Are there any midlife women who want daily sex?

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

If you are going to characterize my relationship, the events and the responses, at least be a little more accurate in your languaging.

As I have written before, the winding down of my sex life was a gradual thing. Prior to our marriage in 1992, there were occasional periods of no sexual intimacy. They generally did not extend more than 5-6 weeks (and by that I mean that I was around during that period because my job occasionally took me away for several weeks at a time). By the time we reached calendar year 1997, we were down to a rate of 3 times every two years though not necessarily equally spaced.

That is not to say that I didn’t try to get her interested more often than that. But what once seemed relatively easy in 1986 and 1987 (in the first year after we met) was now becoming more difficult. So, it was a real surprise on April 6, 1997 when she suddenly initiated a sexual interlude, something she hadn’t done in a while. There were lots of things going on then that complicated things and distracted. But between April 6 and November 11, 1997, though I made many attempts, there was no breaking through.

November 11th was the day of the big “blow-up” and I spent much of the rest of that day and the subsequent weekend apologizing and explaining in the face of her fury at me. She withdrew all permission to be sexual with her until we worked something out. After a couple of weeks of “cooling off” we took the first steps by agreeing to a framework within which to discuss the issues, our differences and all proposals that either of us wanted to have entertained as part of a negotiated agreement.

Over the ensuing 6 months we had several long (and draining) conversations as well as a few much shorter ones to “check-in” on where we were. I still did not have her permission to be the slightest bit sexual with her as she made abundantly clear. And when it seemed we were making no progress, I wanted to know if there was any hope for resolution that involved sex at any level or frequency and her answer was no. I’ve given a much more detailed accounting of what was said previously.

It is not stubbornness that has had me be silent…it was a promise to abide by the process and the choices we made. A promise is a promise and one of the issues that had cropped up earlier was her concern that I might not keep my promises.

As she and I have discussed over the last year, she expected me to break my promise, given what I went through with my first wife. I thought at the time, with a few more months, she might decide that a sexless marriage wasn’t really what she wanted. Besides by this time we had gone more than a year since there was any sex and more than 6 months with any real physical contact. Then another crisis involving her mom’s health was foremost, then issues with my wife’s own health became paramount, issues with her daughter. The list goes on.

The thing I pointed out to her at the time, the reason I was ‘persistent’ and the reason I was willing to come to some agreement on some level and frequency of sexual intimacy was that I could see if we (she) did not give it some importance, some priority, that our sex life would slip away. I said this many times leading up to this big blow-up and to her finally telling me that she was unwilling to commit to any sexual intimacy.

As you can see, this was not some made up fear. I was living it and watching it happen as I am still today.

The argument that she and I might, at age 51 and 44 respectively, be less able to negotiate issues in our marriage than we might today at age 64 and 58, might be valid if we had actually been in our 20’s and 30’s, if neither of us had been married before, or if my wife was not a therapist.
And while she has expressed some regret in the last year about the framework we set up (because I stayed true to my promises and didn’t broach the subject any longer) and has admitted that, on occasion, she has missed the sexual intimacy we once shared, she has also not been ready to share that intimacy with me again or to even give me permission to once again try, even knowing how unhappy I am with this situation….

I’m going to leave it at that for the moment.

The Captain