wishes to believe in them or not. It’s possible she might be willing to work with him on things. If she’s unwilling… well why does he want to stay, again? With a partner who completely disregards his needs?
People have been known to fall in love with prostitutes.
Obviously you can’t make him do anything. But a brothel, at best, will delay the inevitable trainwreck, and likely will make it a lot more explosive at the end.