It really does seem to be phrased with an answer already in mind.
There are some good observations here (with the overarching theme that women are not an alien species who all ‘want’ something).
To add to the random generalizations, I think that, in addition to being slut shamed int heir youth (and hey, even on these boards), some women think sexual attraction shouldn’t enter the equation at all when picking a partner for marriage. They’ve been told they’ll be happy forever with someone who makes them laugh and is a good provider, and think it’s shallow or immature to put sexual compatibility into the equation.
As for the idea of ‘withholding’ sex, that term doesn’t really make sense unless you believe something is owed.
Plus what several others said upthread about kids, housework, working outside the home, self-esteem, quality of sex, etc. I’d also add hormonal birth control to the mix and its effects on sex drive and depression (and depression meds’ effects on sex drive).
It’s funny that we need studies to prove the obvious, but hey, it’s good to have those to counter all the anecdotes we read here.
The high-libido women in this thread have not answered one of the questions in the OP: Have you been in many marriages/long term relationships that were sexless? I would presume not. Since there are many sexless/low sex marriages out there, then obviously your case is not the norm.
Some people brought up a good point about women enjoying sex as much as men, but not wanting it under as many scenarios as men.
Consider the following scenario with two people:
[ul]
[li]Person A enjoys wine, but only if it is of the finest quality, the ambience in the room is just right, the temperature of the wine is just right, and they are not bothered by too many issues from work and home[/li][li]Person B enjoys wine as much as Person A, but in addition to enjoying it in the same conditions as Person A above, he/she likes it so much that he/she doesn’t mind having some lesser-quality wine, under lesser-quality conditions.[/li][/ul]
I guess Person B may be mistaken in assuming that Person A doesn’t enjoy wine as much as he/she does, since “If you enjoy wine as much as I do, you would seek it out more and under adverse conditions”, but I can see how Person A can indeed enjoy it just as much as Person B, but is simply more picky.
So, maybe we can’t say that Person B enjoys wine more than Person A. But maybe we can say that Person B has a bigger “wine libido” than Person A.
My short early marriage was pretty damn sexless. At that tender age, I wasn’t able to separate my sexuality from my emotions as easily as I can now, and as I said earlier, our marriage problems really dampened my libido. They didn’t bother his.
I’ve got a high libido and have been in long term relationships where the sex has tapered off. It’s not because my libido has gone down, it’s because I’ve lost interest in my partner and the relationship is about to end. If I know the relationship is ending, the sex starts to feel like a lie.
Despite my very high libido and fairly open social views, bad sex somehow still makes me feel used, dirty and cheated and I go to great lengths to avoid it.
I have a fairly sex drive but I know that I’m in the minority for sure, at least around here. My female friends think I’m weird for wanting sex every day.
I think, though, that at least part of the problem stems from the attitude of Korean men when it comes to sex. Many of my friends had boyfriends that rarely wanted to go down on them or otherwise pay much attention to making their girlfriends climax. No wonder they didn’t enjoy sex much.
A. Because for ‘women’, sex is more emotional than it is for ‘men’, and that roller coaster doesn’t end!
Question for the board: Do you consider a woman who thoroughly enjoys pleasing herself daily, but not interested in marital duties very often, as interested in ‘sex’ as a guy who does the same? How about a wife who gets it on the side no problem but just can’t get over <whatever is annoying her this week> long enough to enjoy her husband?
Don’t confuse ‘not wanting sex with hubby’ with ‘not wanting sex’.
Sex in a relationship is not nearly as two dimensional as sex for romances’/sex’s/ sake.
It’s a whole 'nother math.
I had an experience very similar to this, although the marriage wasn’t that short. I don’t want to discuss it in detail, but suffice it to say that we were very young and the hot sex went away as the emotional disconnect set in.
I confess, I haven’t read this thread. It’s late, and I’m tired, but everytime I see this topic come up, I wonder one thing.
Are we all considering the roll a large penis plays in all this? A large penis makes for a more…er…exciting experience for many women. Many women that have a husband with a large penis probably likes sex as much as him, if not more so.
In this society, men are expected to initiate sex, and women are used to it to the point where we just lay around deciding whether to accept or reject an offer of sex. But I will bet you, if there were big dick husbands out there willing to hold out on their wives, they would see a huge increase of their wives initiating, nay, begging for sex. Or maybe not, since she can procure a large penis elsewhere.
The interesting thing to me, about society treating men as if they are supposed to be the ones that are the horndogs, is that it gives women an opportunity to hone other areas of sensuality. We are more likely to zone in on things like energy or romance and we can get as fickle as we like about what will turn us on, because men are constantly offering us sex.
But, yeah, I’m rambling. My main point is big dicks. I think most men that find women love sex have big dicks. Just my guess.
