You might want to take a look at "Rekindling Desire" by Barry and Emily McCarthy. It reads like a session with a sex therapist. Their main emphasis is that we tend to jump to intercourse too quickly instead of allowing it to flow from erotic stimulation. The pressure to perform can kill arousal, particularly with men who have trouble achieving and/or maintaining erections.
They talk about five levels of touch, like the five gears of a car: 1) affectionate touching while clothed - hugging, kissing, holding hands; 2) sensual non-genital touching that can be nude or semiclothed; 3) playful touching that combines nongenital and genital touch; 4) erotic stimulation to orgasm; 5) intercourse.
Non-demand touching is gears 1 - 3. The authors advocate putting a hold on intercourse while working on performance anxiety issues and engaging strictly in non-demand pleasuring. No BJ's, no f***ing, no pressure to perform. If you get aroused during the course of pleasuring, that's fine. If not, that's OK too. The main point is that by focussing on goal oriented sex, we take the pleasure out of it and put the pressure into it. Intercourse becomes a pass/fail test, rather than a whole spectrum of sensual touching. The authors feel that we should be spending much more time in 3rd gear, and that hugging, kissing, massage, and other pleasuring should be done outside the bed as well as in, and does not and should not always lead to sex.
The key is requests not demands. None of this works without mutuality. It's best if each partner is willing to initiate touching, but it's OK if one initiates more than the other. If one partner says no, the other partner must be accepting. When one partner always says no, as in my wife's case, well then nothing works. That's why, you Totally Lost, have a chance to make this work, since both you and your wife seem ready to work on your sex lives. The difficult part, for you, is getting your W to accept a moratorium on 4th and 5th gear while you learn to feel aroused. While the two of you are at it, she might learn some things about her own arousal patterns that she didn't already know.
An exercise that the authors give starts out with the couple taking a shower or bath together. They reciprocally wash each other all over. They don't give any more attention to the genitals than to any other part of the body. The idea is to touch and to feel. If you get aroused, great, but no sex. If there is no arousal, that's ok too. After washing each other the couple should dry each other. Then they should proceed naked to the bedroom and begin touching each other, taking turns. One partner touches the other partner, then when the giver is done, they trade roles. The receiver, at this stage, should be passive, and focus on the sensation (mutual pleasuring is a different excercise, I guess). Touching is done slowly and sensuously all over the body, first the back, then the front, again without paying any special attention to the genitals.
This is just a sex therapy excercise. At some point you would want to vary the pleasuring to try different things, and it would be natural for more erotic touching and intercourse to flow from pleasuring. But intercourse is much more likely to flow from non-demand pleasuring than the pass/fail sex test that has you in a state of anxiety.
I really don't know what I'm talking about. I can't even get a hug, because I'm not my W's 6 year old kid. Annette, sorry to say, I think your husband might touch you if you stick the TV remote down your shorts .
Totally_lost, I think you should take a look at this book, and maybe look up a sex therapist. A needle might give you a hard on, but it's not sexy. Your W is sexy if you let her be sexy, and you let yourself be sexy with her. Don't perform. Feel.
Good luck
SM
"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment." Henry David Thoreau
