Grappling with a wife who seems to have become asexual

[Felix_SCZ]

Hi everyone, I'm new to AVEN and I learned about this website via Angela Chen's Ace book. Coming here to hopefully gain some insights or perspective, or even understanding. First post here, sorry for the length. 

 

My wife and I have been together for 12 years, married for 8. We're in our late 30s now. When we were dating, we had sex 2 to 4 times a month on average. (Note: due to a variety of upbringing and self-confidence issues, I was a late bloomer and she is the first & only person I've had sex with). Soon after we got married, her sex drive plummeted while mine remained steady. Neither of us were in therapy at the time so we struggled with communicating about this discrepancy (talking about sex is hard!) and it was basically the only source of friction in our relationship. We had our first child 5 years ago, and then twins 2 years ago. Shortly after our first child was born, we started seeing individual therapists and it helped a lot to understand and we were able to start communicating better about our intimacy issues. I wanted more, she said she just didn't have a sex drive anymore. Sexual intimacy dwindled to only a couple of times a year (except when trying to have a kid). I've shared my desire with her to expand what sexual intimacy could be beyond just intercourse. For example, I told her that I crave both giving and receiving oral sex, but it hasn't featured in our sex lives for 9 years now. She's been closed & narrow minded about sex for years now. There's been a lot of the classical experiences on both sides: she never initiates intimacy of any kind or flat out rejects, leaving me feeling neglected / dismissed / uncared about; this breeds frustration and annoyance and self-doubt within me that starts to spill out into our other interactions. I've come up with stories I tell myself about why my wife doesn't want sex: do I not satisfy her? am I not big enough or last long enough? is she no longer physically attracted to me? She tells me none of that is true. 

 

I've tried to educate myself on intimacy with couples. I've read Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel, Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, The Sex Starved Marriage by Michele Weiner Davis, Getting the Sex You Want by Tammy Nelson, and most recently Ace by Angela Chen. 

We started emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with a couples therapist a few months ago. 

 

An obvious point to note that our lives are pretty hectic right now: 3 young children, no parents nearby. All the literature points to all this chaos draining energy and attention away from intimacy. We had both been working full-time with a full-time nanny but things were still so crazy. So in February of 2022, I left my job and took on the household manager role. She had a promotion and a great gig, so I wanted to support her pursuing that. I've looked after our twins, I've handled all grocery shopping and cooking and errands, been the point person for preschool drop-offs and pick-ups, done all the laundry, tend the yard, clean up and tidy the house daily, etc. Part of the goal was to purely help the household run smoothly, but another goal was to try to lessen the "mental load" on her so she could hopefully regain the bandwidth for intimacy. So much of the literature I read talks about how often the household and kid duties fall on the woman in a heterosexual relationship, and how men should do more to help out. This doesn't apply at all in my case. 

 

Today, we're coming up on 9 months without any sexual intimacy at all; the longest "dry spell" in our entire relationship. 

Over the 2 years when we've tried to deeply discuss our intimacy issues with one another, here are some of the things she's said to me:

• "I never feel any desire for sex, I don't dream about it or think about it."
• "I've done blood work and talked to my doctors about why my libido is gone; they tell me it's just stress and anxiety." 
• "I could never have sex again and would be ok with that."
• "Even when we've had sex in the past year, I never felt desire for it. I just did it for you."
• "I know you've talked about sex acts other than intercourse, but doing something 'one sided' to you makes me feel like a sex worker."
• "You could handle 100% of all the house and kid stuff but I'd still not think about intimacy. I would just keep going down my todo list or think about work instead."

 

These comments led me to research asexuality, and the Ace book. I'm planning on bringing this up in our couples therapy session and encourage my wife to read the book. I don't know if she would agree that she's asexual, but from my research so far the classification is apt. I also have a suspicion that is she on the obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) spectrum, and sexual inhibition is a feature there too. 

 

I'm still grappling with all this, and what it means for the future of our relationship. In my dark moments I feel like I've been unintentionally 'duped' by her -- being with someone who was sexual with me at first but then after getting married decided that they were going to stop having sex anymore, with the attitude of "too bad, that's just how it is now so you need to deal with it". My wife knows that sexual intimacy is important to me, but doesn't do anything to recognize that. I sometimes think "I am doing so much to help our family and her, and I can't even get a 5 minute hand job?" What's interesting -- and this is something that she brings up herself during couples therapy -- is that she is so emotionally fragile about me thinking poorly of her in which anything I say that can be perceived as criticism sends her into a spiral of self-loathing. Yet, when it comes to the only thing that I'm critical of (lack of sexual intimacy), she can't seem to bring herself to do anything about it.  She has expressed disapproval of the idea of me watching porn, and hasn't initiated the idea of opening up our marriage so I can get my needs met that way. 

