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Post by rejected101 on Apr 23, 2018 3:49:44 GMT -5
Did your relationship go from having a healthy sex life to having an unhealthy sex life overnight or was there a slower depreciation of your once healthy sex life?
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Post by baza on Apr 23, 2018 5:30:25 GMT -5
Dunno if my deal was typical - tho I expect it may not have been.
Stops and starts would best describe it.
We'd go at it lots for weeks at a time. Then there'd be a stop. A complete stop. Then it would fire up again as good as ever a month or 3 or 6 or 12 later. Then completely stop again. The lengths of stoppage got longer, the lengths of full on action got shorter.
Over 3 decades this pattern continued. The last 5 or so years were a complete stoppage, and there had been periods of 2 to 3 years complete stoppage earlier on in the deal.
On reflection the sex and the stoppages of sex were a pretty good barometer of how our marriage was going at any given stage. When it was a functional marriage the sex was good. When it went into dysfunctional stages (lots of them) the sex stopped.
Put it another way, the sex in total was great for about 5 years (on and off - mainly off). Trouble was, we were married about 30 years meaning that about 80% was sexless and, by extrapolation, dysfunctional most of the time.
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Post by choosinghappy on Apr 23, 2018 5:41:19 GMT -5
Mine was a slow decline down to nothing and once it reached truly sexless it stayed there (going on 4 years now with the exception of one horrible reset experience).
But I’m not sure I can say it was ever truly a “healthy” sex life; it was always less often than I would have wanted and always less passionate/fun/adventurous. In hindsight I can identify his sense of hesitation almost from the beginning. I’m kicking myself now for not paying attention to that major red flag.
(FYI my H says he is asexual due to past childhood sex abuse.)
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Post by bballgirl on Apr 23, 2018 6:52:37 GMT -5
In my opinion sexless from the start even before the marriage but he was my first boyfriend and I was very naive. First ten years once a month then after kids were born 2002 sex dropped off the table - once or twice a year. I always said if I would have slept with just one man before H, I probably would have never married him because he's awful in bed but I didn't know any better at 18 years old. Well I'll make sure my kids don't make my mistakes.
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Post by GeekGoddess on Apr 23, 2018 7:44:39 GMT -5
My experience was - we dated and/or cohabitated for 8 years before we married.
Two of those early years, we lived a few hours apart. When I visited weekends, we usually had sex 1 or 2 nights. So I concluded 50% - 100% of the time we were together, we both wanted to have sex, & that was good. I thought. After I actually moved in, it slowly dropped, but that seemed realistic to me. I’d say we still averaged once, or possibly twice, most weeks of a month. (I quit having periods b/c of my birth control method, so that was no disruption in available dates)
But it would decline. I would say something. It would get better. It was like that for a long while.
When we bought a house was an uptick. Later when we married there was an uptick. When we would vacation, often an uptick. But a longer slower down trend was evident. And my role as “manager of saying when it’s not enough” began to wear on me. So I quit insisting on the TALK, and quit initiating as much, and it slowly got worse. My H & I each lost jobs & had health problems- downturns during those periods. Understandable ones, I told myself. But the springback never got all the way back to how it used to be.
His last major diagnosis, prostate cancer, meant months of radiation after removal of gland & nerve bundle. Meant he couldn’t perform even if he wanted to. All forms of intimate sharing began to stop then. The g’night kiss got shorter. The hugs got shorter. The “I love you” became “love ya” on my way to work. So the last celibate chapter was roughly 3-3.5 years.
As I was deciding I was leaving, I finally saw all the red flags in our past that I had painted green or ignored or justified. I don’t think it was ever as healthy or “with ease” as attraction is supposed to be. I was convenient for him because I did more of the relationship work. I made it easy for him to be lazy. So he was.
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Post by shamwow on Apr 23, 2018 8:45:01 GMT -5
But and switch. Lots of sex until wedding then 90-95 percent cut off. Some reset here and there to shut me up for a while. Months on end turned to years on end. In time I didn't care. In a little more time I didn't even want it. In the final stages I was actively repulsed by the idea.
I don't think this is the typical story though. I was a sperm donor and ATM machine from the beginning. That was the plan, I just wasn't informed of it.
I think most sexless marriages start off ok then fade away over time. By the time they reach here there is almost no chance of salvaging things without an ending of the relationship or a complete refinition of the relationship.
Either way something has got to give.
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Post by Apocrypha on Apr 23, 2018 9:37:00 GMT -5
My relationship began with a period in which the woman who I later married, pursued me for several years, pushing for a robust and imaginative sexual relationship.
The graph would look like a downward stair, with each drop signifying a sudden and significant decrease in quality, presence, and eventually a quantity of sex. Each drop correlated to an increase in marital investment.
1. Wedding night 2. Honeymoon (6 months later) 3. Pregnancy 1 4. Birth 5. Buying a house 6. Pregnancy 2 - flatline
Two upticks a) an expensive and hot weekend in Vegas in which there was a possibility that she could make a proposal to a couple (and did) b) a brief period at the beginning of opening our relationship, after she found a boyfriend/fwb
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Post by ironhamster on Apr 23, 2018 9:59:19 GMT -5
My sex life died at the altar. There were just enough glimmers of hope to keep a determined man holding on, hoping for something better, but, with the exception of occasional reset sex, it flatlined at the beginning.
