Q:
My wife and I haven’t had sex in almost 2 years. I’m 25 and my wife is 30. We been married for 2 years and been together 2 years and 7 months. I know that’s not a long time and we’re already having sexual issues. When we got married I had no idea this was how it would be. In the beginning of our relationship we had great sexual chemistry but when we started living together things went downhill. I noticed earlier on that we wouldn’t do it as often but when I brought it up she said she didn’t like certain things that I did and she was use to things a certain way. I tried to change and then another reason came up being that she wished I would initiate sometimes because she’s a woman just like me and she’s use to women being more forthcoming. I can admit that was hard for me because by this time I felt so self conscious about her previous reason to the lack of our intimacy. Over time it got worse, and we’ve had plenty of conversations about it. Her last conclusion was that she fells overwhelmed and stressed out in our relationship due to having to worry about me financially and not being supported with her goals. She said it makes her feel like she’s my parent and she can’t view me in that way. She’s also expressed that when she’s stressed or focused on achieving a goal all thoughts of sex goes away. She’s even expressed she might be asexual.
Now my wife is amazing. I love her dearly and she’s like my best friend. She’s very supportive and compassionate. We’ve worked through most of the stuff that was she said was hindering and I’ve started to pull my weight in the relationship now that I am more settled. I still haven’t seen any improvement on her end to rekindle things and our most recent conversations about it seems she doesn’t want to try. We still kiss, cuddle, and go on dates, but that’s as intimate as it gets and I’m worried that we’re too early in our marriage to be experiencing such drastic sexual differences. I need some advice.
A:
Hey there OP.
Dead bedroom marriages are incredibly tough at the best of times. They often speak to one person’s emotional and intimate needs going unfulfilled, and the mounting pressures that exerts on a psyche. The confines of monogamous marriage can make the situation seem inescapably stressful. I see a lot of those frequent flyer characteristics in the story you’re telling and getting into it is never easy.
The pattern that stills my mind the most in what you’ve written is that you’ve been steadily addressing pain points she raises about sex. Your efforts to take on more work in a relationship and initiate sex should be welcomed as helpful steps for her. Especially since they’re the exact issues she outlined as fuel for her hesitancy. But they haven’t worked, and ongoing conversations don’t seem to help. That’s a worrying pattern that hints at her not knowing, or not telling you exactly why she’s unwilling to have sex. Either can result in forming new reasons for not wanting to participate when previous reasons are invalidated. Forming a rationale for why something holds us back is a completely normal response, but in interpersonal exchanges, it can become a chain of excuses that lead others to frustration and stress.
I used to hang out in support communities for sexless marriages, and this pattern often shows up when one person is working hard to address their partner’s pain points about sex and resume intimacy. When it doesn’t work, it’s usually a sign that someone isn’t divulging the whole truth (for whatever reason).
In isolation, none of her reasons you’ve listed are unusual. Wanting someone to initiate? Feeling stressed? Needing more support in the relationship? These are some of the most common reasons for a downswing in sex. Moving in together and getting married recently are other factors that destabilize a sexual routine. The pattern I see in her reasons is that she generally makes an effort to make an argument that it’s not you, it’s me. This presents a dilemma because many of those problems aren’t quickly solvable by you. If she’s walling up behind her reasons, she’s doing it with some care for your feelings, but in frustrating ways that you can’t always address.
That leads to my main guess: She could be a lot more than ‘might be asexual’. She’s already mentioned it to you and a lot of other behaviors check out. There’s cuddling, kissing, and dating, but nothing more sexual than that. You both have a supportive and vibrant friendship within the relationship (vitally important!) but no sex. She seems disinterested in sex and always finds a reason to avoid it. These sound like the hallmarks of an asexual person being with someone who wants sex.
I’d listen to the part of her that has mentioned asexuality. Most people who have a queer awakening know a lot more about their inner selves before they tentatively speak out the first words of their revelation. If she’s anything like most of us, she already knows a lot more about asexuality than she’s letting on. She may just not be ready or well-positioned to approach the topic further.
That would be a discomforting outcome for you and the effort you’ve put in these last two years. But I think there’s a real possibility there. If my guess is true, then I don’t think anyone is ‘wrong’ or at fault here. People have queer realizations all the time, and they’re seldom convenient. In your time of introspection and learning, what kind of voice would you have wanted in your life? Hopefully not a resentful or hostile one, even if your actions were disjointed and chaotic.
