H - Eat your Oatmeal cookie

[MJontheMend]

Out of curiosity, what has been the net effect on your sex life?

I guess I should make it clear that "not initiating" is something I decided to do for me, not for my relationship. I didn't want to define myself as HD anymore. I think I came to this realization in Alaska when I found that I had very little desire to be sexual when I was in a fun situation outside my marriage. Back in my wimpy, weepy days when I considered leaving my marriage I felt desperate because I felt like I was sexually undesirable. During my angry phase when I considered leaving my marriage I felt like "I'm out of here! You might not want to f*ck me but there are plenty of guys who would!". After my trip to Alaska, I realized that I wanted to have the option of not feeling like I needed to be in a sexual relationship at all, maybe concentrating on other things in my life. So, I asked myself why it was the case that I could contemplate maybe doing without sex for a year or two if I divorced my husband but I couldn't contemplate going for a week or two without sex while I was married to him. "Not initiating" was my attempt to answer this question. I found that a lot of the answer had to do with ego and plain old sexual infatuation.

The ego part is pretty easy to understand, if you tell yourself that you have no agency over something it's pretty hard to involve your ego. For instance, you might be happy if the sun comes out after many days of rain, but your ego wouldn't be involved in your happiness unless you thought the little sun dance you did was what caused the sun to come out.

Losing my sexual infatuation with my H as a result of not initiating was actually a surprise to me, but it makes sense if you think about it. You see your H's muscles across the room, you think to yourself "Mmmm, yummy beefcake. I gotta get me some of that!". By telling myself that I couldn't initiate sex, I developed the habit of reminding myself if I had that sort of thought "Oops, remember you weren't gonna try to get-me any of that anymore.". So, eventually I mostly didn't even notice the beefcake anymore and if it did come to my attention it just looked like arm muscles, not a symbol for sex. However,I do not mean to suggest that I have become irreversibly LD. Due to my years of experience, I am almost instantly able to convert arm muscle back into beefcake when appropriate. This is part of what I mean when I say it's better to be sexually responsive, rather than HD or LD.