Cyrena, I tried that only a few times out of the hundreds of times I gave her a massage.
What you're saying is that my wife is logically defended from all sexual touching. If I touch her in a sexual way, then it's what her molester did. If I touch directly and immediately, I'm a crude molester. If I try foreplay and gradually move to more intimate touching, then I'm a sly molester. If I do anything sexual, it's an MO. If I merely talk about sex, it's an unpleasant subject and why would I do that when my wife tells me I should know that's not a comfortable topic for her.
If I tell my wife I love her, and don't ask for sex, she's happy. And that's what I've done for years. And she never wants sex, and she's happy with that.
So, indeed, what you are saying sounds very accurate, because I have come to feel that trying to touch a woman intimately is "dirty", just from my wife's reactions. Early on in our marriage, I "naively" tried touching her in ways that seemed fun to me, only to be met with "no, that's not appropriate", at which time I felt, "Wow, I didn't know that was wrong... and I felt dirty". It took a bunch of times, but now it's part of me too. It now takes effort to visualize that I could enjoy touching a woman intimately, and that she would actually enjoy it.
This distorted experience on my part has also led to some comical misunderstandings. For example, during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, I first assumed that Clinton sort of molested her and came on to her, and that surely she was only putting up with it to keep her job. I was totally taken aback when I read the Starr Report and zeroed in on the salacious parts, where it clearly described Lewinsky as a willing sexual participant. And also experiencing orgasms, though it was never clear to me just how she was stimulated to orgasm. But I've never seen a woman having an orgasm, so I'm a little out of the loop on that one.