I also think that if you want to bring some of these reasons to light, you’ll have to approach the next conversation on her grounds. She’s well aware that you’re a sexual being and are making an effort to reintroduce intimacy into the relationship. But from her perspective, those discussions may be a source of stress if they’re in conflict with her needs. And from what I can tell, she needs less sex. If you can frame the next conversation as one about the possibility of asexuality without the pressures of rekindling sex in the relationship, I think you’ll find something. Even if the assumption of asexuality is incorrect, you’ll at least have an empathetic conversation about a serious topic with her. There are lots of ways to learn and build from that.
Maybe she’s not asexual and was just throwing possibilities out. Maybe she’ll have another reason for not wanting sex (which would say a lot about communication and labor in the relationship). Maybe she’s not sure of her own reasons or isn’t ready to say. There are too many possibilities for me to hash out, but you’re the person positioned to explore them. Despite the frustration, I think this is as much a problem of needs and communication as it is one of sex. Sex just happens to be the manifestation of something else.
If she does turn out to be asexual, that’s not the end of a marriage either. Allosexual and asexual people often live very happy relationships. But those relationships only work when scaffolded by a great deal of honest communication and compromise. Some people open their marriages up so the allosexual person can find intimacy elsewhere. Sometimes, everyone clicks into a rhythm that doesn’t need sex because the rest of the relationship works so well. Everyone’s story is different, but you’ve already got a better starting point than the average /r/DeadBedrooms user. Namely that you have a robust friendship with her and care deeply for each other. And things haven’t turned to simmering resentment yet.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
It’s lacking in self awareness that she at 27/28 met a 22/23(?) year old, married them within 7 months and is complaining about feeling like a parent and an imbalance in financial resources.
I encourage you to examine other areas of your relationship dynamic to make sure your needs and autonomy are being respected.
for real
100 percent this. Red flags.
She married younger – and someone of an age where we don’t usually have our shit (money, work, frontal lobe) sorted out.
Couples therapy seems like it would be helpful.
Same
I agree. It easy to judge from the outside, but getting married 7 months in is likely to be a factor. You can’t fully know a person that quickly. The new relationship energy will still be at play and unfortunately that energy is not always a reliable indicator of what the long term situation will look like. This isn’t helpful for the OP (though it may provide some clarity/explanation) so I hope others reading this who find themselves tempted to dive into a hasty marriage think twice! If it’s a good thing, it’s worth the wait.
Why is she even married at all she’s in her twenties she doesn’t have to be some child bride!!!
Summer says that if your wife is asexual, then nobody is “‘wrong’ or at fault here”. I completely disagree. OP, you entered this marriage having a lot of good sex and there has not been any renegotiation of those terms, and now suddenly your relationship is completely different from what you signed up for. Things change, needs change, relationships change, but people should have full information about what is going on in their own relationship so they can keep consenting to being in it, and your wife is not giving you that information. Instead of honestly saying “I don’t want to have sex with you anymore” and allowing you to decide based on that if that is a marriage you want to stay in, she keeps blaming you for her lack of interest (you’re too needy, you do things she doesn’t like…) and every time you come up with a solution (getting your life on the rails, changing what you do) she comes up with a new problem. She is being dishonest and disingenuous.
I left a 6 year long relationship last summer. My ex had exactly the same reasons for never wanting to have sex with me, and then some (I was “too safe”, I was “not the same person she started dating”…). I should have left, but instead I changed all the things about me that were supposedly contributing to her not wanting me sexually anymore. I got my shit together, became independent, got good therapy, tried not to feel hurt that she wanted to have sex with other people but not with me… And still nothing changed! The goal posts kept shifting. But things did change when I finally got some self-respect and started feeling disconnected from the relationship and I basically gave up. Then suddenly she was able to address her issues and feel a modicum of attraction to me again. I broke up with her like a month after she told me “maybe sex doesn’t need to be scary after all!” because by then I was completely burnt-out on it.
LW, I don’t want to scare you and I don’t know your situation. Maybe your wife is actually super open and honest and communicative. But I am so fucking grateful I left my ex. She is an absolutely wonderful person and we had an amazing life together full of love, cuddling, and good food. Leaving her was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, it broke my fucking heart and hers. But her attraction to me was completely contingent on me not having any emotional needs around sex with her, bc it scared the crap out of her. Staying in that relationship for so long made me a TERRIBLE partner. The constant rejection, working on this problem all by myself, feeling unwanted, feeling like my sexuality was a burden to her (because it was!)… All these things kept adding up throughout the years. By the last couple of years of our relationship I’d lash out, pressure her, throw tantrums, and very un-lovingly complain about things about her that were completely harmless because I was just SO hurt and frustrated all the time. This was wrong of me and I regret all of it. But I also know that I didn’t start out in our relationship like this and it is not entirely my fault that I became like this.
