It's automatic when you feel it

[Kettricken]

Sometimes it's just so much easier to say the substance of, "You should be ..." or "married people are supposed to ...." or "Everbody else does ....." or "Experts say ....." -- instead of "I feel unloved and ugly and unsexy and alone."

Whether it's because we don't, deep down, feel that our preferences really matter at all or because we aren't comfortable with expressing vulnerability or what.

When you come right down to it, though, pressuring our partner to be just like us or like what we think is healthy is kind of controlling and unfair. It tells them *they* aren't good enough, just as much as them not desiring us physically can send us the message that we're not good enough. An invalidation for an invalidation, yep, that helps nobody.

The best we can do is express what makes US feel most loved and satisfied, personally, without casting ourselves as as the acme of all that is true and right. Then the ball is in their court.

IMHO.

In my case, I left this site up on my computer (not on purpose) and my husband read a bunch of the personal stories up there in the top thread, about how being sex-starved made other people, strangers, feel. Reading it like that, on his own, with no pressure from me, made him understand what I had been feeling more than ever before.