Counseling or Therapy

[ColmCaoineadh]

So, my wife revealed to me that she thinks she is asexual after 5 years of marriage. We are considering professional assistance at this point. Does anyone have a similar experience and did you go to marital counseling or sex therapy to figure out if and how the marriage can continue with some compromise or whether it is best to split? I'm not sure which would be most effective.

 

 

[MoraDollie]

There is NO "one size fits all" for this kind of revelation. Here's my honest advice as someone whose asexual, engaged to an allosexual male where we both have a sex drive.

• TALK ABOUT YOUR LIMITS! What's your soft limits (you're unsure if you'd like it or not, be willing to try), hard limits (HELL NO, you will NOT do it under ANY circumstances) - this has to cover sex, sensuality (caressing, holding hands, love nips, etc.), romance (how dates will go), flirting (with each other and/or others), any potential kinks/fetishes/BDSM
• Define what cheating is for both of you. Some people think playing porn is cheating while others "it's only if you fall in love with the other person or have sex with them"
• What, if anything, in the sex and sex related fields makes her uncomfortable. It could be due to trauma, it could be she simply isn't interested in whatever the thing is.
• THERAPY WILL NOT "FIX" HER OR MAKE HER NOT ASEXUAL! Please do not go into therapy with the idea of "I will convert her/fix her to no longer be asexual". This is toxic and dangerous as hell.
• If you REALLY want to do something and she REALLY DOES NOT, see if an open relationship is on the table. If it is, again, GO OVER LIMITS. Make sure you're opening it up for the right reasons and non-toxic ones (to make the other one jealous, just to get "free pussy/dick" while your partner can't, what's ok with dates, is sex on the table for all parties?). I STRONGLY recommend the website "More than Two" https://www.morethantwo.com/ as well as the book "The Ethical Slut". TES is slightly outdated with some terminology, but it's a FANTASTIC beginner's guide to ethical non-monogamy
• Realize this happens surprisingly often - you're absolutely not alone. However, going to "dead bedroom" type subreddits or similar IS A TOXIC CESSPOOL online. 
• Sex therapy is great for navigating through potential boundaries that could involve different aspects of sex (religious trauma making you think masturbation is taboo is an easy example), but it's NOT going to fix a "dead bedroom" or "pulling teeth to have sex" mentality if you're trying to make her do something she absolutely does not want to do. It's about deconditioning social responses and making trauma responses less severe. 

[Olallieberry]

54 minutes ago, ColmCaoineadh said:

So, my wife revealed to me that she thinks she is asexual after 5 years of marriage. We are considering professional assistance at this point. Does anyone have a similar experience and did you go to marital counseling or sex therapy to figure out if and how the marriage can continue with some compromise or whether it is best to split? I'm not sure which would be most effective.

 

 

In my opinion, the best things counseling and/or therapy could do for you two would be to help you communicate with each other without triggering defensiveness, rage, resentment and other unproductive, toxic behaviors. This is really, really important and I don't mean to minimize the value of counseling or therapy.

 

What I do want to convey is that counseling or therapy aren't going to "fix" asexuality or change your own needs. "Compromise" might be very, very hard.

 

Speaking for myself in my own marriage, we spent months trying to find a sexual compromise. We did find one which she was willing to "perform," and I ultimately said No to it because it was so empty and un-fun for me. I decided it was better to just land where we basically now expect to never have sex with each other at all. The compromise that worked for her didn't work for me.

 

But we did find compromise in another area, specifically, extramarital sex.

We did spend several weeks, like probably fifteen or twenty or so, working with a marriage counselor to help us with our communication skills and with ensuring that every other part of our relationship, including and especially our long-term vision for our future together, was as strong and secure as possible. So, the content of this counseling didn't include, for us, working on the sexuality mis-match issue.

 

She asked/offered to do that with me, and I said No because I knew it wasn't going to help me be OK with a sexless marriage, or help her provide sex she didn't want. It just seemed pointless. I did consider seeking counseling on my own to process grief and to figure out what I wanted and how bad I wanted it, but what I did instead was process grief on my own (I have experience with this so I didn't need the counseling) and also to spend a long time being uncertain what I wanted and how bad I wanted it. There were months of basically wanting to avoid dealing with it or thinking about it, because I couldn't bring myself to dare to do something which could end the marriage. What wound up happening was, enough time went by that I became able to ask for what I wanted (extramarital sex) and able/prepared to be told No, which would have been an existential threat to the marriage.

