MrsNOP, Our days are very similar to yours, actually, with the exception of all the fun sneaks and tweaks. There is none of that. If there was, I think I would view my M very differently. He, by his own admission, rarely thinks of sex. When he thinks of it now, it is in this context: "I wonder if she is expecting anything..." etc.
Regarding the passive and aggressive stuff, you know, I knew this was going to stir up the pot and it is excessively hard to explain to someone not in the situation.
In our marriage, my H acts like a man..a husband..in all areas except as regards his sexuality. This is not a silly cultural viewpoint that I insist on hanging on to--I challenge ANY woman out there to imagine herself with a sexually passive male and tell me that it would float your boat. I would wager to say that ALL women want to feel desired for their feminine wiles and beauty and sexuality. When you take away this piece of the puzzle, things are altered in such a way as to make the whole thing very difficult to pull off. Can you imagine being turned on at the thought of making love to NOP if he was not all that desirous of you? If the sight of you didn't stir something in him? If your naked body may or may not make him feel aroused? If he could kiss and hug you and run his hands all over your body and not feel a thing?
It is really hard to describe what I mean to the HDH's and LDW's because the husbands are thinking, Wait a minute..I want desire too! And they do. I am not trying to minimize that at all.
I think Jenny summed it up best when she said, "Don't take your partner out on the dance floor if you don't intend to lead."
Cause SOMEONE is leading the sexual encounters, it is not a matter of complete equality. Well maybe 'leading' is not the right word wrt making love, but the man's desire is strong enough so that the woman feels, well, like a woman! It mentally throws me off to have to try so fcuking hard to get him aroused. I then do not feel like I am making love to a man.
And for the record, I am not looking for soap opera style romance and hanging from the chandeliers. I don't think Jenny is either. I would gladly trade all that for a man who is so sexually into me that spring water wouldn't even cross his mind when pondering What Could Make This Birthday Perfect.
It is hard (even impossible) to imagine unless you are experiencing it. I need him to be able to open up and openly desire me, or I am afraid I will fall out of love with him. I don't think he is withholding from me either, I just don't think sex crosses his mind. That turns me off, in a man.
This is not immaturity speaking, or stubbornness, or hatefulness. It is just brutal honesty.
Honeypot
P.S. Sorry if the tone of this message is coming off wrong. I am not gloomy or doomy, I just feel like things are becoming clear to me..where I stand and what my next moves should be. I have been pushing for something that is not going to be forthcoming and pushing him away in the process. I don't want to do that any longer. That was my original point.
Choc, I have been operating under the assumption that, at some point, my H's desire would overwhelm my own. He is a man, one who was found to have high testosterone no less, and so I have been expecting him to step up and show me what he is made of. The problem is that he has already been doing this, and I've not been listening.
It IS different for the HDH's. Are you telling me that you not only want your wife to have more frequent sex with you but that you also want and expect her sex drive to overshadow yours at some point?
That is the difference that I am trying to underscore.
Oh sheesh, let's not get started on the realistic thing.
Look I am as busy as the next person. I would bet that Jenny is too. What she was describing was a FANTASY. She even described it as such in her post. What she is after is a man who feels this way and may or may not have the time and resources available to act it out. It is really not the acting it out, it is the wanting to.
Our men do not even want to act it out. They are not turned on by things that turn other people on. Unlike women, this cannot be explained away by lack of testosterone or busyness with raising children.
I'm finding the whole thing frustrating today, although I am sexually satisfied this week and exchanging lovely emails with my H today. Life is weird! I am like a boiling cauldron, under the surface. I gotta ditch my expectations and work on accepting that my sex life is good and my H wants me in his own way.
If anyone was doubting, I can and will do this. I'm nothing if not persistent.
I think I do understand what you're saying, and as much as I can't RELATE to it, I can empathize with you.
You state your feelings and your needs so well that I feel like I know you.
