What's the point of him going another 18 days before making ANY adjustments to something that's clearly:
a) already annoying him; and
b) meanspirited and controlling on his wife's part?
Shouldn't he just try to make the adjustments now, and her reaction will tell him everything he needs to know about her motivations?
But for Tex this is the start of something. None of us (perhaps even his wife) really know where its going. But after many years of dissatisfaction for them both, a kind of a dialogue is underway.
I say he should play along for a month, because that gives a fair idea of what is likely to happen in the next month - at the moment its not clear whether some of these rejections are not due to her period etc. So a month gives a full picture - Tex can then say to his wife "Well, we gave your game a month and after X initiations, you thought Y were good, and we actually had sex Z times. Now we're going to mix things up a bit." That kind of statement carries far more weight than "We've given your game 12 days..." (after many years of dissatisfaction). Do you see my point? His wife will find it very difficult to deflect if he gives it a whole month. A month is a natural cycle for a woman and gives a pretty good indication of what will happen if they continue this game playing only by her rules.
Given the positives that could well come out of this, I think its well worth Tex putting up with "annoying" for a little while longer. All kinds of situations can be annoying, that doesn't mean that they're not opportunities. If a man can't take a bit of "annoying", he'd do well to avoid women altogether!
And why this assumption that his wife is being meanspirited and controlling? You may or may not be right about this, but I prefer to assume some kind of good faith on her part - it can't be a coincidence that there's been all this publicity about 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy, and now Mrs Tex wants her husband to initiate for 365 nights as well. I somehow doubt she was thinking "What a great way to belittle my husband". I tend to think she sees this as a plan to get them both going. I've not personally read 365 Nights, but I suggest that Tex himself gets it and reads it - he may get some more insight. I can't think why I didn't suggest that to start with
There was another thing I wanted to say, Puppy and its this. This is my own personal view, arrived at through a lot of pain, depression, reading many books and countless posts here and on other boards, as well as some very deep soul-searching.
No-one is entitled to sex, even in a marriage. That mistaken sense of ownership and entitlement causes all kinds of problems for marriages and huge resentment. For sex to start happening again in a SSM the couple have to strip out all their resentments. That's very hard work. But it doesn't just stop there. The old atmosphere of resentment doesn't simply have to be removed. That would just leave a sterile vacuum. So it must be replaced with a spirited and playful atmosphere.
A man who approaches sex with a deadly serious attitude will always struggle. The woman has to feel she's going to have some FUN dammit. Read what I wrote on DQ's thread about emotion and spirit. A man really has to fill himself up with a strong masculine joy, so that he's approaching sex as something he definitely wants and that will be fun, but that he doesn't actually need. If his reaction to rejection is "how cruel" or "I'm wounded", its doubtful he's done the necessary inner work, because a rejection should not wound.
A woman should rarely be able to wound a man who is complete and happy and confident within himself. However, a man who is emotionally "brittle" with pain, entitlement, resentment and need, will probably always feel wounded by sexual rejection - because he has not made himself strong enough on the inside. That may seem like an overly dramatic even harsh thing to say, but my own experience as well as all that I've read on the subject by both men and women, tell me its true. Sex is a game, even within a marriage, and a man must enter it prepared with the right mental attitude.
So that's why I think Tex can quite easily afford to play along with his wife's game for a little while longer - because he's a man, because he shouldn't be taking this so damn seriously, because he needs the practice, because her rejections won't wound him unless he lets them, and because he has an opportunity to learn something.
Of course none of the above excuses Mrs Tex from her responsibility to own her femininity and to play the game that she has after all started herself. Time will tell .
S&A
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated" - from The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
Which I take to mean that every man has within him a spirit of relentlessness and optimism. Its already there; he just has to cultivate it.
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