To HikingOut's point:
The only thing I can offer in return is usually the more orgasms you have the more you want.
I can completely attest to this, I call it the sex snowball. When XWH and I were in the beginning of our relationship, we had sex all the time, and therefore I wanted it all the time. As work/kids/stress gets in the way, the desire goes down, then once you get back into the swing of things, it starts rolling down the hill again, picking up speed.
Granted, for us, sex almost always ended with me having an orgasm. It was incredibly, incredibly rare that it did not. So for me the sex snowball theory only really works if there are orgasms involved, because that is the "demand" that keeps up the "supply," even if it's just a subliminal thing and you're not even acutely aware of it. It's hormonal, the chemicals released when you have an orgasm are designed specifically for that purpose, so unless you have a deficiency in the receptors that actually pick up those chemicals, it's likely that an increase in orgasms will correlate with an increase in sex drive.
Now, FenderGuy, something you brought up triggered something for me, and I thought it might be helpful to you.
She does not seek the closeness and the intimacy that sex provides. It’s a non issue for her. We could have sex everyday or none at all and I don’t think she would feel any different. It’s just a fun activity to do together.
Has she always been this way in your relationship? Is it possible that something happened to make her feel this way about sex? It might not even have anything to do with you, it could be something from a past relationship, or even just the way she was raised to think about sex, or how she internalized it from media etc. Not something you even have to answer, but it might be worth her thinking about it.
Of course you've also said that you've just come to terms with it, and that's ok too. There are thousands of inputs that contribute to how we build up sexuality in our brains so it could be anything, or it could be nothing. But if it's something that bothers you and you want to explore, it might be worth a look into her past.
I say this because I have had a similar attitude toward sex in the past. Previously, I would have considered myself to have a very high sex drive. Had my fair share of sexual partners pre-marriage, often FWB (friends with benefits) so that I could call whenever I was in the mood, but sometimes ONS to fill in the gaps. I also shared a very high sex drive with my WXH. We went a week without having sex once, and I had a sit-down conversation with him about how I was worried that he wasn't attracted to me anymore and that we needed to have more sex. He used to joke that I'm probably the only woman who has ever said that to a man. BUT there was a point when I started to feel exactly how you describe your wife.
Like you mentioned, how you could have sex every day or not at all and she wouldn't notice - this is EXACTLY how I felt. At that point in my life, we would go for months without it, and I wouldn't even notice how much time had passed. When we would have sex, it would often be on a day when the kids were gone, so we would have sex multiple times because we had the free time. But it wouldn't really set that snowball in motion like it had in the past. It was fun, sure. But it didn't pick my drive back up.
I didn't know it at the time, blamed it on being too busy, too stressed etc., I won't go into all of the nitty gritty details, but suffice to say there is a direct correlation between some specific events with my sex addict XH and when my sex drive/emotional connection to sex tanked.
Yes, in the immediate aftermath of the SA revelations, of course I knew that's why I wasn't interested. But the lack of drive continued, well past when I had considered us "reconciled." I told myself it was fine, that it was just part of getting older, being stressed, dealing with kids etc. But in reality, I was building a wall around myself. Not allowing myself to be as connected to sex as I had been in the past. Protecting myself from it, even.
I've gone through it a LOT in therapy, and I honestly think that the only thing that kicked me back into wanting to have sex again was him getting the surgery so that we could have kids. Not even because it was imperative to have sex in order to have children, though that's obvious. But because I finally trusted him again... I finally felt like he would follow through on his word by getting the surgery; that after all of the times he told me this was the last DVD, or the last pair of my underwear to be destroyed, or the last bottle of conditioner to be found empty, and it never seemed to be true, finally, now, when he said something, he meant it.
It was too late for us, he had already started up his affair. In large part, not so surprisingly, due to the lack of intimacy. But that is the revelation I've come to more recently, and something I would have endeavored to work on had our relationship continued. That I had much, much deeper issues regarding sex than I even realized on a conscious level.
