In fact during a long talk we had several years ago she told me that she truly loved me and that just because she didn't want to have sex with me, didn't mean she didn't love me. She told me that she showed me her love by washing my clothes, by keeping the house nice, by shopping for food and by her cooking me dinner.
Right on the money! I've heard that for years too.
Quote:
The thing that I am coming to terms with is that I need sex and touching to feel loved and that my wife needs quality time from me talking to her and listening to her to feel she is loved and she needs me to perform obvious acts of service/devotion for her to feel loved. When I ask her about what is going to happen to her during the day at breakfast and when at dinner I ask about how each of those things went during the day she feels that I love her. When I do the dishes after dinner, when I vaccum the house on the weekend or run a load of my underwear throught the wash, she feels that I am showing her the love that she needs. When she is feeling loved or when she is feeling like I don't show her an love, sex and touching are not a motivating factor to her. Sex is just something she doesn't seem to be interested in.
Yet she doesn't want you to have sex with anybody else, right? Have you given up or stopped showing interest in her physically for any significant amount time? It's interesting how an LD spouse will sometimes fish for compliments or expressions of her physical attractiveness, but carefully so as not to signal that she wants to consumate that attraction in sex.
Quote:
For these women, they have to start to have sex, before they can experience a desire to have sex. For them once the act is completed they again have no desire to have sex until they are in the middle of it. For them it is difficult to express sexuality unless it is as an act of devotion, submission or gift to their husbands. It is my hope to gradually find out, if this is how my wife feels about sex.
It's my impression that a lot of women are like this. Michele Weiner-Davis advises such people to adopt the "Nike" philosophy "just do it".
Quote:
Part of my wife's low libido, I attribute to her being raised by two parents who I never saw show much physical affection for each other and who were both alcoholics, but not to the point of not being functional. They were also very cruel to their children and verbally controlling and verbally abusive. I also attribute part of her inhibitions to being educated in an all girls catholic middle and high school, where there was a huge pressure to inform young women that "nice girls don't, until after they are married." When, we have discussed this later point, my wife has informed me that the nuns had no idea the kind of disgusting things that husbands wanted their wives to do and so she rejects the "until after marriage" part of the educational lecture.
Another part of her low libido, I attribute to aging, menopause, and possibly some health condition that I am hoping to try to talk her into having a medical check up about.
Still another part of her low libido I attribute to stress over her job and fear of loosing it. I also feel that over the course of our marriage, I may not have been there for her showing her my love for her, in the way she needs it expressed to feel loved.
This is familiar because I've said pretty much the same things about my wife. But, interestingly, when I see someone else saying it, my first reaction is, wow, you're making a lot of excuses for your wife. Yeah, sure, you're allowed one good reason for why you're not interested in sex, but it starts to look like excuses when you have MANY DIFFERENT REASONS, all reducing one's sex drive. Because if you start picking all kinds of things as reasons for not wanting sex, I can just as validly list a whole lot of reasons your wife SHOULD still be interested in sex, such as (1) you're available, (2) she knows you want her sexually, (3) she can count on you to help support her, and (4) lots of other reasons like that. A few of those things is enough for many women to want sex, even with the negative list you presented.
