Allosexual husband of an asexual wife explores options
- Thread starter Fogul
- Start date
Thanks for that. I hadn’t heard of her before, but I’ve listened to her recite a few of her poems on YouTube. Some really powerful messages delivered with humour. I’ll need to order her book now.
Yeah, that's great, but most Americans on this board wouldn't be able to decipher it! So I looked up a translation.
I'm on my second watch of Outlander and I struggled with a few of the terms haha
So act now, don’t hang around waiting?
Truth be told, I don’t know many Scots who would get all of it either. But if they went to school in the seventies like me, they would probably have learned it, even if they didn’t understand it.
You are being in the PRESENT. You saw a counselor. You made a framework and have a plan. You did the preparation.
Now you have outside stressors. It's okay to wait a few weeks or few months. You are making the plan for the short-term future.
If outside stressors keep on happening, what's the deadline to have a talk ANYWAY, to avoid putting it off too long? That's the part that I think is missing. What is the middle future? You aren't going to wait so long it can be measured in YEARS, right?
Sometimes there is a "better time." Sometimes there just isn't. You can't put it off forever.
You cannot change not speaking up sooner. You do have a say in how you choose to carry yourself TODAY, in the present, and how you face your future. It is okay to sometimes look back and review, but if you spend ALL your time ruminating about stuff in the past that you cannot change anymore, you aren't being in the present and are basically facing your future butt-first. That's not a great way to navigate life. There can be tripping hazards ahead, you can miss present-day opportunities, etc.
Galagirl
MoPoly
Member
We’re all different and will have different approaches. But having waited decades for change, and now clear in your own mind, what is to be gained by waiting? You don’t have to polybomb - that ‘conclusion’ can wait - but at least open up the conversation that you’re unhappy and seeing a therapist.
Of your 4 options, you see polyamory as your best outcome. However, successful polyamory - where all the parties feel secure and loved - is based on communication, communication, communication. How has ‘not communicating’ served you?
Yes, baring our souls is scary; yes, we are all clumsy at times; but delaying it won’t make it less scary or suddenly create a fluent orator!
There may well be good reason not to drop the polybomb this week or next week, but (in my books) there is never a reason to live a lie.
That's totally a reason to wait a bit.
Hi Fogul.
I was returning here after my own post (https://polyamory.com/threads/life-can-bring-surprises.155272) which you’ll find has quite a lot of commonalities with yours.
I think I may have some practical advice to share with you. In fact, I might turn this into a post of its own around navigating the “unexpected” allo/asexual dynamic we find ourselves in.
- Like you, I love my wife very, very much. In all things non-sexual, we are the best of partners and friends.
- Like you, I’m less inclined to initiate conflict in general. I’m also more likely to retreat at the first sign I’m making my partner very uncomfortable. These are very deep instincts that take a lot of conscious effort to overcome.
- Like you, I allowed for a very extended time of our sex life dropping to nearly non-existent and to a large, unconscious degree became good at hiding my perpetual dissatisfaction around this.
- However, like you, I’m coming to realize this isn’t sustainable as it stands. I’d love if I could just “adapt” to being asexual as well.
- However, after some work on myself, I’m actually quite confident I’m on the spectrum of poly and would compartmentalize ENM well. Not just saying that to help me solve this problem, there have been a lot of signs around this for me all along. I’m not sure how much we’re alike in this regard.
Now for tough part...
- I had many failed attempts at trying to have the Big Conversation around this problem. I would head in to it knowing all the things I wanted to say, but also getting nervous and fumbling the wording at times. Then ultimately wanting to pause the discussion to pick up later.
I was frustrated because it kept going very different from how I imagined it would. And I think a big part of it is that I was failing to see how many on the asexual spectrum, like my wife, just don’t have the same frame of reference.
Sexual attraction, sexual fantasies, and all the headspace wrapped around them aren’t there for people like her (and this may be true with your wife as well).
I’m not into sports. But I have family who are thinking and talking about it every day. They live for watching and going to the games. I nod and try to keep from upsetting their groove when in their presence. If I married a woman who had this same passion for a game and in the honeymoon period I joined her for some, I might feel some excitement for how SHE was enjoying it, but that would be it. But if she was perpetually disappointed I didn’t want to keep going to every game with her, I would likely get annoyed she couldn’t tell I just wasn’t into it as much as she was.