Anyway, this isn't meant to imply that your wife doesn't trust you, that's very specific to my situation. Just wanted to throw out there that some underlying issue may exist that causes this kind of disconnect, one that she's not even consciously aware of. Considering that you say she initiates about as much as you, and is still doing it for you, everything I said might be completely off base. Take it or leave it, just my two cents.
******
Re: the OP. I do think that this is where the sexual Plan A vs. Plan B thing CAN come in to play. I'm not a wayward, so I can't speak specifically to the way a WW would feel. But as a woman in general, there are definitely things about sex that can cause you to shut down, even if you don't notice them at first. And the Plan A vs. Plan B distinction can get very warped.
There are certain sex acts that I was more than willing to participate in before the discovery of his sex addiction. I'll call that discovery DDay 1, and we'll call his addiction an A, just for simplicity's sake- although it wasn't a technical "affair" it might as well have been. So toys, role playing, outfits, all of that was very much on the table, and initiated by me more often than not. Now there are a lot of things in porn nowadays I would never get into, but if the more "garden variety" porn was the standard, I would say "crazy porn star sex" was very much in the realm of what we had on a regular basis. Sex with my WXH was by far and away the best sex I had ever had - physically and emotionally - and he was my Plan A. Judging by how much he wanted it from me, and talked about it and praised me for it, asked me to film it, etc. I would say without a doubt, I was his sexual Plan A as well.
Post DDay1, totally different story. His A made me feel like a sex object. Like I could have been anything, or anyone, and that all of the toys, outfits, candles, oils etc. were no longer there as part of a mutual act with me, they were there just as I was - as a supplement to get him off. I was now Plan B. Plan A was his addiction (porn/masturbation).
Sexuality is complicated. There were things I had previously enjoyed, sought out and initiated even!, that post A were just triggers. After his actions, I subconsciously chose to disconnect from him. Becoming his Plan B did not make me want to have more sex with him to reclaim that part of our relationship. Yes, my standing as "the best he'd ever had" felt like it had been taken away. But it didn't make me want to defend that position, I didn't feel the need to prove that I was better than the toys/lube/porn, It made me want to run away and hide from it.
Like what RideItOut alludes to: For all of us - when we went into our relationships, there was a certain agreement. One that included all sorts of understood terms, sexual and non sexual, but did not include an A. So post A, the terms of that agreement have been violated, and are now up for renegotiation. Now, instead of telling him that going a week without sex made me feel as if he was no longer invested in our relationship, I did a complete 180. I was basically telling him that the only way to show me he was invested in our relationship was by abstaining from sex for as long as possible.
We talk a lot on SI about an A being a choice. And that is true, it is. But choices are not made in a vacuum. Choices very rarely stand alone, they are often made in response to choices made by others. An A is a terrible, misguided choice, there's no doubt about that, but that choice was formed when the WS took in information - experiences and conversations with their BS, of course, but also with their children, their employers/employees, friends, family etc., the babysitter, the dog walker, the random clerk at the grocery store who might have looked at them funny- and then decided to react in that particular way based on all of what they took in. The WS's life experiences were the many, many inputs, and the A was their output. There were hundreds of other ways they could have responded, but they chose that one.
It is okay that my WXH's addictive behaviors made me want to run and hide from our sex life, when previously we had enjoyed a very active one. It is also okay that BHs like in RideItOut's situation feel the need to reclaim it, and to "get" all of the things they want that they were previously denied. Both of those feelings are valid. But if we subscribe to the notion that everyone has a choice, and I believe the common rhetoric on this site says that we do, then we have to accept that the reactions to our choices are equally valid, even if we don't agree with them. And the reason that works, is because we then have a choice to react however we want to their choice, and so on, and so forth.
