SD and the Friday night "Just Do It" experiment

[eyesopened]

Does anyone have any ideas how I might be able to guide her to confront her pressure (given that she won’t read the books etc.)?

SD,
I wish I had some good advice for you. What worked for me was the realization through Michele's book, TSSM, and Willard Harley's book, His Needs, Her Needs, that sex was more than a physical desire or itch for my husband, that it was an emotional need and the way he felt and expressed love most. In other words, that the most effective way I can say "I love you" and show him that I love him is to let him know that I find him very desirable (and I definitely do) and to make love with him often (he now has complete control over the frequency of ML in our marriage, which means that I'll never turn him down again and that I'll initiate, which he likes, but there's no pressure there).

I also finally understood that turning him down (usually for mundane reasons like tiredness, busyness, etc.; sometimes because I was angry or irritated with him) hurt him. I thought about how I would have felt if he'd turned away from me or stood there like a tree when I came up to him to hug him.

Lately, I've been reading two books by Patricia Love (she wrote the forward to TSSM and her books are recommended by Michele), Hot Monogamy and The Truth About Love. In Hot Monogamy, Love writes:

If you want to create ongoing romance, find out what says "I love you" to your partner and do it. This is not as simple as it sounds. We have a natural tendency to show love the way we want to be loved. We want to believe that my preferences are your preferences, my desires are your desires. This is rarely the case. One person's idea of romance may be hiking together through the Sierra Nevadas; another person's may be sharing a two-hour spending spree at Tiffany's. In order to create romance, these two individuals have to tailor their expressions of love to each other's sensibilities. If the person who likes expensive jewelry gives a pair of diamond cuff links to the partner who lives in jeans and hiking boots, the unspoken message is not "I love you" but, "I wish you were more like me." To be a true romantic, you have to see the world through your partner's eyes.
Love, Patricia. Hot Monogamy. New York: Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1994. pp. 180-181

KNOWING now that sex is what says "I love you" most to my husband (other things say "I love you", too, but they can't make up for sex), I can't turn him down without facing the fact that it would be the same as telling him that I don't love him, that he's not important to me, that my love for him isn't consistent but is conditional according to how I feel, etc. Now when I ML with him, I see that I'm saying "I love you" to him in a way that means far more to him than the words, gifts, hugs, etc.

One other factor for me is that 10 years ago, I was baptized as a Christian (like the author Boris Pasternak, I lost my faith in atheism). It was a long and hard journey to get there, and I'm not a barcode Christian (meaning the type who sees "being saved" as the equivalent of having a barcode stamp to get into heaven but allows them to carry on their lives without any changes). It's a daily struggle trying to live as I should, especially the "love your neighbor", "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", "love your enemy", etc. Mature Christians explained that "love" isn't a feeling, it's an action verb. And, what kind of Christian could claim that she was "loving" others, especially enemies and strangers, when she wasn't even "loving" her husband as she should.

I'm not sure what you can do to guide your wife. Have you ever had a heart-to-heart talk with your wife about what ML with her means to you and how you feel when she turns you down? Would she be open to reading a book like His Needs, Her Needs? My husband, who's an engineer and puts very little stock in relationship books, was willing to read that book when I said I wanted to know what his top emotional needs were and what I could do to meet them. If she reads the entire book, perhaps she'd understand the importance of sex as an emotional need for most men (this book apparently helped my husband understand the importance of affection for most women because he's gone out of his way to be more affectionate with hugs, ILYs, flowers, etc.)