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Post by TheGreatContender -aka Daddeeo on Apr 23, 2018 15:29:32 GMT -5
Was pretty hot for the first 12 years. Although nothing too out of the ordinary other than robust position, frequency, time of day, and location variety. I remember one time we went more than 2 weeks without, it was a crisis. Usually it was 4-5x a week, maybe with more frequency on weekends.
Then about 5/6 years ago, frequency gradually started to drop until I was borderline sexless by the 10x a year definition. But we do go months at a time without sex more and more often now. By my definition, I was in an SM when I started keeping track of dates when we did get around to it.
Now Im more or less a counter refuser. I lost interest in having sex with someone that does not want/need to have sex.
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Post by h on Apr 23, 2018 19:45:08 GMT -5
My sex life never really started. We followed the rules and waited for marriage. Even talking about sex was taboo in my family so I didn't know that it was a conversation I should have had before the marriage. I learned after the fact that my W has almost no interest in sex and considers it an optional extra. She wasn't in the mood on our wedding night and only allowed it to happen once on the honeymoon. She allowed sex about 10 times a year and I just accepted that as my deserved lot in life. My ignorance on the subject made me think that there was something wrong with me so I lived with the disappointment for years and never talked about it with anyone because of how ashamed I felt. SM is all I've ever known. Since I found this place, I've learned and gained the confidence to push for change. Still working on it.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 23, 2018 20:20:27 GMT -5
A long, fairly steady decline from what was at best mediocre and occasional to terrible and rare.
Rarely there would be a tiny uptick, a ray of hope that was inevitably dashed very soon thereafter.
Now it is at zero. It's actually a relief not to expect it ever again.
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Post by pfviento on Apr 23, 2018 21:51:04 GMT -5
I missed some red flags. That being said when we started dating we had sex all the time.
Not sure what happened but suddenly right before wedding arguments about it cropped up. It's been a constant series of resets since then.
I really wish I had paid a bit more attention to the warning signs including the all day sleeping and emotional instability.
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Post by DryCreek on Apr 23, 2018 23:50:57 GMT -5
rejected101, by now you'll see there's quite a variety to the journeys... Mine is less typical. In ignorance, I mistook red flags for green flags. I thought our weekly routine during dating was a good thing, and mistook tolerance for desire and participation. (Because, who doesn't like sex, right?) I expected things to uptick after the wedding, when we had our own apartment and were no longer living with our parents. They didn't. The chaste kiss at the altar was the first red flag I finally noticed; the sparse sex on the honeymoon was another. It never did get to "good", and I spent a couple decades trying to figure out how I was screwing it up. (Because, again, who doesn't like sex?) Now, if I'd known there were people who actually didn't like sex... To have had this forum 30 years ago would have changed my life.
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Post by elkclan2 on Apr 24, 2018 0:00:16 GMT -5
My relationship was sexually dysfunctional from the start. He had never had sex with anyone else and had trouble performing. He once said in therapy that he was never physically attracted to me, but he had a 'deeper' love for me. I do not know if this is true or not. If it was true, it was classic bait and switch. If it wasn't true, then he obviously used it as a way to hurt me. For sure, toward the end he wasn't physically attracted to me. He was unable to reach orgasm during intercourse for a few years after marriage, he blamed my vagina - as he couldn't get 'enough sensation'. He said I was 'too loose'. I was stupid, but I wasn't stupid enough to fully fall for that, yet it still created doubt in my mind. I blamed myself a lot when I shouldn't have. I should have had the sense to leave though.
With each step forward, again, there was less sex. Moving in together, getting married, house, kid. I think I had sex with my ex 13 times after my son was born (he left when my son was 8). That 13 times was all in a period of January to August of one year - and then I moved out of the bedroom for good.
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Post by elynne on Apr 24, 2018 1:40:49 GMT -5
We started off with a whirlwind romance. We had three weeks together (one of the weeks I had a friend visiting from London, and one of the weeks I was traveling for work). It was hot and steamy, lots of kissing, hand holding. He gave me thoughtful gifts, sent flowers, cooked dinner. It was mutual complete infatuation. Sex was not adventurous but very passionate in those first weeks.
Then we’d see each other only when I would fly to Europe for a weekend. We had a week long vacation in Monaco together- and lots of sex though I remember at the time thinking it seemed a little forced from his side and not so much desire.
From that point on the intimacy began to decline. Despite birth control, I found myself pregnant after our vacation together. I was living in NY, H in Amsterdam. We had already talked about getting married and having kids, but I was still flipping out when I discovered I was pregnant.
Long story, short: within 2 months I had a job in Amsterdam and moved in with h. 6 months later we were married and our daughter was born four weeks later.
In that first year sex went from often to almost non-existent. He stopped holding hands with me. We went from sleeping entangled to me not being allowed to touch him in bed. We still hugged and kissed (not passionately but affectionately) but that also began to drop off.
It seemed the only time he would have sex with me was after he’d been drinking. H doesn’t go out to parties all that often or drink all that much so sex was infrequent. I’ve only started counting recently, but so far this year, sex 4 times (3 times during a 4 day reset period). Last year we had sex once. I would guess the year before maybe around 4 times? We’ve probably been by the 10 times a year or less standard, sexless since immediately after our wedding.
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