she becomes more and more worried about whether or not she'll be able to respond to me, while I becomes more and more worried about whether or not she'll be able to respond to me
It isn't up to you to turn her on... it is up to HER to turn herself on... that is why the two of you are so worried about how she's going to respond to you... jeese, talk about pressure... no wonder the two of you crumble. Who wouldn't?
Nice catch on my wording there, Corri -- I didn't realize how revealing I was with it. This is a problem that we (finally) recognized this fall, and we are making progress at moving towards the more experimental (and fun) sex-model that you described in your second post:
Originally Posted By: Corri
That doesn't mean sex is going to go like clockwork, either. It means you guys have a lot of trial/error in front of you... things to try, things to toss out... and if you give yourselves a break, and say outloud to one another... "it's okay if this thing we are trying together utterly bombs..." you take the pressure off yourselves, and you become that much more willing to try and fail... and keep at it until you find things you DO like...It can be kinda fun, too...
It is amazing to me how difficult it can be to get out of an old sex-model or sex-script, even one that doesn't work very well. And we BOTH share responsibility for that rut.
For my part, I admit to being one of those guys whose primary pleasure during sex comes from pleasing his partner (I'm not alone: see John Gray's Mars and Venus in the Bedroom). I can remember reading The Hite Report on Female Sexuality as a young man and vowing that I would never be one of those 'pawing, intercourse-obsessed apes' that woman after woman complained about in that book. Can you say "performance pressure"?
For my wife's part, she was willing to let me take the lead, while she followed what I think of as a romance-novel sex-model; that is, the man is supposed to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it expertly, with little to no direct feedback from his partner -- he should be so in-tune as to be able to read his partner automatically. Can you say, "even more performance pressure"?
This set-up is doomed to failure, especially once a couple gets past the infatuation stage of the R, and it did, indeed, fail much of the time for us. While our former sex-model is certainly NOT the only cause for our ultimately sex-starved M, it was a contributing factor, and one that we're working to fix.
The irony here is that even while we were at our most estranged and living separate lives (and sleeping in different rooms), my wife was discovering her own sexuality -- on her own. It is only now, with the REST of our R on the mend, that she is feeling secure enough to share those findings with me.
May the baby-steps continue....
-- B.
Me 50, W 45, M for 26 yrs S25, D23, S13, S10 20+ year SSM; recovery began Oct 2007
