In which I ponder marriage, sex, duty, and who may have a right to my body.
One of the big problems in my marriage, particularly at the end, was sex. It all seemed terribly complex at the time, with all the love and hurt and rejection on both sides, but in the end the problem can be stated very simply: he wanted more sex than he got.
My husband used to tell me that he “never got laid any more,” a statement that made me so angry — because I was deliberately and acutely conscientious about making sure he never went without, even to the extent of frequently and cheerfully having sex I didn’t want to have — that I actually kept a calendar in order to prove that he did.
Sucks, don’t it, how what starts out as a source of intimacy and bonding can become its own polar opposite?
Anyway, point is, I’ve been contemplating this issue for quite awhile now. Lately I’ve discussed this topic in depth with a few couples, and based on what I’ve experienced and observed and been told, I’ve come to what I feel is an important conclusion for myself:
I should never marry, because I am not willing to owe sex to anyone.
Yeah, whoa is right. A lot of you would might compelled to jump on that and say, “You never owe anyone sex, not even when you’re married!” Just let me unpack this so you can see how I got here.
Women sometimes lose libido for a extended periods of time. This seems to be fairly common.
I had no sex drive for nearly two years, due to various factors. It was not intentional. It was not my fault. It just happened. At the beginning, it was just a state of being. By the time my libido returned, I’d been nagged for sex for so long that I continued to say no just to be a bitch. It hadn’t been my fault in the first place, and he’d punished me for it anyway, so I was punishing him back. (Yeah, I’m mature like that.)
The math is that males are fertile all of the time and females are only fertile for three days per cycle. Assuming a 30-day cycle, the male-to-female fertility ratio is about ten to one. Ten to one! If you compound this cruel joke with the fact that women are several orders of magnitude more hormonally complex than men (and are therefore more likely to suffer failures), and then you mix in hormone-altering things like birth control pills, pregnancies, and plain old-fashioned stress, well, then, suddenly it begins to seem that periods of libidolessness are a natural occurrence in females.
In males, though, a missing libido seems to be generally considered pathological and is usually associated with some clear cause like depression or physical damage. In my experience and observation, a man with a high libido cannot understand what it feels like to go through a period of no libido. You can tell him repeatedly that everything in the relationship is hunky-dory and that you are not rejecting him but simply don’t want sex, but as soon as you’re done talking he’ll ask you to fuck him and then he will sulk when you won’t.
(Yes, of course I realize that human sexuality is much more complex than fertility alone.)
Men get married in order to have sex.
This statement sounds like feminist propaganda, but honestly it’s not. Four men have said this to my face, and that the whole point of marriage is to get laid regularly. (Apparently, trying to get a woman is difficult enough that the risk of financial loss via failed marriage is a risk worth taking in order to secure a steady sex source.) Regular sex is an extremely high priority to many men.
Men who are married or otherwise in committed, long-term relationships appear to believe that they are owed a minimum amount of sex in return for the sacrifices they make vis-a-vis committing to a relationship and bein’ tied down. If the frequency or quality of available sex drops below this threshold, many men appear to feel that the covenant of the marriage or commitment has been violated. (This doesn’t mean that they’ll all cheat or file for a divorce, it just means that once he considers his sex life to be unacceptable, the whole rest of the relationship is in jeopardy regardless of how well it might actually be going because availability of sex is the whole point of a relationship to a man. He really doesn’t care that you wash his socks or cook his food or clean his house if you’re not screwing him: those services you perform are, to him, just not the point.)
If you’re in a monogamous relationship, you actually are responsible for a portion of your partner’s sexual happiness.
Sexuality is more than just hormones in humans. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and if you’ve committed your life to another human being you need to be willing to build bridges even here, in this territory of another person’s body.
A friend of mine once told me that if you get your boyfriend to marry you, you’re effectively cornering his sexual market and that once you say “I do,” it’s cruel to withhold sex from him. Observing the men around me, it does seem to be the case that you can make a perfectly good man really miserable by marrying him and then not having sex with him.
From what I can tell, any reason a woman may have for deviating from the relationship’s original we-just-fell-in-love-and-have-sex-five-times-a-day schedule is utterly irrelevant to most men; all they’re concerned with is the fact that their woman won’t put out. They appear to listen when you explain things to them, but their reaction to the circumstance remains the same: they hover between hurt and angry, whiny and demanding. Entitled even, if I may be so indelicate.