 

So that's where I am now. We have a wonderful family and a great house and great friends and there is so much to be thankful and grateful for in my life, and it makes me feel ashamed to complain about sex. But this complete lack of sexual intimacy is just leaving this gaping hole inside me.

 

I'm really curious how the next several months of couples therapy will go.

[Guest]

A big welcome to you...you've come to the right place.

Please look at the thread Will this relationship work? Although it's not specific to you I think there are many good points which may also apply to your situation.

Hope I can come back later.

[Guest]

Hi again,

I wanted to address the 'feeling duped' as not only does that resonate with the feelings I had, but it stopped me from moving on. 

Unlike you, we got married late and we had 2/3 years of living together, before making the big step.

We were both grown adults, used to living independently, and we thought we'd have problems accommodating each other.

It turned out that the first year was literally bliss. A real honeymoon phase, and so were the years that followed so, hey we could make the big move to tie the knot.

Then sex stopped, and the feeling duped/fooled/conned was an overwhelming smoke screen which did not serve me well. 

It kept me in a loop which included resentment and unacceptance and stopped me from seeing clearly.

For a long time asexuality was totally unknown - then the revelation. Wow what a mind blowing experience that was.

So we both started educating ourselves more about asexuality until not only did I come to understand it but also accept it.

 

I accepted my husband for who he was, not someone I expected him to be.

With acceptance, I let go of that horrible feeling. I started thinking more about what was ahead of me/us. About our shared values, about how we could be true to them.

 

What I was working with is 

Me to husband - you say you love me, but don't make love to me? 

Husband to me - you say you love me but you despise me for not making love to you?

 

Clearly we were getting nowhere.

So I had to narrow it down.

What could I do to make him feel better and what could he do to make me feel better?

 

Obvious. Let go of all the negative feelings. Learn how to be close again. How to appreciate a hug, a kiss, a massage. Bring our decision making closer to the values we share.

It's a work in progress. It does not change who we are. I also had to dig deep to understand what sexuality was for me. Not the act, but its meaning. Seems simple, but for me it was not.

 

 

 

[Liara]

Welcome here. Your situation is not new for us.
Sadly, your wife will not change. She certainly was ace (the label is not important, it's just a way to say "her no desire for sex") before, but, the excitment of the beginning of a relationship, the pressure to do what was expected of her could have "helped" her to have sex... And she certainly had not done that to "dupe" you. She could have thought it would come later.
Asexual label could be good for her to understand that nothing is wrong with her. She is like that and she is not the only one. Maybe she would not accept this label but that's not important. She doesn't want sex and she will never want it. You can do what you want, she will never desire sex. Not her fault, not yours. She is not wired for that.

With that, what can you do? Does she understand you are not like her and that you need/want sex and sexual intimacy? Does she understand that hurts you? She doesn't want you watch porn and will never think about open relationship. What does she propose for you? She certainly doesn't have to force herself into sex, of course. But what does she imagine? And you? Can you accept a sexless life?

[Olallieberry]

I would love to grapple with my wife.

 

Just kidding. Terrible joke. Not funny. But funny? She would laugh at it so idk who I'm apologizing to.

 

Just saying, mine also was sexual with me in our early years. Unsurprisingly it slowed down. Unsurprisingly it disappeared completely after childbirth. Unexpectedly it never came back. Curiously a ton of different medical investigations and interventions (not just for this but for various ailments) didn't restore it. Perimenopause was when she broke the ice and started discussing with me (asking me) what it meant for our relationship. Very soon after we started talking out loud about it, she discovered asexuality and identified.

 

It's been like six or eight months.

 

Anyway:

Therapy or no therapy, it's vanishingly unlikely our wives will become sexual again. Like, so unlikely that it's counterproductive to hope and wait for it.

It doesn't matter if they're neurodivergent or not. There is probably no "why" which we could discover or which would make a difference even if we could. It wouldn't change the sexual aspect of the relationship.

It doesn't matter if yours identifies as asexual or not. For you to get invested in "informing" her with reading material and "winning" the "you're asexual, everything I read says so" fight which could erupt over this, would only sap energy from the real work of discovering how to move forward, together or apart.

Regarding the choices we face, there's no practical difference whether our wives are asexual or just the not-asexual way they say they are.

Maybe yours will identify, maybe not, it's just not important. When discussing things, we can use their actual words, not the shorthand label if they resist that.

