Sooo mad, porn but no sex.

[Crazy Eddie]

Eddie,

I just want to throw in here that one source of "variety" in a relationship has nothing to do with different hair color, eye color, body shape. It has to do with what Schnarch calls "shades of meaning" in sex. If your sex life provided adequate shades of meaning - fun sex, raunchy sex, angry sex, freindly sex, romantic sex - props, no props, different moods, smells, lingerie, nudity, naughty language, silence, music, no music,positions, types of sex etc...then "variety" may cease to be such an issue.

So true. We both had some issues to overcome first.

Experimenting is hard when you're afraid of failing, and when you misinterpret a slight bit of resistance as "hell no" when it really means "convince me".

I found some moves that nearly always brought her to O, and stuck with them lest I fail to get her there and leave her frustrated and unhappy. Stuck with them for years. Didn't let her do much to me for fear I'd finish too soon. Watched porn where the girl was up for anything and wished we could do it like that. Meanwhile she was tired most of the time and unhappy with her body and (now that I think back on it) bored out of her mind.

Guess what - that sort of variety is your responsibility too.

Yep. Actually, at least in my case, that sort of variety is mostly my responsibility... she generally follows my lead. (Although, after she'd lost a bit of weight and I'd led her through a few change-ups the last several times, she surprised me by asking to try a position we'd never been able to get into before, and it worked!) She sometimes asked me where I got a move I was showing her, and I smiled and said "I saw it in a movie once" (porn does have its uses). Once I got more confidence, I went from "why can't we do it like that" while watching those videos to "we can do it like that" to "we should do it like that, and I bet she'll go along with it if I lead her in a manly fashion like that guy in the video", and I took on the attitude that, if something doesn't work, we can try something else next time... it's not the end of the world if I don't push her over the edge every time, and she has a lot more fun if I relax and play with her.

And dropping the conflict avoidance paid big dividends recently... I brought out an inflatable exercise ball from the closet right before we started, and while my head was turned, she threw it right back into the closet! In the old days, I'd have assumed that she was not interested in playing with it and just dropped the idea. Now, after we warmed up for a while on the bed, I took the exercise ball back out of the closet and led her to it... and we got plenty of exercise with it! Later I asked her if she'd originally had misgivings about it, and she said she didn't even realize it was I who had brought it out before, much less why it was out; she was just cleaning up and putting the ball away before she started playing. She wasn't resisting the idea at all, but I could easily have fallen into the trap of thinking she was rejecting a simple variation and then blaming her for a boring sex life if I hadn't pushed through my own insecurities.