So if these three statements are true, and I think they are, then I’m not willing to put myself again in a position where I owe anybody any sex ever again. The very structure of marriage for me, as a straight chick, is one in which I have to agree to be responsible to another’s sexual satisfaction with a body I know will at some point cease to give a flying fuck about the topic at all.
So I stay single, somebody nags me for sex in the future, I’ll just say, “So go out and get laid, then, if it’s that goddammed important to you. What am I, your wingman?”
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I’m not surprized that you believe you’ve got the answer in 1,109 words. Many women think that we men are such simple minded folk that we wouldn’t know the difference between ‘giving’ and ‘providing’ sex. We all hope that our women are ‘giving’ but we will use our skills at causing her to ‘provide’ as necessary. Sometimes doing it badly. But my guess is that you ‘provided’ much more then he ever ‘gave’. Which means our methods work. (Sticks out tounge.)
Get a job slacker. Stop thinking about stuff.
I’m not convinced I have the answer, but I really am starting to believe that men ARE stupid, in this particular area: if I tell my partner that my not having sex with him is the result of, say, hormone imbalance and stress, and he comes back two hours later nagging me for sex… he’s just proven to me that he really is NOT, in fact, listening. -m
doooode, that’s why couples should *not* get married until they’re way past the “relationship’s original we-just-fell-in-love-and-have-sex-five-times-a-day schedule”.
you know – to make sure they’re equally bored of each other in the libido sense, but still like to hang out together anyways.
Why would you want to hang out with a man? *hehe* -m
AMEN! PREACH IT SISTA!!!
*smooch* -m
Hey, we guys try to have reasonable relationships with you gals but you ARN’T reasonable. So, we default to asking for sex a lot. Get use to it. Quit whining.
I keep telling my guy friends: women ARE crazy. We are. But men are stupid. So it all evens out, eh? -m
wow! makes me glad i married who i did. bran and i haven’t had sex in about 10 years or so. not saying he hasn’t had sex (afterall, there was his “friend” here for a while). i often feel guilty that he’s not getting regular sex from me, but i try not to and it’s certainly not because he attempts to guilt me. thing is, i just don’t want sex, from him or anyone else. hell, most of the time i have trouble with the physical contact snuggling requires.
that’s what you need…a teddy-man with benefits. 🙂
Is there such a thing, though? I might be even more freaked out by a guy who didn’t want to have sex than one who wants to all the time. (Yes, I know that’s contradictory, but whatever.) -m
Bet you’d enjoy this book.
Mmm, looks good. -m
What it means is that men are more interested in propagating the species. Which implies that we CARE more about humans. We’re not the selfish one’s after all. Makes us better, in every way. Really. Prove me wrong.
*scowl* -m
re: “Why would you want to hang out with a man? *hehe* -m”
Girls are silly, and I don’t always have the patience for that. (hehe)
Besides, hanging out with my man is mostly like being alone, and I really dig that. 🙂 (really, I think what everyone needs is someone to be alone together with, but that’s just my opinion, and it’s what works for me – I’ll shut up now.)
“Alone together” and “nagged for sex” are in no way mutually exclusive. *hehe* But some of the most successful couples I know describe their space that way, so you’re definitely on to something there. -m
:FEMALE PRAYER
Before I lay me down to sleep,
I pray for a man, who’s not a creep,
One who’s handsome, smart and strong
One who loves to listen long,
One who thinks before he speaks,
One who’ll call, not wait for weeks.
I pray he’s gainfully employed,
When I spend his cash, won’t be annoyed.
Pulls out my chair and opens my door,
Massages my back and begs to do more.
Oh! Send me a man who’ll make love to my mind,
Knows what to answer to “how big is my behind?”
I pray that this man will love me to no end,
And always be my very best friend.
Amen.
:MALE PRAYER
I pray for a deaf-mute nymphomaniac with huge boobs who owns a liquor store and a bass boat.
This doesn’t rhyme and I don’t give a shit.
Amen.