 

I had to be ready to kiss it goodbye, and that's what months of doing nothing brought me to. Maybe working with a therapist/counselor could have made that go better for me, with less suffering, less alienation, less avoidance, less time sunk, but I didn't. 

[ColmCaoineadh]

Thank you for the responses. I have been lurking around AVEN (mostly great) and Reddit (both Dead Bedroom and Asexuality, both toxic in their own ways but also helpful) so I know the basic options (i.e., celibacy, intimacy compromise, open relationship, and ending the marriage). I know I am not trying to "fix" her, because there's nothing wrong with either of us. I was just wondering whether marriage counseling or sex therapy would be more appropriate for working through those options (and all their permutations) to see if and how the marriage continues. It sounds like marriage counseling, because at the end of the day the problem has been communication since I just suppressed the problem for years and she did not even know there was a problem or certainly not one for her to care about and talking through any of the solutions will require an enormous amount of communication.

 

Really a daunting amount of communication, tempted to just bury it down again.

[Olallieberry]

Sex therapy would have to be 100% her decision and hers alone.

 

52 minutes ago, ColmCaoineadh said:

tempted to just bury it down again

As you can see, I did this, and I always knew it wasn't a permanent situation or condition, but I don't feel sorry that I did it. And I'm not just saying that because I got something I wanted at the end of it. It could have gone the other way.

 

Sometimes "silent time" is just a dead end, but sometimes it's the soil in which our determination germinates, takes root and grows. For me, it was a deliberate choice to go that way instead of trying to force something before it was ripe.

[uhtred]

If you are not able to openly / honestly discuss sex with each other, I think counseling could  help, but if you are, it probably won't make much difference.

 

I think the key is to (by yourselves or with counseling) figure out if there is a level of sexual activity (possibly including people outside the marriage) that would make you both happy.  It doesn't matter *why* each of you wants or doesn't want various things - the issue is finding if there is compatibilyt. 

 

If there is an option that makes you both happy, that is great.  If not, then I think separating is far better than living with a major sexual mismatch. 

[Sally]

Sex therapy is usually indicated where both partners are of the same sexual orientation but have some adjustments there could be made without either of them feeling like they are giving up  something.  But with a sexual orientation mismatch, a compromise would mean that both of you would be giving up something important, because she would be having (some amount of) sex she doesn't want, and/or you would be having a sexual relationship with her that wasn't satisfactory to you, knowing she didn't want it.  Maybe it might be more useful to talk with each other about that kind of situation, and whether it's even reasonable to try it. 

[ColmCaoineadh]

That’s a good point. My wife said she was scared of doing a bunch of work and bearing her soul if I was just going to leave (which is one of the options). Maybe now that the topic is properly broached we can really be honest about what we could reasonably expect from counseling. It really doesn’t sound like sex therapy is what we need at this point.

[Olallieberry]

Do you need the regular therapy?

 

Will you leave if you two don't do it?

 

Is she already resigned to you leaving and not confident that anything anyone does at all can change that?

 

Or might she change her mind about it if the alternatives are "leave without therapy" versus "do therapy and maybe stay together?"

 

I'm not sure those are the alternatives, you weren't clear with us about that, but if those are the alternatives, from your point of view, then she might become willing to try it, if you tell her it could keep you together.

 

Or not - maybe she's already checked out and that's why she doesn't want to invest in therapy.

[anisotrophic]

Couples/joint therapy without individual therapy for both partners tends to be worse.

 

Individual therapy is important to understand oneself and use that to guide and modify your own behavior in order to achieve whatever joint goals are made in couples therapy for understanding and change. “Why do I feel/do this”, “how can I change it”, etc.

 

I think a joint goal for change is implied by joint therapy — a goal that is set together. Determining what goals are realistic and desired, and achieving them, is much less likely to succeed if the effort is asymmetric (one partner is putting in significantly more work to understand themselves, modify behavior, etc.). IMHO.