My ex was not willing to face her own sexuality or me or our relationship with full honesty. I don’t think she even had any idea what her feelings were or why having sex with me was about as appealing to her as putting her hand through a meat grinder, when our amazing sex life was what made us want to date in the first place. Whatever her reasons were, it fucked supremely with my self-esteem and with how I was as a person. I am now relearning empathy, self-respect, respecting boundaries, love, and a bunch of other things. I learned a lot from this relationship and the good times were amazing, and I truly hope my ex and I can be friends again in the future, but I could not keep feeling like some sort of disgusting creep because my sexuality mattered to me and was an important part of my life.
I hope this is helpful to you, LW. I don’t want to tell you to break up, I just also don’t want to join the chorus of people probably telling you, like Summer is, that your girlfriend’s need of “no sex” trumps your need of “sex” and that you should just tough it out. You don’t need to stay in a relationship that is on a fundamental level different from what you want and different from what you agreed on.
This.
As the asexual person in my relationship, all of what Pallas wrote above. Demanding even more work from my partner because facing my asexuality was too scary sounds extremely unfair.
I disagree with Summer, to me your letter reads like your wife is very much saying that it’s not her, it’s you. And even if it is her, then she’s that way because of you.
Your wife has been making you jump through flaming hoops, and just when you clear the last one (increasingly exhausted and with some fresh burns to show for it), she keeps adding new ones. I’m not saying she’s doing it on purpose (we all do stuff to people we love that we regret, when we’re panicking or hurting or feel out of control about our own lives), but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s doing it. Hopefully, once you point out to her how this impacts you, she’ll be mortified and do her best to change her behaviour and repair.
There are probably other options apart from leaving this relationship, but none of them include you single handedly “fixing” whatever is going on. This is a relationship. No one person can fix things in it on their own. It’s not your solitary job to fix this, simply because you can’t. Your wife has some serious work to do. It’s probably scary, but so is facing down a new series of flaming hoops just when you thought you finally cleared the last one. (Wouldn’t it be super fucked up if her needs and wellbeing were framed as more important than yours?) She’s not a solitary person in her struggles here and her struggles have a very real impact on your relationship, your self-esteem, your ability to be a good partner, all the things Pallas talks about also.
It’s not unreasonable or even unkind to expect her to deal with whatever’s going on on her end, as, y’know, an active participant in this marriage. It’s not unreasonable to expect honesty from the person you’re married to. Yes, coming to terms with being asexual is a journey and a half (boy do I ever know), and having privacy and space to do it is essential for many people, but hurting you by blaming you for something you might ultimately have very little influence over is not a natural part of that process, that you just have to suck up because she’s going through some big steps of self-discovery. Her (potential) asexuality shouldn’t be an excuse to make you do even more work and feel increasingly shit about yourself in the process, is my point.
(And respecting your needs doesn’t mean she has to have sex with you even if she doesn’t feel like it. That’d be massively fucked up and not what I’m talking about here when I’m emphasising the importance of your wellbeing.)
Also big agree with Rue in maybe taking an honest look at some other dynamics here. No good relationship comes at the cost of you feeling like shit about yourself.
Best of luck there. My rocky sexual relationship with my partner (whomst I love more than life itself and have been with for a decade now) got infinitely better once I came to terms with my asexuality and we could talk about the actual issues calmly and lovingly. (This is a more recent development than I care to admit.) I wish you and your wife the same!
OH AND ANOTHER THING…. Re: “There are too many possibilities here to hash out, but you’re the person positioned to explore them”. LW, the person positioned to explore these things is not you, IT IS YOUR WIFE!!! You have been doing nothing but exploring and have only gotten the runaround for your troubles. Focus on yourself instead of trying to fix this
Your wife needs to stop making you do all the work of figuring out your SHARED sex life.
While this is a good response, I was struck by this part of the question:
Her last conclusion was that she fells overwhelmed and stressed out in our relationship due to having to worry about me financially and not being supported with her goals. She said it makes her feel like she’s my parent and she can’t view me in that way.
The response focused more on her possibly being asexual – and maybe she is!
But, I think it’s also worth considering that it’s more of a situational thing, and that she is feeling this way as a result of the all the other factors she told you. In other words, that it’s effect rather than cause.
(This is not to discount anyone’s asexual identity! But going by what is written – a formerly good sex life, a bunch of stressors – it seems like a real possibility).
The part of your letter that I’ve quoted is a BIG deal. How long was she financially responsible for you, and is that still the case? Has your relationship been centred on taking care of you, as her letter implies? Have things shifted to feel more equal now, and if the answer for you is ‘yes’, would she agree with you that that’s the case?
It sounds like you’ve really been working on things, but it may take a long time of sustained effort for her to really feel that you’re equal partners. I obviously have limited information to go on here, but I’m not sure that this is ultimately about sex.