I also think your husband is who he is, and isn't going to change. He may continue to change how he RESPONDS to you, the how often's and such, but I don't think he's going to change how he IS.
What you then do with that I guess is up to you, but it's sad when a W and a H are so differently matched in this one regard.
I hear what you are saying about the desire piece. I can parade naked around my bedroom, hug my H, blah....blah... and if he isn't interested then NOTHING I do can get him there. Even if he does get interested I have to work very hard to make sure his interest continues. I honestly think that one of those times he is just doing it to try and please me I could stop mid-stream with him as hard as a rock and he could and would roll over and go to sleep. When he is interested then everything is wonderful. Between times the entire sexual part of his being can be totally unreachable. It not only turns me off sometimes but actually gives me a surreal feeling - difficult to describe. You do a wonderful job describing what you are looking for. I think the sexy e-mails (from his end)are a good start.
Sorry you're going through such inner turmoil, HP. I think I got "it" when you asked the question about my W's sex drive "eclipsing" mine. I don't ever expect this to happen. I would be happy, I think, if my wife's sex drive made an appearance more often than Hailley's comet (to complete the astronomic reference). I'd never expect her to grab me and throw me on the bed and dominate me.
Why do you assume that maintaining an easy good humor throughout the day and being able to generate sexual heat from a simple end of the day snuggle on a regular basis is the "easy", "pragmatic" choice? Even if I felt like this would satisfy all my needs, it would NEVER,EVER work for my husband. Just the word "snuggle" turns him off. The reason that NOP can get it up night after night to "make love" to you is he is SUPER-HD.
My "fantasy" is actually based on a real-life encounter I had with my H this summer. He had been out of town for a while and when I came to pick him up, he couldn't wait so he threw me down on the backseat, ripped off my pants, pinned my legs spread-eagle, stared at my pussy and then looked me in the eyes and said "Beautiful.". I thought "This man wants me" and I had no trouble orgasming at all.
It makes me CRAZY that the same man three monthes later would rather watch Ted Koppel than have sex with me even though I'm visibly aroused and actively seductive. It makes me especially CRAZY that I know he was horny this summer because I was threatening to leave him over the sex issue. The fact of the matter is my LDH is the one who needs relationship "excitement" in order to be aroused, not me.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Jenny said: ----------------- I think HP and I would love to be able to accept your POV with confidence. Please tell us what you would do if your sexual desires required not just a loving and willing partner, but a sexually aggressive partner? What if your fantasies were primarily along the lines of
"Mrs.NOP looks at me with a glazed, longing in her eyes. I can sense........ -----------------
If I were after an aggressive glazed fierce animal of a woman, or needed that to get me going, I would have married someone else. I would have probably divorced multiple times as well. I think it would be hard to maintain that kind of relationship. In my experience, the friction between partners with similar drives is far greater than those with a wider disparity of drive.
I have had lots of 'animal like impassioned' sex. Sans a good relationship, after 30 or 40 times, it gets kind of boring - for me anyway. That is probably why I 'moved around' as much as I did.
I can be aggressive or not, before and during sex. It depends on the mood of my partner and me.
The real answer to your question is available in a simple observation.
I will tell you what I see in my relationship. I see a woman that steps way outside of her comfort zone in order to meet my needs. If that is not passionate love, then I really don't know what is.
I suspect that when your respective husbands (Jenny's and HP's), step up to meet your needs, that they are putting more in it than you recognize, or appreciate. Why is that not considered passion?
It seems to me, that both of you are scared that you will end up settling for less, if you don't hold up an impossible to meet standard for your spouses.
If possible, get on a schedule so that you and your spouses can *practice*. Your spouses need practice to learn how to please you, and you need practice to learn how to treat your spouses. If a spouse is resistant to the idea, then tell them in no uncertain terms that there will be no sexual requirements outside of the schedule. That will make them more comfortable with the idea.
Osmosis doesn't work in a relationship. The only way to build one is to build one. You can spend all your time talking about design and never actually get your hands dirty in the construction. Until you have put your sweat and labor and hands into the construction, you will never really be able to appreciate its design.