I chose to withhold sex after my XH chose to violate my personal property. He did not cause me to make that choice, I could have made many other choices, including to leave it alone and continue to have sex with him every day. In fact I made that exact choice, on many different occasions as various addictive behaviors were discovered over many months and years. Over and over again I rugswept and continued along like nothing was wrong. And it only lead me to more and more discoveries, and more and more pain. So when I put two and two together and realized that the choices I had been making were not leading to anything positive, I made a different choice. To stand my ground and withhold. There's no denying that each choice was a reaction to his behavior, as well as what I felt I got out of each of those choices.
Did I have every right to deny my XWH sex because of all of his actions that hurt me? Yes, I did. Sex is never truly obligatory, if it is that's called rape. But he also had every right to say, nope, crazy, porn star sex every single day is imperative in my life, and if my wife denies it, I choose that over my wife. Just like RideItOut has every right to request all of these sexual actions, and then, if denied, leave. I don't agree with it, but whether I agree or not doesn't matter, it's still his choice to make.
I have never cheated on anyone. But I would imagine that if I did, and I saw the evil of my ways and decided to try to make it up to my spouse and R, whatever act I had indulged in with the AP would make me feel vulgar and disgusting. I would never want to do it again. Now, if my spouse made it a requirement of R, then I might try to work on that. But it is still my choice whether I do it or not. My partner then has the choice in how they react to my reaction, and so on, and so on, until the end of time.
Is it absolutely f&*($!ng hurtful to know that my spouse would leave me over these things that I deemed so trivial by comparison?! Yes! But it was still his choice to make. And after discovering that about himself and his needs/wants, an A (the found-him-in-our-bed-with-another-woman kind, not the addiction kind) was the worst, most hurtful way in which he possibly could have handled it. But considering that he clearly didn't care about hurting me with all of the addictive behaviors, it was naive of me to expect that he would react differently to being denied sex for extended lengths of time. And fair or not fair, it doesn't matter, an A was how he chose to respond.
None of this is "fair." I spent multiple years working through his addictive behavior with him to get it to stop. Once it stopped (or at least I thought it had), I thought I was owed the courtesy of at least an equal amount of time to process and work through when he told me I was "being too critical" and that I was "turning into his sister" because I didn't want to have sex as often as he would like. It just turns out that our thresh holds when it came to waiting for change were very different. I gave him years, he gave me 6 months, tops. Our styles of communication about it were different too. I told him numerous times that the addiction would eventually be a deal breaker, and gave him time frames within which I expected change. He just complained about my criticism/our sex life, then when it didn't change within the magical timeline that he created in his head but never communicated to me, he started an exit affair instead.
DragnHeart, what you said here rings really true to me:
What I'm saying is that you cannot build a foundation of a new marriage on the back of what happened in the affair. I'm not saying you shouldn't have the best of your spouse of course you should but I disagree with the method of getting it. Demands and doing out of obligation aren't authentic.
And THIS is the entire reason our R was never truly an R. Everything was fine and dandy, until DDay 1 with the sex addiction. After that, everything he did to correct it was because he wanted me to be happy, and to stop crying and yelling at him. But in reality, he saw a problem with my reaction to his behavior, not with the behavior itself. So changing the behavior was never about HIM it was about MY reaction TO him.
Because you are committed to one another, it is tempting to plead with the WS to change for you. This is complicated. Because you think you want them to change "for you." The idea of it feels like it would be so satisfying. It would make you feel loved, and appreciated, and heard, when they said they did it for you. When he started trying to work on his addictive behaviors, I won't lie, I did feel all of those things. I felt more loved and appreciated and heard than I ever had before in our relationship. And because it is a commitment to you, and they are supposed to be more committed to you than to anything else in the world, then it follows that this should be the thing that "cures" them, right? Wrong.
No behavioral change is lasting unless they do it for themselves. His thinking was “If I stop doing these things, HHADL will be happy with me.” What true recovery would have looked like is “Once I stop doing these things, I will be happy with myself.” Without that, we were just putting bandaids over bullet wounds and calling them healed.
[This message edited by HeHadADoubleLife at 11:21 PM, March 22nd (Friday)]
