If only society learned to respect intimacy as a genuine need/right. Instead, the refuser holds the rights of both with a cock cage/chastity belt. And we wonder why people don't want to be owned? It's not right to own slaves yet, we feel the need to cage someone in celibacy till death do us part?
Is it really cheating if one informs their spouse/relationship that it's ok if they don't want sex/intimacy, but they do want it and will be seeking intimacy. BRB
Cheating is defined so many ways. People even think an open relationship is cheating and some think that open relationships can't be monogamous.
My husband told me I was cheating. I told him I wasn't doing anything behind his back. All of the information was on the table and he wasn't cheated out of any information. He understood way after we learned about loving open marriages serving the needs of both.
I wanted intimacy so bad that I decided not to ask him for permission to open the marrige. I wished I had gotten a mentor and learned all about it before I threw that hand grenade because I really didn't care if he loved me at that point
ETA: We all agree they have a right to dictate what happens to their own body. Once they give up sex, do they have a right to keep us prisoners?Several recurrent themes commonly occur in these kinds of messages, and my challenge to them is based on the idea that the abandonment of your own agency perpetuates your suffering.
"Do they have a right to keep us prisoners?" This is framed as a group struggle between disparate communities, when it is actually a private decision between two individual partners. Leaving a marriage doesn't require agreement- it is an individual decision, with opportunities for collaboration or alignment if you are lucky enough. It's a private lifestyle decision that is faced by many people, like the decision to have children or not.
Where it comes to marriage and celibacy - there is no vast cabal of celibate "they" who commune together as many of us do here, conspiring on how to deprive their partners. It doesn't work like that. Most likely, these partners feel as trapped in a seemingly irresolvable circumstance as you. Obviously you both are in a sexually unsatisfying relationship - for reasons. Obviously you both are making trade-offs on that issue, to avoid losing the benefits you both associate with a marriage (or perhaps, a shared household and identity framework in which you get to perceive yourself as "a married person).
Talking about "them" in this manner is a way to put the responsibility for solving the problem in their partner's hands, while absolving yourself of the same hard decisions their partner must face. Namely, in the absence of a living marriage that includes a unique
and mutually felt sexual attraction to one's partner, how do you preserve the benefits you both associate with the marriage? You both have the same problem, but for different reasons. You both get to avoid the important question of
whether you have a marriage or not. If a vow of celibacy was written into your vows, as a pre-req to marriage, you both would likely agree that this was not how you conceive of a marriage. And yet...
"Do they have a right to keep us prisoners?" We have a lot of discussions here about "rights" - which is largely some mix of desires, entitlements and agency. Every right comes with a responsibility - often costs and tradeoffs, and broadly there hasn't been a lot of interest in discussing that.
We might feel entitled
personally to pursue happiness and sexual fulfillment. ..
Your partner might also want the same things, but not with you - or not in his/her present circumstance with you - resulting in celibacy.
In the singles world, when this occurs - a couple decides not to date anymore. Or more often, one person tells the other, and they both contend with those results.
You might feel correctly entitled to sex within the context of a marriage - but you cannot force someone to give it to you, nor can that partner force their own attraction when it doesn't exist.
Zooming out the lens though, no one forces you to get married, nor to choose THAT person, nor to remain married.
There are costs and tradeoffs associated with different choices - such as ending the marriage - but a marital association continues because both parties continue to choose it in spite of the difficulties they perceive.
But it's unhelpful to you and to your partner's ability to change your situation if you are not able to acknowledge that the choice of
not being married belongs to you alone. You don't need consensus on it. Marriage and celibacy are not something a partner is inflicting on you. Both of them are contingent on your own agreement to play within a set of agreed parameters.
"Do they have a right to keep us prisoners?" This goes along with "rights", above. I think, more broadly, the discussion is about an expectation of avoiding suffering in one's life. So it FEELS like you are a prisoner (and it may feel to your partner that they also feel a prisoner to you - or to the marriage - a cage in which you are both trapped. The cage has an open door though. Either of you can leave.
Of course it's not easy or simple and certainly would result (at least at first) in a different kind of suffering - maybe more, and a likely expectation of celibacy continuing for some time, in addition to the added pain of knowing your celibate partner is seeking the sexuality elsewhere that was denied in your marriage, to someone who must seem less deserving. It casts you into the hell of divorce and the various tradeoffs that come in the dating world where there is no
assurance of a long term fulfilling romantic and sexual investment.
But viewing that as "assurance" reveals the same problem. Marriage is clearly no guarantee of assurance. You know this. You are living it.
Nor is dating.
That's just the tragedy of living - and also what makes it special and a gift to treasure when it is present.
No one is entitled to have it - but they are entitled to seek it - which requires that they accept their personal agency over the things they control and make decisions on whether the tradeoffs are worth it - both for the desired unknown future (shake the dice again and try another roll) or the trajectory of the present course.
As is correctly pointed out - it's possible to end the marriage, or at least to end the celibacy by cheating or by renegotiating a working agreement that allows you to enjoy sex apart from your partner, while retaining parts of the marriage that you enjoy. This also has tradeoffs and risks.
I've been through a few iterations of an open relationship and cheating as well, from various vantage points in my married and single life. I think a lot of the resistance to the idea even from a partner who doesn't want sex with me herself - is based on the significance of trading an unrealized ideal (a future in which either you both share similar disinterest in each other but otherwise find your association sufficiently rewarding) for the truth of your lived relationship - which is that your partner doesn't see you as a viable sexual partner.
That latter realization is the difference between a parent who has a long term lost child, and a parent who is shown the body.
Once the body is shown and the truth can't be traded for hope or an aspirational fantasy, then choices and realities that have been avoided come crashing through the window.
So a sexually averse married partner may resist her partner seeking others - because it puts the reality of the relationship front and center.