That’s funny. And sad. Heh. -m
I think if you are using WORDS to “ask for sex” or “intimacy” of any kind, you have reached a rough patch in your relationship. There should be understanding and ebbs and flows with the quantity of sex you are “exchanging.” But, asking to have sex instead of allowing it to simmer and come to a boil between two people can’t be good. Sex is asked for through action and gesture not through the literal words or phrases “you never put out. come on.” Or, “it’s been like weeks. just a quickie?” Keeping sex personal, physical, and intimate through body language and not literal language is how I feel.
This was a very honest post. And definitely stirred your readers to think.
thanks
I appreciate your ideal… it sounds lovely. Perfect, even. I can’t even fathom it being like that past the first year, though. You know the phrase, “familiarity breeds contempt”? It’s like that: we tend to treat our partners like personal property after awhile. -m
The man and woman prayers were priceless.
El Rey and I went through a bad, bad patch of no sex because I had no libido. It was as you described, fighting all the time, feeling pressured, oy. This went on and off for years. If we could get going, I was fine and enjoyed myself, but I had no impetus to start things myself. Now I know it was the hormones–first depo provera (which I got on after I started taking antibiotics for my acne), and then later, the Pill. They really did a number on me, on us, one so severe I really thought that might be the end of the marriage. I was so very, very tired of fighting. I hear you, girlfriend. It’s a bitch, and I’m sorry.
The hormone thing… they can’t/won’t grok it. Having no libido is baffling to them. Fighting over it, though, is the worst… nothing says sexy like a fight. -m
An addendum…just read the prayers to the hubby, cackling all the while.
He said “I disagree.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I don’t want a bass boat.”
LOL! -m
Nice post. It’s well thought out, well put together, and it tackles a timeless conundrum. I need to think more on this subject.
Do it! Then come back and drop some Shenright. -m
To continue the conversation, two more things:
1. Yes, I realize that sometimes it’s the other way around and she wants more sex than she gets. Or it’s a same-sex couple, and one’s got a higher libido than the other. The topic’s universal; I just told the story from my perspective.
2. Letting your partner give you sex you KNOW they don’t want to give you is a Very Bad Idea. Because they’re gonna resent you, no matter what, if you take them up on the offer too many times… eventually they’re gonna figure that they could easily be replaced with a blow-up doll, and then? Then you’re an asshole, even though they SAID it would be fine. Lose/lose situation, is what that is…
Just a very complicated topic, IMO.
Clem’s statement is highly idealistic and distinctly unrealistic and limited IMO. One needs actions *and* words to make a relationship and therefore sex/intimacy work.
Mush, I appreciate you talking about this as it is a hard subject. Yes, it is universal regardless of the body genders, as I can only too well attest to. I can’t say I quite agree to some of your premises but I respect your perspective.
Yeah, I like the idea of sex in Clem’s world, though. It’d be hot! 🙂 But yeah, when so much hinges upon sexual intimacy, and so many factors impinge on it, it can become muddled. -m
Couples can sometimes go trough a down period when sex is the issue but it is most often caused by something else. Guys are more intimidated by women who want to have sex all the time than women are by such men.
I used to think men were complicated enough to be bothered by other things, but it turns out that most of them? Aren’t. If it seems like he’s sulking because you won’t fuck him? Then he’s sulking because you won’t fuck him. He’s not sad about genocide, he’s not feeling melancholy. -m
One sided intimacy is STILL intimate.
But…Clems comments really nail it…I just wish it worked out to be as easy as that sounds. Sadly, it doesn’t.
One-sided if you’re alone, that is. -m
I used to be a relationship where he wanted sex, but not intimacy. I wanted more intimacy and less sex. I got hacked off with him coming on to me all the time in the end, and him going off on one when I turned him down.
Now I’m five years in to a relationship with someone who understands that the traffic lights don’t just have to be green-for-go and red-for-no … there can be a fuzzy, snuggly amber light area in the middle. Reading your post and some of the comments, I think I’m lucky.
This is true:
If you’re in a monogamous relationship, you actually are responsible for a portion of your partner’s sexual happiness.
But it’s a two way street. And that means finding a compromise that suits both partners, and involves, about all things, verbal communication; which tends to be the first thing that goes out of the window once the blood starts flowing … .
I like the poems, too
True, it is a two-way street. Or should be. Ideally. If you’re fortunate. -m
This post made me sad.
*Hug*. -m