Post by greatcoastal on May 15, 2023 22:02:06 GMT -5
www.drpsychmom.com/2023/05/13/if-you-dont-want-your-husband-to-masturbate-guess-what/?fbclid=IwAR3Itjr2Lv9QVw-VbCDzc3o9kQXQ9qDkN
If You Don’t Want Your Husband To Masturbate… Guess What?
Samantha Rodman Whiten — May 13, 20230
There are many women who feel uncomfortable with their husbands masturbating, particularly if their husband uses porn. I totally understand this, and have discussed how masturbation is harmful in many ways for people who aren’t extraordinarily happy with their sex lives already. Further, porn can make men, especially those with limited experience, have unusual expectations for their wives and an artificially-heightened libido. However, there is no free lunch in life and it’s unethical to expect your husband to stop self-pleasuring when you have no intention of pursuing sexual pleasure together.
I discuss the idea of what I term “sexual codependence” here, and I deeply believe that it is healthy and positive for a monogamous couple to try to fulfill each other’s sexual needs fully. Of course, this will take a bit of compromise in a couple where libidos are mismatched, which is the case for the majority of couples due to responsive desire, the type of desire most often experienced by even high libido monogamous women, particularly as they get older and after kids.
However, couples get into trouble when the compromise is not split down the middle but is something like once a week for a woman that wants sex twice a month and a man who wants sex twice a day. In this case, sex is very much weighted towards the woman’s preference and in no way is a true compromise. Everything isn’t about a mathematical compromise or the letter of the law, but when a woman is having twice the amount of sex she wants and the man is having a thirtieth of the sex he wants, this is not the spirit of the law either and is not a good faith attempt to get to common ground.
If your wife wanted to go to a date night once a week and you did it once a year, this would not be a genuine compromise. If she wanted you to say I love you every day and you did it once a week, you would be considered a real jerk. Sex is not any different, despite some people thinking it is because they were raised to fear it. If a woman is unable to get outside her comfort zone and try to get into the mood more often, given that responsive desire means you have to start touching in order to even see if you can experience desire, then the no masturbation plan can’t ethically work.
Certainly, men can wait a couple of days to have sex without any problem. After that, it is like anyone who goes more than a couple of days without their love language being met… they feel lonely, angry, irritable, and resentful. If a woman whose love language is words of affirmation could only get complimented once a week by her husband and he instructed her that he could never compliment her two days in a row because then he starts to feel that all she wants him for is compliments, this marriage would never work as the guy would be considered rigid and selfish. How is touch or sex different? If anything, a lack of sex is MORE upsetting, because within monogamy, sex is not allowed to be obtained from anyone outside the relationship, as I discuss in depth here. This can be multiplied exponentially if the man is also expected to forgo masturbation.
Obviously, a compliment takes less time than a sexual encounter. But what about when the woman says she also cannot touch the man at all, despite a hand on the shoulder or a kiss taking as much time as a verbalized compliment? There is a rise in touchless marriages that I have seen and that I discuss here. Time is never the only issue, unless neither person ever scrolls through their phone or watches TV, both massive time expenditures that are somehow still done even when people are “so busy.”
There is a closeness that couples can experience when they are the sole source for meeting each other’s romantic and sexual needs. Women have literally told me in session that they adopted a puppy or kitten and are the one who gets up to care for this pet all night because this is how it learns to bond to the woman as a primary caretaker. Then they tell their husband to go masturbate without thinking that this may make him not see HER as HIS primary attachment figure. It would be funny if it weren’t so common and so sad.
If you take out all the middlemen of masturbation, porn, or vibrators (more on that in a bit), and are intimate more frequently, like daily or close to it, you grow more attuned to each other’s bodily needs and cycles. For example, a man will grow aware of the woman’s different arousal levels over the course of the menstrual cycle, and the woman may see how much more calm, relaxed and secure the man acts when they are intimate every other day versus once a week.
There is something very erotic about knowing that someone is completely giving their sexual self to you, and this is seen as a privilege and a source of joy within loving marriages, rather than a burden or source of fear. At the very least, couples can commit to daily kissing, a great idea that “mommysphere” content dismisses, as discussed here. And if that is a bridge too far, daily touching can be your first step, just touching each other’s bodies in any way even with clothes on, which is often a starter assignment in sex therapy.
As promised, I will discuss the use of vibrators. It is essential to recognize that if women do not regularly masturbate or use vibrators, then they have more motivation to teach their husbands how to please them. (Certainly if a woman doesn’t know how to have an orgasm, masturbation is a great place to start learning how; this is not what is being discussed here.) An emotionally healthy man wants to learn how to give his wife an orgasm and wants to ensure that she feels close and bonded to him during and after sex. Taking away sole reliance on the vibrator can allow many couples to be closer, in that the man becomes much more attuned to what his wife’s body needs. Exploring a diversity of activities in the bedroom and extending foreplay are other ways for a couple to grow closer and more connected in bed.
