One man’s story of his dead bedroom:
I’m a high-libido, affectionate man who married an asexual woman.
It’s been an okay marriage. We liked each other as friends, enjoyed similar niche music scenes and vibes on nights out, and have been good roommates and parents.
We had three stunningly gorgeous, intelligent young adults, for which I’ll be forever grateful. But the disjoint between our individual outlooks on life has been agony. It felt particularly crushing for me as the passionate, affectionate, sexual fool that I am.
My beautiful, intelligent, capable wife, widely popular with those who know her, is a great human and absolutely entitled to live how she feels and chooses. However, she has a sex-negative asexual outlook. She is closed off to physical and emotional human shared experience, and that’s all ok — for her.
She is not at fault; we’re just different.
I could have made more of an effort.
I could have worked harder to cast aside my work stresses, to throw more of my energy to focus on her as a woman, and to consider carefully how my actions could help her feel good about her femininity. I should have booked that babysitter to take her out, away from toddlers, for a night (our eldest was ten before I eventually fought her point-blank refusal ever to have a babysitter for an evening. Shortly after that, I took her to Rome for three nights for her 40th — where she just moaned about returning to see the kids). I should have bought even more flowers and said more nice things.
But I am really not at fault either.
Our reality has been that we’re just mismatched from the beginning.
Why did I put up with this affectionless and asexual partnership?
Low self-worth.
I was told that I was a failure at sports, laughed at in the junior school playground from age seven onwards (the only activity that seemed to be necessary to my peer group at the time), and bullied throughout my teenage years. I was gangly awkward physically, had an essentially all-male friendship group, and threw myself into cars/motorsport through my early 20s from a genuine interest but also as a partial way to escape being totally unwanted by the opposite sex. No school sweetheart (ok, one, at 19 for four lovely weeks as my first fulfilled crush), fewer snogs than fingers on one hand, constant rejection at college parties or to hopeful advances at townie nightclubs. In sum, girls just seemed impossible.
My first real girlfriend, when I was 23, had a five-month-old baby girl when we met — so I was an instant Dad; both of us lived with parents and had little to no income, so it wasn’t a free or joy-filled, hedonistic, youthful relationship. We split after three years as she worked late into the evenings in pubs/clubs and was ‘partying’ with others as I babysat her daughter. That was all very painful, so at 28, I went out constantly and threw myself into chatting girls up, ignoring any rejection, which resulted in a year with a few one or two-night flings, and then I met my future wife.
Right from the beginning, I asked for more affection, nudity, and sex. I should have seen the red flags, but I didn’t. My low self-worth made me feel I was ‘lucky’ to have a steady girlfriend at all.
We married after three years in August 2000; she became pregnant in March ’01, and that’s when the infrequent, unremarkable, quick bonk-type sex we had stopped. Sex diminished year after year.
As the kids were young toddlers, my wife found it all too stressful, and we had a three-year period where I marked on a calendar our ten-minute bonk four times a year.
Forty minutes of sex per year wasn’t enough for me.
By 2011, I was done and desperately wanted to divorce. Still, I felt my responsibility was to give the kids a stable family upbringing — so I stayed. I asked repeatedly that we seek counseling together, but she said no.
I hung onto this sexless marriage until the kids were older.
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Takeaway
Now, I’m finally separated and found the most joyous, sexual, intelligent, exciting, and deeply connected lover I could have ever imagined — a million stories already written with her.
My reflection on it all is that I accepted crumbs from the very beginning as a result of not feeling worthy or knowing there was more.
The crumbs were sufficient for my wife but starvation for me. We were mismatched from the start: a warm, enthusiastic, passionate, inwardly sexual man and an intelligent but profoundly asexual woman.
Why don’t we get advice on these things when we’re young about the importance of physical compatibility in a union?
The frustrations of my sexless marriage, my entire 30’s and 40’s, have dominated my life. There are no happy memories of joyous intimacy whatsoever, just deep scars and wounding of being trapped into painful rejection year after year.
Given the above, I feel so truly blessed to have now finally found such a deep, loving connection. I’m in my mid-50s, and our first few years were truly healing. I feel a bright, happy future is ours to take.
I learned lessons the hard way about no longer accepting crumbs in my life.
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I hope that sharing my story may help someone and maybe give hope that it’s not too late to change your situation for the better. Used by permission from the author who wishes to remain anonymous.
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- Follow me on substack — [email protected] (It’s free and I’m interestingly evil…)
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: @felipepelaquim on Unsplash