But many men also are in the state of ‘not wanting sex with wifey’ (due to physical appearance, lack of emotional connection, etc), but in the end they prefer that over ‘no sex at all’.
This goes back to a poll I started in IMHO about the statement "Men prefer bad sex to no sex, while women prefer no sex to bad sex"
If “bad sex” is “sex with hubby, with whom I no longer have the desire to have sex with”, then the above statement is similar to what you are saying. (You are saying that many women do want to have sex, but don’t want to have it with their husband, and therefore end up choosing no sex. This gives the false appearance to men that their wives don’t want sex). However, in that thread many people were saying that the above statement is not true. (The majority ended up agreeing though, something like 54%)
Maybe an analogy is kids living in an affluent society, with abundant food, which enables the kids to be super-picky about what they will and will not eat. If these same kids had been raised in a poor society, with a scarcity of food, then they wouldn’t be so picky about what they will eat.
So, in the sex sphere, the men are the ones raised with the scarcity of “goods” (offers for sex), which is why they are not that picky when deciding whom to have sex with and under what conditions, and the women are the ones raised with the abundance of “goods” (offers for sex), which is why they can become super-picky when deciding whom to have sex with and how to have it.
With apologies for singling out billfish, there are a couple of posters in this thread who can be counted on to sing the “ways women suck” song just as reliably as Freudian Slit and MeanOldLady and Green Bean and I can be to sing the “let me tell you how much I love sex” song. I think it might be worthwhile to ponder the chicken and egg factor of all our attitudes. I wonder in each of our cases to what extent our attitudes toward the opposite sex are a result of our experiences, as opposed to how much they shaped those experiences in the first place.
Well, I have noticed nobody seems to have mentioned long distance relationships as a cause of sexless marriages. It is rather difficult to lay your husband when he is on a 6 month deployment to the North Sea and you can’t even make a guess as to where he is at any given moment … or when the sub is doing fast deployments where they are gone 1-3 weeks at a time. Combine fast deployments and menstrual cycles, or in my case PCOS driven on and off bleeding at any given day of the month, a back injury and his overnight duty schedule when actually in port…hooking up with my own husband got interesting and I can remember an entire year where I didn’t get any.
You forgot kids, jobs, laundry, grocery shopping for his mother who doesn’t get out much, couples who start going to bed at different times because they have different sleep cycles.
Marriages often result in kids - and kids often put a damper on one’s sex life. When they are little, its exhaustion. When they are a little older its “we have to wait until the kids are asleep.” When they are teens they are awake more than you are, and in order to have sex you need to prioritize it for Saturday afternoon when they are out of the house.
And then there is the touched out issue. When my kids were toddlers, they would spend so much time touching me. My body wasn’t my own - and unfortunately, that meant that sometimes I just didn’t want to be touched by my husband either - I was just “touched out.”
Its easy to procrastinate sex when it needs to be scheduled. Its easy to put it off when you could be using that precious time to sleep or do dishes. Then add in a little resentment because your spouse doesn’t even realize there ARE dishes.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with Nzinga, at least in regards to big dicks.
The best sex I have ever had was not by the guy with the biggest dick.
This guy’s dick was average. But he was absolutely amazing. He had a natural advantage-just the length and angle and how we fit together would make me orgasm-but the love and desire to please me helped a lot, too. We could also do any position and screw the hell out of each other for hours, day after day. The only man to make me orgasm multiple times. It was never-ending positive reinforcement.
Anyone ever play the card game “spades?” Then you’d be familiar with the word “Boston” which is when you get every trick, all thirteen, pretty rare, funner than hell in cards, even more fun in sex. We’d go away for the weekend, work on “getting a Boston.” Each. We were successful more than once.
Some of the worst sex was with someone with a huge dick. He’d hit bottom all the time, and was highly uncomfortable girth wise as well. I pretty much just laid there, impaled. It was not that much fun at all, although part of the problem was him, too.
There was another guy that was huge, but it went much better. I was still somewhat uncomfortable, and we had to take our time and go easy, but we had fun.
I like hard, mutually enthusiastic sex. It’s very difficult to do when I can’t move because I am impaled and uncomfortable or in pain.
I’m sure there are vindictive people out there, of either gender. I don’t think it’s possible to determine whether folks of one gender are more vindictive than the other. I do think it notable that you say “one side”, as if it were a battlefield.
It’s quite possible that I’ve met a woman with that opinion, but I don’t recall a woman admitting it to me. I suspect that extremists of opinion exist on either end of the spectrum, as usual.
That works.
I have not found that penis size makes that much difference. Perhaps I have not met the right penis.
I agree about “touched out” especially when I was nursing with additional little kids hanging on me all day.
As to the procrastination, I find that people get in and out of the sex habit. It’s easy to get into the no sex habit, and it perpetuates the cycle, making it seem more of a big deal than what it is.
You have to make a bit of an effort, but then it just becomes a good habit.
