Are there any midlife women who want daily sex?

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

I'm going to step out of my own story for a moment and offer a couple of observations.

If I had been as tough as I should have been, we would have divorced.

For the functioning of human voluntary reflexes (as opposed to hardwired reflexes that we cannot control), language is everything .

In in your language, in the words you tell yourself (and others) there are two separate but related factors.

The first part is that you should have been tougher than you have been in the past. It's right the in the first part:

If I had been as tough as I should have been,....

That's a self-assessment of your own position, not something that someone else has imposed upon you. In those words there is something else and that is what you tell yourself about not being as tough as you should have been.

Others have pointed out how allowing the resistance, her resistance, to win out over the follow through is letting her off the hook. But you are telling yourself you shuold have been tougher, and you have not been. Aren't you also letting yourself off the hook and haven't you been all along?

That leads to the second related part, but not necessarily logical part:

....we would have divorced.

I'm fairly certain that you, like I, have a whole internal conversation about divorce and what it "means" and how that view defines us. As a child of divorce, I can look back and see how that influenced my view of the world and contrast that with "normal" families. It also requires a great deal of self-awareness on such issues.

So, let's just say to simplify things, divorce is not a path you wish to follow. Again, from my own adult experience, though we've made it relatively easy, we make divorce mean something and say something about who we are as people in this world.

But it does not necessarily follow that you'd be divorced.

You've told yourself that. The question is, has she?

I'm clear that my wife has told me that if I become involved with someone else (and she probably does not make any distiction between the physical and emotional) that our marriage (relationship) will end. She has spoken the words and re-stated them to be clear about her feelings about that.

(As a note: she has given me an "easy-out" to end the marriage...for her to stay true to her promise, her word. I have not taken the easy out.)


And the only way that you could draw that logical conclusion is fi she told you explicitly that if you attempt to work through these long-standing sexual difficulties with her, that she will divorce you.

Or put another way to match your words, she would have to have said to you "if you are as tough on me as you should be, I will divorce you!"

But at least the path would be clear...you both would have agreed that you should have been tougher and that it should end in divorce.

Otherwise, you just have a logical fallacy.

The Captain