How to convince resistant LD wife?

[melissag]

Ambivalent, if you're still there, I'd like to know what convinced you to work on your problem? I assume you were somewhat like my wife. It's hard for me to understand how my wife thinks because I've been HD my whole adult and teenage life. The best I can tell, my wife sees my interest as an obsession with something that has no practical value, and is only a sort of internal-meditative selfish pleasure experience. At this point, her approach to my sexuality is more like, well, do whatever you need to do, just don't cause some huge embarrassment or complicate our lives. What's the hook that will work for her? How do you convince a person who sees no reason to even want to want?

At this point, I simply don't know what more I can do. I really have tried just about everything. Almost every suggestion I get is something I've already tried. It's with mixed feelings that I read of other couples who seem to be in my situation, including couples described in MWD's book on sexless marriages, who then go on to solve the problem. But at this point I'm convinced that these accounts leave out the failure cases. Understandably, if you're trying to solve a problem, who wants to read about people who tried and failed?

So, right off the bat, let's be clear that my case is one which is not solved with the simple love life advice given in virtually every magazine at the checkout counter. Lighting scented candles and drawing a warm bath does not work. A romantic evening at a fine restaurant with good conversation, handholding, and even kissing -- doesn't work. A nice getaway vacation for just the two of us -- doesn't work. She enjoys all those things, but it doesn't make her one bit more interested in sex. Not at all.

Also, I'm not interested in threatening divorce in order to get sex. That doesn't really work and doesn't establish the kind of relationship I want anyway. And in my case, even that wouldn't work.

Finally, I understand that I can just "move on", as I have been advised many times. I'm smart enough to realize that option is always there -- that takes no thinking whatsoever.

ssmguy, sorry to intrude on the convo here, but wondered if maybe I could help? I am normally on the newcomers forum but was perusing the other forums during an insomnia attack last night and saw your posts.

I don't know much about your W or the specifics. I'm not even sure what exactly makes someone LD or HD. I do know that for women, sex is only a small part physical, and mostly emotional. My H and I are separated right now, and a large factor was lack of intimacy - I had no idea how painful it really was for him until he announced his intention to D me. I simply did not accept that sex was important to him to maintain our connection - I thought of it as just wanting to get off, being self-indulgent, etc. Every time he complained of not enough sex, I felt more and more like that's all I was good for; like he didn't value me for other reasons. It became blown way out of proportion because we handled it all wrong. It was to the point that he actually thought I didn't even want sex at all (Wrong.) I wouldn't even say that I am an LD person; I just didn't feel emotionally safe in the relationship to engage in that much intimacy. We didn't understand each other, and it was a vicious cycle. He was tired of feeling rejected, so he stopped initiating. Then I felt that the burden was 100% on me, and that didn't feel good either. It was a mess.

Here is what did NOT work: any kind of pressure, threats, or complaining.

Here is what DID work: he told me he wanted a D.

Now, I think that if he had told me, at some point before he got to actually wanting a D, that he was SO upset and hopeless, that he found himself considering D as his only option - that also would have made me sit up and take notice.

My H telling me he wanted a D was a serious 2x4 to the head for me. I guess I was listening to his complaints through my own lens - so I thought that he must be being overdramatic. It did not occur to me that he is just a different person with different needs, and that his needs and feelings, whatever they are, are valid. It made me see that he wasn't just being a pervert, but he truly needed that intimate connection to feel loved and worthy. It made me feel like a complete POS that I had withheld this from him for so long. (We did have sex, but it was not frequent enough - sometimes it would be 2-3 months in between.)

It's been 7 weeks since BD . . . and we have probably had more sex than we did in the past 3 years. Of course, H probably thinks I am faking things to get him back, but he couldn't be more wrong. I am embarrassed to say this, but it took this massive upheaval for me to see straight. I wanted to have this intimate R with H the whole time, I just couldn't figure out how to make it work. (I know this sounds incredibly stupid right now, it does even to me - but the mind is a weird thing and sometimes we can just get so stuck somewhere that we can't see out.)

I'm not suggesting that you throw empty threats your W's way. I don't even know if your W would see things any differently if you did D her. I am assuming that she is not simply non-sexual; surely you (as a HD person, especially) did not marry her thinking you would never be having sex with her. I don't think people just change like that - if you two had a good sex life at one point, it's still in there somewhere.

When you say you are HD, are you expecting her to meet your level of D? Or are you OK with more of an average frequency? I would occasionally make the effort to get things going with H - I would initiate, we would have sex, and I would feel defeated because he didn't act happy or appreciative about it. (I mean, he liked it, but guess I wanted a ticker tape parade or something.) Worse yet, sometimes a week later he'd be back to the complaints about how we have a "sexless marriage." That made me feel like my efforts were completely wasted, and I couldn't possibly ever make him happy.

I think another issue for me was complacency. I knew we were going through a crappy time, but I thought that we had our whole lives to figure it out. Little did I know that H did not agree . . . he was not about to live his whole life like this, and he didn't see a way out other than D.

What is your W's position? She may just be stuck, too.