Mine sort of does, even though she's the one who came out as such to me. In her case, the resistance is I think less about whether she identifies with the label or accepts the orientation as real, and more a matter of the way I sometimes use it, which can veer into an activist attitude since I already have been queer for a lifetime and this sort of thing is completely new to her and she has other activism priorities elsewhere. So now we tend to avoid saying "asexual" regarding her own sexuality and instead talk about the bare facts themselves.

 

 

 

[Olallieberry]

 

 

 

11 hours ago, Felix_SCZ said:

she is so emotionally fragile about me thinking poorly of her in which anything I say that can be perceived as criticism sends her into a spiral of self-loathing.

If someone wants self-esteem, they can do something esteemable. Of course I'm not talking about giving in and having sex.

 

11 hours ago, Felix_SCZ said:

she can't seem to bring herself to do anything about it.

That's unhealthy for both of you. Of course we're not talking about giving in and having sex.

 

11 hours ago, Felix_SCZ said:

She has expressed disapproval of the idea of me watching porn, and hasn't initiated the idea of opening up our marriage so I can get my needs met that way. 

The first of these is simply unreasonable. Period. Your solo sex life should be your own business. Relaxing and minding her own business about this is an example of something she could "bring herself to do something about." Wouldn't that be esteemable?

 

The second? I suppose that you could bring it up, at some point, and again, maybe it could become another example of something she could  "bring herself to do something about". Wouldn't that be esteemable? I don't necessarily mean agreeing to it and sucking up the consequences, I mean simply having a reasonable, realistic adult conversation about it and hearing you. What follows from that would at least be authentic if she at least hears you without getting triggered.

 

I brought it up, and she said No. I brought it up again, and she said No again, and said she wouldn't keep talking about it. Good for her. She's set a boundary. I respect it.

 

Which brings me to my last bit. Someone else who introduced themselves here just yesterday was in kind of a similar boat and I wrote to them about some skills which would probably be necessary to develop before going as far as some of these touchy subjects. Without nonviolent communication and the emotional maturity to dodge triggers with equanimity and with loving attention to the partner's truth, the outlook for some of the conversations we're talking about are probably very bad, maybe even worse than the way things already are now.

 

Here's what I said to them. It's scary and hard but almost certainly necessary and oh so worth it. I am very lucky to have a wife who worked on these things together with me. It could be worth it to ask the therapist if they're specifically able to help with this. Getting this out of the way is probably the single most important thing a struggling couple can do, because addressing the specific difficulties in the relationship without these skills is likely to trigger insecurities and maladaptive reactions and impede any practical progress.

 

We might not make it but if my marriage fails it won't be because of toxic communication and imagined threats. Neither of us wants that but if it were to come to it, it would probably be amicable.

[Felix_SCZ]

Thanks everyone.

 

Yes, getting to understand more about asexuality is certainly helping me shed some of the frustration and feelings of resentment about her not being sexual intimacy, as it's truly something that doesn't compute in her brain. It's not fair for me to be mad at her for that. There's work to do to better understand where on the "repulsion <---- aversion ----> positivity" spectrum she is on, but my guess is that it's somewhere between repulsion and aversion. 

 

Also, to clarify on the 'dupe' comment: I fully realize that there was no malice or ill-intent, it's just a story that I sometimes tell myself in my darker moments (which are becoming more and more fleeting as I've learned more and through therapy). Like all of us, she was on a journey of better understanding herself.

 

A really helpful part of both therapy and reading the Ace book is both of us knowing that she isn't "wrong" or "broken" to feel the way she does, and I'm not "wrong" to feel the way I do.

 

[Rain dancer81]

19 hours ago, Felix_SCZ said:

"I am doing so much to help our family and her, and I can't even get a 5 minute hand job?"

Thing is, for sex repulsed asexuals, a 5 min hand job is really rather gross. Oral sex is even worse. Think if someone asked you to lick the toilet for 5 mins? I hope that doesn’t offend you, because it’s not YOU who is gross, it’s everyone’s genitalia. That’s the mindset. 

[BeakLove]

On 4/20/2023 at 8:26 AM, Felix_SCZ said:

So that's where I am now. We have a wonderful family and a great house and great friends and there is so much to be thankful and grateful for in my life, and it makes me feel ashamed to complain about sex. But this complete lack of sexual intimacy is just leaving this gaping hole inside me.

You mention the many great things about your life and lifestyle. But I'd ask: what are you getting from the relationship at the moment that makes you happy? What are the good parts that you're grateful for?