I know that’s a bit of a simplistic analogy for this, but it’s more to illustrate how it isn’t just about the act itself, it’s about how often it’s thought about or even understood to matter to the other person.
I needed to make clear just how much and how often this was affecting me without sporadic, infrequent talks like we had been having.
– So the big solution that has been working so far has been to have a scheduled time, every week. We have a specific time and day in the morning when we are to “talk about sex, have sex, or both”. But the having sex part is only if both of us are interested. I already know we won’t have sex very often for the appointment, but we will be talking about it, even if just for a little bit.
I also know it’s going to be mainly me that’s talking. Much like the analogy above, I know she isn’t really into this topic. But enforcing this frequency has helped it to do three big things: (1) I don’t feel I have to perfectly nail what I want to say. If I fumble or am inarticulate, I can know it’s coming around again next week. (2) the regular frequency becomes a built in reminder to her that this is a very present problem and in need of addressing. (3) the more we’re talking about it over time, the easier it has been to come to creative compromises. This applies to all kinds of problems outside this topic, of course. It’s the advantage of not placing all the eggs in one basket.
We’ve worked out parameters she’s comfortable with that I won’t share here for now (this post is already getting too long). But I’ll say this method has been doing wonders for helping to move this thing to a place we’re both comfortable with.
If I can leave you with one last thought… I made a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t let my own hesitancy in finding a healthy way to get this dialog on the table a reason for things to go south with us. There had to be a way we could at least understand and brainstorm a way we could work through this. Having that commitment with myself helped give me a long of strength to keep trying, which is how I got to this point now.
I was returning here after my own post (https://polyamory.com/threads/life-can-bring-surprises.155272) which you’ll find has quite a lot of commonalities with yours.
I think I may have some practical advice to share with you. In fact, I might turn this into a post of its own around navigating the “unexpected” allo/asexual dynamic we find ourselves in.
- Like you, I love my wife very, very much. In all things non-sexual, we are the best of partners and friends.
- Like you, I’m less inclined to initiate conflict in general. I’m also more likely to retreat at the first sign I’m making my partner very uncomfortable. These are very deep instincts that take a lot of conscious effort to overcome.
- Like you, I allowed for a very extended time of our sex life dropping to nearly non-existent and to a large, unconscious degree became good at hiding my perpetual dissatisfaction around this.
- However, like you, I’m coming to realize this isn’t sustainable as it stands. I’d love if I could just “adapt” to being asexual as well.
- However, after some work on myself, I’m actually quite confident I’m on the spectrum of poly and would compartmentalize ENM well. Not just saying that to help me solve this problem, there have been a lot of signs around this for me all along. I’m not sure how much we’re alike in this regard.
Now for tough part...
- I had many failed attempts at trying to have the Big Conversation around this problem. I would head in to it knowing all the things I wanted to say, but also getting nervous and fumbling the wording at times. Then ultimately wanting to pause the discussion to pick up later.
I was frustrated because it kept going very different from how I imagined it would. And I think a big part of it is that I was failing to see how many on the asexual spectrum, like my wife, just don’t have the same frame of reference.
Sexual attraction, sexual fantasies, and all the headspace wrapped around them aren’t there for people like her (and this may be true with your wife as well).
I’m not into sports. But I have family who are thinking and talking about it every day. They live for watching and going to the games. I nod and try to keep from upsetting their groove when in their presence. If I married a woman who had this same passion for a game and in the honeymoon period I joined her for some, I might feel some excitement for how SHE was enjoying it, but that would be it. But if she was perpetually disappointed I didn’t want to keep going to every game with her, I would likely get annoyed she couldn’t tell I just wasn’t into it as much as she was.
I know that’s a bit of a simplistic analogy for this, but it’s more to illustrate how it isn’t just about the act itself, it’s about how often it’s thought about or even understood to matter to the other person.
I needed to make clear just how much and how often this was affecting me without sporadic, infrequent talks like we had been having.
– So the big solution that has been working so far has been to have a scheduled time, every week. We have a specific time and day in the morning when we are to “talk about sex, have sex, or both”. But the having sex part is only if both of us are interested. I already know we won’t have sex very often for the appointment, but we will be talking about it, even if just for a little bit.
