Post #1409357

Don’t generalize. I am a progressive leftist and think real feminism is justified and necessary, but like any other social movement, there is ignorant prejudice that disguises itself as feminism. Sexual health professionals will tell you that libido varies among people. When a couple has great disparity, both sides must change and the essential first step for healing is accepting reality. Telling the woman the problem is exclusively men’s fault is a recipe for suffering. I speak from experience. I had sex maybe once a month; sometimes I would wait nearly three months. When it did happen, it was always the same boring routine, because she never once allowed variation. She made clear she didn’t want it, sometimes even making bad faces, looking away and complaining “Just finish it!”. I had frequent nocturnal emission like a teenager. Sometimes I lost control and resorted to pornography and masturbation, causing big suffering and a heavy guilt of adultery. After more than 7 years of this, I finally had a tough conversation with my wife. She was initially receptive but then quickly retreated into denial. She concocted five crazy justifications. One of them was that couples with a child can no longer have sex. I said: “then how come so many couples have a second child?” She said they are all bad parents, because they neglected the first child to make the second. Eventually I showed her my therapy notes. Just a few months after we married (many years before the child), the sexless marriage became a recurrent therapy theme. One day she finally accepted talking to a gynecologist, and some months after that she started physiotherapy, but still strongly refused the crucial part – psychotherapy – because “that is for weak people”. She said that knowing very well both me and our child have psychotherapy. She also said “it is wrong for a couple to like sex”. She would also berate and offend me for trivial and often imaginary reasons. Only after a big fight I would deduce what crazy impulse of her imagination had started it. She had violent headaches twice or thrice a week. Only very recently she finally accepted psychotherapy. She is slowly improving. The headaches and fights are gone, but I am still resentful and depressed because after more than a decade of marriage I still can’t have passable sex.