I have been married for 38 years. Three years after we married my wife told me that sex was out of the question as she had married me for companionship not lust. We have two daughters from that first three years. It was her choice to have children. I love my wife and daughters dearly. Since then we have had no intercourse, in fact, no sex play of any type whatsoever. She told me she has no interest and despite years of asking and years of suggesting counselling, she has not accepted either. I am totally destroyed by all of this but can see no course of action. What can I do?
Eleanor says: Three options for how sex appears in the rest of your life: you and your wife have sex; you have sex with someone who isn’t your wife; you have no sex ever again. There are no options besides these.
What a position to be in! It’s not just about missing out on sex. It’s about feeling as though your wellbeing doesn’t matter very much. It’s about being told you can’t have something valuable to you and then feeling lascivious or base for even valuing it. No wonder you feel destroyed, without something that can make us feel so vital and free, without acknowledgement of how much this affects you.
You mentioned asking, and suggesting, counselling. What about – I’m sorry to be bold – straight-ahead curiosity about what she likes?
Often when we try to explain a straight woman’s disinterest in sex, we go to slightly pathologised explanations such as body image, trauma, hormones or pelvic issues. Surprisingly low on the list is the hypothesis that so far, sex hasn’t felt good. A variety of bummers conspire to make a great deal of heterosexual sex unenjoyable. A variety of additional bummers conspire to make it hard to say so. Consequently lots of women who have no barriers to enjoying sex nonetheless find they never want it, because “sex” has come to mean “an unenjoyable experience in which I feel alienated from my body and under politeness-pressure to pretend”. Hard to explain what a wretched feeling this is. Really imagine pretending to be turned on by penetration you’re not enjoying. Imagine the invitation to do so again.
Of course, I have no idea whether this is happening for your wife. Even if it is, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad or negligent lover or you’ve done anything wrong. Part of the tragedy is that even with a maximally attentive partner, lots of women don’t have the knowledge or self-authorisation to say what might feel good. You can’t share what you can’t even articulate to yourself. Our collective sexual landscape is so mean and negligent to straight women that it can end up feeling easier to say “no touching” to your monogamous spouse of decades than to wonder what kind of touch might actually feel enjoyable. Talk about perverse.
If – big if – this plays a role for your wife, things will only change if she gets reason to hope sex might be different. A person who never wants to do something again is a person completely confident of what that activity will feel like.
There are great books and podcasts and apps, if counselling feels too remote. But the very first step might be changing the goal. It can’t feel like “sex” is the goal. She has decided she doesn’t want sex, so if every conversation feels like a bid to get there, she has no reason to join in. The goal could just be understanding. “I want us to really hear each other, whatever we decide to do.” She might not understand all that sex is to you, besides “lust” – a longing many of us are raised to view as a vice. For you sex might be a way of saying I feel safe with you, I want you, I trust you – but you might not understand what sex is to her either. This gap in understanding might be why it has come to seem hopeless. Bridging this gap can be its own form of intimacy.
