I think she gets stressed out when she is asked to talk about her own sexuality. That's been unchanged for many years, and I never fully understood that. She's read some books when I asked her, but it never changed anything. It was more like, OK, I did what you asked.
I understand the standard advice about a wife just doing it as a loving chore for the husband. The problem for me, after all these years of that kind of sex, it really doesn't work for me because it increasingly makes me feel like some kind of pervert who has a need that needs to be taken care of. She's not really participating and gets nothing out of it herself.
There seems to be a dichotomy in our social advice on this point. On the one hand, everyone celebrates the woman who is on her own and just pursuing her career or whatever, even if she's without a man or not dating for years. But if she happens to be in a relationship, there is something wrong with her if she's not having fulfilling sex. Well, guess what, it's pretty common for women (and men too) to lose interest totally in sex in middle age. Now, the standard model is that when that happens, they go to therapy and figure out the "problem" and then it gets fixed. Well, guess what, it doesn't always get fixed. Then what do you do? Standard model is, you get a divorce and "move on". Guess what, I don't buy the standard model.
