Irresistible
By: Sex Starved Wife
Tags: Relationships Love Dating, Marriage, Self Help, Sex

There is nothing so exquisite as the pain of rejection.

And I’m not talking about a one-time experience, where you offer something and that offer is refused.

I’m talking about a decade of trying to get a self-professed fully attracted-to-you husband to explore his sexual needs with you. I’m talking about feeling so starved for affection and intimacy that you begin writing a blog. On the internet. For strangers.

You, dear reader, are going to want to make the big question, ‘Why do you stay with him if you’re that unhappy?’

And the truth is, I don’t know. I’m not sure what place that question has in these conversations anyway because I’ve offered him an out many times. In one fight, I explained to him that though I may have abandonment issues, I don’t have independence issues. I lived alone with the trappings of a satisfied single life before he came on the scene. And now that he’s here? I’m still quite independent. After all, I’ve managed to survive this long on crumbs of physical affection. I care for myself in many ways. I just don’t receive this type of fulfillment from my husband.

To me, the big question isn’t one of staying or leaving. And I think many women reading this will feel the same. Obviously, if I’m staying, there’s some areas of true fulfillment. He’s a brilliant sparring partner, offering intelligence and wit. He’s good at his job, we’ve never had a moment’s unrest because of his inability to provide his half of our living requirements. He’s fairly woke, though harbors some latent misogyny. In his ‘wokeness’, he displays a crucial willingness to participate in his share of the household chores. He proactively does the laundry, cares for the repairs of the house, and takes on other cleaning jobs as needed. He does ask the question ‘How can I help?’ a little too often, demanding that I do the emotional labor of creating the plan for what needs to be done. But this is ever so forgivable. And I’m not without my faults that were he to list them, may make you feel as if I was lucky he was sticking around at all... He’s an excellent father, with above-average communication skills and a tenderness with our son that melts my starved heart. Yes, he’s physically affectionate with our son, showering him with kisses and cuddles throughout the day.

For some reason? He showers me with a wall of avoidance, when it comes to physical affection. Distance.

When we were dating, he touched me a lot. It seemed he could not get enough of touching me. And when we finally had sex for the first time (we waited a good long while because we had both been raised in a religion that equated abstinence as worthiness), he was gentle, thoughtful, and kind.

But after that first time, he said he wanted to wait until we were married to engage in sex again. I felt hurt by this pronouncement but felt that perhaps the distance was due to his stress over his first year of law school. Or the wedding itself. We planned our own wedding and did all of our own decoration and food preparation.

But then, the wedding. And the wedding night… was anticlimactic. Quite literally. I had forgotten to pack a prophylactic in my wedding night bag, so we spent the better part of the night seeking one out. By the time we returned to our hotel room, we were both exhausted. The sex was quick, not at all what I’d been promised by legends I’d learned from my abstinence-first upbringing.

I thought these were launch issues. Until our first year of marriage revealed that my new husband found sex to be stressful during his second year of law school.

And third.

And while studying for the bar.

And while looking for a job after passing the bar.

By that time, I had successfully arranged my life around the sunk-cost fallacy of my investment into our marriage, that it would be several years before I realized how unhappy and dissatisfied I was with this aspect of our marriage.

And now, as I survey the landscape of this life we’ve built together, I note the shady area where nothing grows. Our desolate garden of intimacy (can I even reference the word ‘garden’ without it sounding like a euphemism? I’m not really trying to…)

I would take physical touch over intimacy any day. And I’d take intimacy over sex. But for some reason, my gentle husband, with all his good and difficult traits, seems to find both physical touch and intimacy so impossible to approach that even raising the topic causes him to step back.

But, what about attraction? Is it that he’s not attracted to me?

He claims this is not the case. And when we do have sex, it seems I’m selling exactly what he’s buying. Yes, that euphemism was intentional.

So, you ask, why do I stay with him? If this part of our monogamous and now non-religious (we are both exiled from any religion) partnership is so dissatisfying, why not seek another?

And the simple truth is: because I want to be irresistible to this man.

I love him. I want him to want me.

So, the bigger question is — is it just me, or would it be any woman? Does he resist just my charms? Or would any woman in this role find herself the recipient of such neglect?

What is it that makes some marriages revolve around a foundation of irresistibility? What is it that makes my marriage revolve around “such polite affection” (thanks to Austen, who always has my back with good descriptors.)

I don’t know. But I know I want to write about it.

So, I will.