Yep, unless you want your current routine to become the established norm for your marriage, you need to make an effort to change. If you both sense a problem here, make an appointment for sex and then do it whether you feel like it or not. You’ll probably end up enjoying it!
My friends went through this stage, more on the wife’s side than the husbands and I think it’s because the husband did almost none of the child care. The problem was that small children are needy all day long then at night the last thing the wife wanted to do was more things for someone else.
Eventually as the kids got older things returned to normal. Things you can do to make sex more attractive are things where you are away from the children and bored; no tv, no friends, no computer, no shopping or reading. Think of spending the night at a cabin where all there is to do is card games or watching the fire. Go to the beach or on a nature hike. Stay at home but don’t watch tv, watch the bird feeder or sit on the porch and watch the street activity. Do nothing together.
The “bored” thing works… my husband and I are on such different schedules (he’s a chef and works nights/weekends; I’m in banking and I work M-F 9-5. We often have sex on Saturday afternoons. We’re sitting at home, nothing on TV, I know he’s got to go to work in a couple hours and we’re bored killing time before he goes in. Granted, we don’t have kids (yet!), but boredom can lead to sex, at least in my experience.
I thought some more about it, and a large part of it is that I can’t help but feeling it as a rejection when my husband will rather DIY then do it with me. I know, intellectually, that is silly. He is just as tired as I am, so I know how he feels. But I usually had to be the one to start sex (yes, Dutch men are less “male” about sex then in the USA) and after five years, that sort of grinds me down. It just makes me feel unattractive if I have to take the initiative every time, and feeling unattractive makes me feel unsexy.
I asked my husband about it, yesterday. He said that yes, of course he found me attractive, but he always let the woman take the initiative. Not just with me, with all the girls he’s been with. He was raised in a PC, feministic household and says that is the best way for a man to prevent forcing himself on a woman. I asked, couldn’t he get over that? Nope, he said. "This is how I am and you have been okay with that for five years now. "
Yup; something is rotten in our marriage. And don’t start about counseling, we don’t have the time or money for that. And we have a terrible track record for trying to change anything about ourselves voluntarily.
I think its may be easier for you to change your attitude. He believes himself to be being respectful…and frankly, his attitude, while an extreme, is a preferable extreme to the “its my wife’s duty to let me rut on her whenever I want.” He isn’t playing guilt trips on you for no sex, or “playfully” grabbing your breast when you are trying to get something done.
Maybe instead you guys could work out “not so subtle cues” for “you’d like sex” that aren’t you initiating SEX. Ours is candles in the bedroom. Or the request for a massage (which sometimes is a massage, but its easy to communicate during a massage that you want a “technical” massage or foreplay). Or opening a bottle of wine. Things that will let him know you are giving your permission.
With an ex that I lived with, I was pretty blunt about when I wanted sex. I’d just attack her, basically. She wanted sex regularly, but was shy about bringing it up. There were plenty of times where I’d just take care of myself because I didn’t feel like bothering her. Maybe that’s part of the problem? It seems like it’s just easier to get yourself off, so why bother your partner?
Next time you’re sitting on the couch with him, whether you’re in the mood or not (you’ll get in the mood) just reach over and start feeling him up. I promise you’ll be having sex shortly after.
I’m rather amazed by Maastricht’s husband’s attitude. Part of me can’t quite believe it and wonders if there isn’t a deeper issue. But let’s be charitable to him and assume he is both 1.) trying to tell the truth and 2.) accurately diagnosing his hesitation. If that’s the case, I think Dangerosa is giving great advice. Think of it as an inverted safe word. Whereas a safe word is “stop, now” for situations where the word “stop” would be…inappropriate, you can create a word that means “please, kind husband, I would like you to seduce me tonight” that you can use without feeling like you’re always taking the initiative.*
Also, I don’t think this needs to be one of those painfully complicated self improvement projects. If rabbits can do it, so can you 
*well, you still are, but the goal is to give him permission, which he needs, without you feeling like you’re taking the active role, even if you technically are.
You have a small child. The two of you–and your relationship–are his whole world. Nothing matters more to his future happiness than that you two have either a strong, loving marriage or, if it comes to divorce, an amicable, civil, respectful friendship. NOTHING matters as much as this. It’s better to blow off your job, be rude to your friends, even, perversely enough, give up time with your kid, to make sure you take care of that relationship. If things really are rotten, you need to go to counseling–if it can’t fix your marriage, it will at least give you the tools for a civil, mature divorce. Your son needs that.
More than the 50 minutes every two weeks or whatever counseling requires, however, you need to wrestle with your relationship: you need to be actively working on improving it every single day. It needs to be more important than what work expects of you, what your parents expect of you, what your friends expect of you. Disappoint all of them if you have to in order to find the time and space to work through these things.
If you and your husband had a “terribly track record” for taking care of things dependent on you, would you have thrown up your hands and accepted that your son would probably be neglected and forgotten? No, you’d take the steps to educate yourselves, to learn what you needed to learn to take care of him, even if you hadn’t be successful doing that sort of thing in the past. THIS IS THE SAME THING. You’re much too young to have decided the “type” of person you are–you’ve both still got time to be 4-5 totally different people before you die. You can learn how to do this. It will take time, it won’t be easy, but you owe it to your kid.
Excellent Custom Title/post combination!
As half of a young couple who have just moved house, my first thought (like many others) was that putting shelves up sometimes has to take precedence over getting it on. Now that I understand what you mean, I would offer the anecdotal evidence that you are not alone - there’s, er, a couple I know with a similar problem. I think the most important thing is to talk about it, often, so that you both know exactly how you and your partner feel about it, and how important it is to both of you to change it. Hopefully, there will be some common ground in the answers to these questions, and you can both work it out.
In my parents’ case, the hiatus caused by some medical issues never ended, although the medical issues did. Medical issues + tons of hangups = sometimes I wonder how did those two manage to have any children.
If you want it to end, you need to get things moving.
Well, as Dangerosa said, that’s not a “date night”! You need “us time”, not “socialization time”.