Ohhhh. . . I have a bad habit of asking people what they said or I said as a way to get them to repeat it back to me. . . bad old school teacher habit. I can see how that would be frustrating. I had a similar problem with my wife constantly talking about how I didn't listen and telling people how much I didn't listen . . . but ignoring everything I said and feeling free to talk over me. The only thing that made any difference was to start demanding her attention. If I think she isn't listening, now, I stop talking and ask her if she's listening to me. Often she's not, but she catches herself with a rueful little smile now and refocuses when that happens. It'll take awhile, though.
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I am careful not to commit to another time because I might not be up to it when the time comes.
That IS very honest. And it's not a completely unreasonable way to look at it. Have you told him that you feel that way? If so, what was his reaction?
If not, let me suggest that you should tell him, but also that you should choose your words very carefully. He's in a sex-starved, scarcity mindset right now and he's not always going to hear what you say the way you say it. And you're in a harried, pestered state of mind and things might not come out the way you mean them, either. When my wife said things like that to me, I heard something like "I know you want to make love, and I know it hurts you when I reject you, and I know I could soften the blow if I said we would do it tomorrow . . . but sex with you turns me off so much that I just can't stand to promise that, because then tomorrow I'll have no escape and I'll have to have sex with you."
Something like "I'd like to promise to do it another time, but right now, I'm struggling with desire and it scares me to promise something without knowing for sure whether it'll happen or not. I don't want to make promises I can't keep."
Now, all that said, if you read the Sex-Starved Marriage book, you saw references to what MWD calls the "just do it" theory. Basically, she says that many people (more often women, but not always) believe that they should feel desire first and then get stimulation. But many people, especially women, can't do it that way, because they walk around without feeling desire for days, weeks, months or years--but when they relax and accept stimulation, suddenly the desire is there. This was a revelation for my wife, because I'd been complaining for years that she would be wild on the rare occasions when I could get her to make an effort sexually, then go back to asexuality the rest of the time.
She began trying to "just do it." Every once in awhile, when she didn't feel desire, she'd open up to kisses and touching anyway. What we found was that it does work . . . if she feels no desire, but she relaxes and forgets about trying to get aroused, all it takes is some kissing and touching and she's full of desire. The key difference is that she only does this when she wants to do it. I don't try to make her do it, and I don't think it would work if I did.
So if you decide that "just do it" might work for you, give it a try and see. But don't accept your husband trying to guilt you or push you into a sexual encounter you don't want to have; that's going to do the opposite.
The way I introduced "just do it" to my wife (before I'd ever read The Sex-Starved Marriage) was to say "Give me five minutes of your time with an open mind. Set the alarm if you want. At the end of five minutes, if you want me to stop what I'm doing and go take a cold shower, I will." She didn't always accept that challenge (and she doesn't always "just do it" today, either) but every time she did, she found herself unwilling to stop after five minutes.