If this post spoke to you, try to bring up the idea with your spouse of being fully sexually committed to each other, without other sources of release, for a couple of weeks as an experiment. You may learn new things about each other, closeness, and connection. And till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, What Can You Lose By Trying?
If You Don’t Want Your Husband To Masturbate… Guess What?
Samantha Rodman Whiten — May 13, 20230
There are many women who feel uncomfortable with their husbands masturbating, particularly if their husband uses porn. I totally understand this, and have discussed how masturbation is harmful in many ways for people who aren’t extraordinarily happy with their sex lives already. Further, porn can make men, especially those with limited experience, have unusual expectations for their wives and an artificially-heightened libido. However, there is no free lunch in life and it’s unethical to expect your husband to stop self-pleasuring when you have no intention of pursuing sexual pleasure together.
I discuss the idea of what I term “sexual codependence” here, and I deeply believe that it is healthy and positive for a monogamous couple to try to fulfill each other’s sexual needs fully. Of course, this will take a bit of compromise in a couple where libidos are mismatched, which is the case for the majority of couples due to responsive desire, the type of desire most often experienced by even high libido monogamous women, particularly as they get older and after kids.
However, couples get into trouble when the compromise is not split down the middle but is something like once a week for a woman that wants sex twice a month and a man who wants sex twice a day. In this case, sex is very much weighted towards the woman’s preference and in no way is a true compromise. Everything isn’t about a mathematical compromise or the letter of the law, but when a woman is having twice the amount of sex she wants and the man is having a thirtieth of the sex he wants, this is not the spirit of the law either and is not a good faith attempt to get to common ground.
If your wife wanted to go to a date night once a week and you did it once a year, this would not be a genuine compromise. If she wanted you to say I love you every day and you did it once a week, you would be considered a real jerk. Sex is not any different, despite some people thinking it is because they were raised to fear it. If a woman is unable to get outside her comfort zone and try to get into the mood more often, given that responsive desire means you have to start touching in order to even see if you can experience desire, then the no masturbation plan can’t ethically work.
Certainly, men can wait a couple of days to have sex without any problem. After that, it is like anyone who goes more than a couple of days without their love language being met… they feel lonely, angry, irritable, and resentful. If a woman whose love language is words of affirmation could only get complimented once a week by her husband and he instructed her that he could never compliment her two days in a row because then he starts to feel that all she wants him for is compliments, this marriage would never work as the guy would be considered rigid and selfish. How is touch or sex different? If anything, a lack of sex is MORE upsetting, because within monogamy, sex is not allowed to be obtained from anyone outside the relationship, as I discuss in depth here. This can be multiplied exponentially if the man is also expected to forgo masturbation.
Obviously, a compliment takes less time than a sexual encounter. But what about when the woman says she also cannot touch the man at all, despite a hand on the shoulder or a kiss taking as much time as a verbalized compliment? There is a rise in touchless marriages that I have seen and that I discuss here. Time is never the only issue, unless neither person ever scrolls through their phone or watches TV, both massive time expenditures that are somehow still done even when people are “so busy.”
There is a closeness that couples can experience when they are the sole source for meeting each other’s romantic and sexual needs. Women have literally told me in session that they adopted a puppy or kitten and are the one who gets up to care for this pet all night because this is how it learns to bond to the woman as a primary caretaker. Then they tell their husband to go masturbate without thinking that this may make him not see HER as HIS primary attachment figure. It would be funny if it weren’t so common and so sad.
If you take out all the middlemen of masturbation, porn, or vibrators (more on that in a bit), and are intimate more frequently, like daily or close to it, you grow more attuned to each other’s bodily needs and cycles. For example, a man will grow aware of the woman’s different arousal levels over the course of the menstrual cycle, and the woman may see how much more calm, relaxed and secure the man acts when they are intimate every other day versus once a week.
There is something very erotic about knowing that someone is completely giving their sexual self to you, and this is seen as a privilege and a source of joy within loving marriages, rather than a burden or source of fear. At the very least, couples can commit to daily kissing, a great idea that “mommysphere” content dismisses, as discussed here. And if that is a bridge too far, daily touching can be your first step, just touching each other’s bodies in any way even with clothes on, which is often a starter assignment in sex therapy.
As promised, I will discuss the use of vibrators. It is essential to recognize that if women do not regularly masturbate or use vibrators, then they have more motivation to teach their husbands how to please them. (Certainly if a woman doesn’t know how to have an orgasm, masturbation is a great place to start learning how; this is not what is being discussed here.) An emotionally healthy man wants to learn how to give his wife an orgasm and wants to ensure that she feels close and bonded to him during and after sex. Taking away sole reliance on the vibrator can allow many couples to be closer, in that the man becomes much more attuned to what his wife’s body needs. Exploring a diversity of activities in the bedroom and extending foreplay are other ways for a couple to grow closer and more connected in bed.
If this post spoke to you, try to bring up the idea with your spouse of being fully sexually committed to each other, without other sources of release, for a couple of weeks as an experiment. You may learn new things about each other, closeness, and connection. And till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, What Can You Lose By Trying?
