Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

On the one hand, it may be true that you are sub-consciously attracted to women who are either inherently low-desire (sexually), and who therefore lose much of the sex-drive following the dopamine-laden, "infatuation" stage of the relationship, or perhaps women who have "attachment disorders" of the kind that cause them to avoid intimacy and close physical contact in general.

Statistically speaking, a population of three different women (for me) is not much of a statistical population. The thing for me to notice is that I am the common element beyond the three. But it was also written very much tongue-in-cheek.

My first love, and the first relationship that I thought of in terms of being "in love" with this girl, then woman, occurred in my last year of high school (I was 17, she was 16) and over my first couple of years at the university (she briefly reappeared in my life right after I graduated from the university). The year difference in our ages played a role since I was a year older and meant that I left home first. We tried to maintain a relationship from 300 miles apart over my fisrt-two and her first year in our respective univerisities. At the level of personal communication and connectedness it was wonderful. At the level of sexual intimacy, she would be up to a point and then she would kinda freeze up or just lose interest. We never were sexually intimate. Oh, there was lots of petting and foreplay that went on at different times and to look at from outside, it looked very warms and probably quite sensual and sexual. But it wasn't that way. We eventually went our separate ways, me wondering just what that was I was fighting. But we left the relationship on "hold."

Eight years ago, she contacted me. Seems she was thinking about me and wanted to apologize. She graduated from her college, married someone she had met there (I met him once), and a few years later their marriage came completely undone because she had an affair....with a woman. It was a bad scene according to her. To make a long story short, she divorced, found another partner and has been in a relationship with that woman for 25 years. But 14 years transpired between the time she and I met (as teenagers, and briefly in our early 20's) until she came out of the closet.

I'm not the first man to have fallen in love with a lesbian that was not yet out, particularly in those times and at that age.

My second love and I met 4 months after the girlfriend (above) and I decided that things just were not working out for us. This woman was my first sexual partner and eventually became my wife 4 years later. Although the two of us hit a brief rocky patch a couple of years into our relationship (her with her ex-fiance, me with the girlfriend noted above) our relationship was, frankly, spectacular. And the sex was, well, beyond anything I imagined and it just kept getting better, more sensuous, more satisfying (if that was even possible). We got married and almost two and half years later we conceived our son.

The words to describe what that was like for me just seem so inadequate. Let me put it this way, if there had ever been any fear of losing myself with her, that went completely away. I was thoroughly, totally in love with her. We made love for hours on end, sometimes 3 or 4 times a day and mentally it was difficult to see where I ended and she began.

Even through the pregnancy, though our sex life slowed slightly towards the end (in the last month we might skip a day or night), it was absolutely incredible. In fact, the morning she went into labor (it was a Saturday), we were about to make love again when her water broke (though "leaked" might be a better description). In that last week, we had made love every night or morning and the weekend before, multiple times in multiple places in the house as we finished off the house for our child. That is all, except Friday (and we went well into Friday morning with what we started on Thursday night).

For seven years and two months, to the day, from the first time we made love to the last time before our son was born it was the most spectacular, most sexually fulfilling on the both a physical and emotional level, it never got stale, boring, or forced. Each time was like dicovering each other for the first time. I'm not making this up feom just my perspective, she says it felt the same to her. No book or wrting about the sexual experience did this justice.

And then it went away.

Not gradually, but suddenly. From the time our son was born to the time we went our separate ways 4 years later, the total number of times we had intercourse: 16. In our worst month in the 7 years and two months before that, it might only be 16 times. We'd typically make love 16 times over a two-week period. And all of a sudden I was confronted with this, seven years after we'd first become sexually involved with each other.

C'mon, Bagheera, this is not about me being attracted to low drive women. If a "sexless marriage" is one were sexual intimacy occurs less than 10 times a year, then I suddenly encountered one and it was completely unexpected. But the outcome is the same. I ended up married, for a while, to a woman whose reason for being with me was to not have sex with me.

Oh yes, in the middle of this sudden lack of sex (and her guilt over that as well as me trying to sooth her and keep the frsutration level down even though the intimacy gave hints that it was returning), at the age of 29 she meets a 22 year old university student on the bus that changed her life, who convinced her that I had walked away from her and I really did not love her, that I just wanted the sex, and that he was the one to give her happiness (of course, she had already had to have a POV about me and our relationship for this to take hold). It's a little like Dick Cheney saying that he found the best VP candidate and it was him.

She had another teenage rebellion as she approached the age of 30 and she discarded me (for that?)

As for my current wife, there is no doubt that I gave her the ammunition to kill the sex life. I gave her the choice or the option and I never expected her to take that route. In my discussion with Virginia (AKA Walking) I muse over the difficulties with expectations. When we met, even though we had other problems in the relationship, our sex life was one that "proved" that women at the age of 39 reach their sexual peak. And the first couple of years were good.

But then everything started to set in at once and I did not realize what the outcome was going to be. I did not realize how tough it was going to be as she went through menopause, I did not realize how much of a damper that a football sized fibroid on her uterus, and a softball-sized cyst on her ovary was going to play havoc on our sex life. When I said that she was "bleeding to death," I was not kidding. And then, trying to be adults and discussing this lack of sex and my request that there be some commitment, any commitment, to a sexually intimate marriage, I got a very definite no. In the middle of a family medical crisis (her mother had just suffered a debilatating stroke two months before), I got this "no."

As I have said before, I did not expect that to be permanent on her part.

A year later she had her hysterectomy to remove the uterus and ovaries and her sex drive is now "zero." As I have said now more than once, she is not a candidate for hormone replacement therapy.

In this second marriage, these factors have been magnified. I don't think it's because I attract or am attracted to low drive women. What I do say, is that I give and have given these women the space and the relative safety to be non-sexual if (and in my case when) they reach that point without dire threat of draconian consequences.

Again, in my wife's case, I know what the studies and statistics are. Ten years after her operation and 12 years after deciding against a sexually intimate relationship, the likelihood of any sexual intimacy returning to the relationship is effectively "zero" (at the 95% confidence interval).

I'm looking for how to deal with that in the future as well as right now. The prospect of another 12 and half years much less another 6-months of a sexless marriage does not thrill me. Now, if yo know where to point me with those facts on the ground, great. The other part I'm having to deal with is her domaneering nature and what it's going to take to take back the ground I've given up.

In the context that I've laid out, that will likely be down in the "no-sex" mode.