Even if it turns out that your spouses are total losers in the sack, at least you can get them in the game long enough to find out.
I am not trying to be mean, or make anyone angry, having said that, let me throw this out. If Jenny and HP will insert one third of the energy that you spend cogitating and worrying about your spouses shortcomings in meeting your needs, back into the relationship, you will see remarkable changes.
I have the highest respect for you, Jenny, and HoneyPot. I think you are both incredible women that should be appreciated by your husbands. You are both very intelligent. Figure out how to give your spouses some room to grow a relationship with you. Whips and cattle prods worked for a while, but you and your spouses are past that now. You are seeing that the props you used previously work less effectively, and are not maintainable. All that means is that there is still more growing up to do, and that it is time to move into the next phase.
It does NOT mean that all is lost or that your relationships can't improve from here. They most certainly can.
-NOPkins-
I will ferret out an affair at any opportunity.
-An affair is the embodiment of entitlement, fueled by resentment and lack of respect. -An infidel will remain unreachable so long as their sense of entitlement exceeds their ability to reason.
Quote: It seems to me, that both of you are scared that you will end up settling for less, if you don't hold up an impossible to meet standard for your spouses.
If Jenny and HP will insert one third of the energy that you spend cogitating and worrying about your spouses shortcomings in meeting your needs, back into the relationship, you will see remarkable changes.
Quote:
Et tu, NOPkins. (sigh)
But don't feel bad. It's natural to view HD women as shrewish and demanding. It's yet another way in which being in a SSM is wonderful for a woman's self-esteem. Fortunately for me, I know it isn't true. I also know it isn't true that I am lazy about working on my relationship.
Really, I agree with much of what you had to say. Perhaps I haven't explained my current sich clearly enough. My H was showing up for sex even though he wasn't in the mood. He was "stepping outside his comfort zone" to meet my needs and I appreciated it. However, it was a very uncomfortable process for both of us. I'm not without empathy for his situation,in fact the problem may be I have too much empathy. When he shows up to have sex with me even though he's physically not aroused, I feel that this is an expression of his love for me, but I also feel guilty for creating a situation in which he has to feel inadequate. These feelings of guilt compounded with the responsibility of having to bring all the "heat" to the encounter cause me to feel anxious and therefore LD. This is what I mean when I say that you are more successful with the scheduled sex because you are more HD than me. In the absence of evidence of male arousal, my little ovaries just don't pump out enough testosterone to get us both over the hump.
I am angry and disheartened because my H chose to use a minor financial issue as an excuse to avoid the discomfort of continuing working his way through these encounters with me. He was being disingenuous when he implied that I was treating him like a "piece of meat". When he is in the mood, he likes being treated like a "piece of meat" as much as the next guy. He said this to me for the same reason that he used to blame the problem on my weight. Everyone knows that it's okay to not want to f*ck a "hard-hearted" woman, just like it's okay to not want to f*ck a fat one. I suppose I could keep an "Acts of Kindness" journal to prove to myself that I am a caring person, the same way I weigh myself daily to prove that I'm not fat, but I'm sick of playing these games.
MY IMPOSSIBLE STANDARDS/DEMANDS
I would like to have sex at least 2 or 3 times a week. I would prefer spontaneous sex that was initiated at least half the time by my husband, but I will be content with scheduled sex for which he at least shows up willing in mind/heart if not body.
BTW. I love you NOP, but when you write about your youthful experiences spoiling "animal-like impassioned" sex for you, it reminds me of someone talking about how they can never drink whiskey again because of the time they found themselves face down in a ditch choking on their own vomit. Overindulgence in a pleasure does not necessarily make one an expert in that pleasure. I don't want to be a teetotaler or a drunk. I'm generally content with a just a glass of white wine after dinner, but every once in a while, when the moon is full, I like to get out the whiskey or tequila and howl like a wild thing.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