I also know it’s going to be mainly me that’s talking. Much like the analogy above, I know she isn’t really into this topic. But enforcing this frequency has helped it to do three big things: (1) I don’t feel I have to perfectly nail what I want to say. If I fumble or am inarticulate, I can know it’s coming around again next week. (2) the regular frequency becomes a built in reminder to her that this is a very present problem and in need of addressing. (3) the more we’re talking about it over time, the easier it has been to come to creative compromises. This applies to all kinds of problems outside this topic, of course. It’s the advantage of not placing all the eggs in one basket.
We’ve worked out parameters she’s comfortable with that I won’t share here for now (this post is already getting too long). But I’ll say this method has been doing wonders for helping to move this thing to a place we’re both comfortable with.
If I can leave you with one last thought… I made a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t let my own hesitancy in finding a healthy way to get this dialog on the table a reason for things to go south with us. There had to be a way we could at least understand and brainstorm a way we could work through this. Having that commitment with myself helped give me a long of strength to keep trying, which is how I got to this point now.
MoPoly
Member
That’s great advice and a helpful football analogy. Wishing you all the best SpMd. My heart really goes out to people trying to negotiate with asexual partners. It would kill my soul to live without sex with a loving, interested person in my life. I did try and it made me crazy and miserable. And so I came out to open ethical caring polyamory as the only way I can be. Good luck both of you x
Thank you. It does sound like our situations are very similar. Your suggestion of regular scheduled talks sounds like something we could try, once we’ve had the first one. I never thought it would all be sorted with one discussion, I always saw this as the first step on a long journey, but a hell of a big first step for me that I’ve been having difficulty navigating.
Like you I worry about getting flustered and it coming out wrong and causing my wife more hurt and distress through my inarticulateness. With the help of my therapist (as well as great advice from here and AVEN), I feel like I am ready now.
As I said above life circumstances have got in the way, but these are starting to clear up naturally. I can see in the next few weeks life will be back into a more even keel and I am determined not to let my hesitancy prevent me from dealing with this critically important issue.
I thought some of the feedback on your thread extremely judgemental and showed a real lack of understanding of people in our situation and our marriages. I think if our marriages weren’t extremely strong we wouldn’t have hung around in them without sex. I like to think I’m a caring and compassionate person, and it sounds like you are too, I don’t think I would have to dehumanise someone else to have a relationship with them, whether that was mutually agreed to be just about sex or was something deeper.
Last edited:
Thank you. I suspect @Fogul would agree with me that there really is something to say about having so many things that do work in a relationship, so many ways in which they truly are wonderful, that you can’t help but want this to just be a tiny item in the “con” list that is so outweighed by the long “pro” list.
The other part is that neither of us know this in the first place. So there’s at least some degree of “we need to adapt to where things take us” (for better or for worse, and so on) that comes with all healthy marriages. Where those lines are depends on the relationships themselves, of course.
But importantly, it helps that she doesn’t feel like it has to get figured out in a single discussion. However, the discussions won’t be stopping either until we figure out a solution. This keeps just the right amount of pressure on while forcing both of us to keep readdressing it.
You might want to consider volunteering this concern up front before getting into it. I’ve told my wife a dozen times that we seem to be able to talk about anything, but I know this topic is a tough one, and that isn’t any one of our faults alone. Neither of us have been bringing it up, but that’s the first thing that needs to change.
Again, it’s super important to bring to her attention just how much this permeates our minds on a very regular basis. Like the sports analogy, you couldn’t blame them for thinking we’re more like them when they genuinely don’t know this is something we’re thinking about every single day. Something we’ve been quietly struggling with this entire time.
These constant, weekly meetings help to convey that part non-verbally.
You’re right on both counts. To be sure, I came to this forum at a time I was very vulnerable and new to truly addressing this problem. So some of the harsher feedback did put me off somewhat, but a lot of it was useful as well. But yes, without someone really walking in our shoes to understand why, this seems like a simple comparability test.
It might indeed turn out that our relationship can’t work due to our being unable to make this key part of it work, but I’m far from coming to such a conclusion. I have to know for myself that she’d accept no other outcome of possibility than the one that I know can’t work for me, and I have to know she understands this as well. This last part is super important because, again, we can’t hold against them what they can’t truly understand because we played a part in not making it overt enough just how meaningful this is.
SpMd, I appreciate you shared more about your journey. I hope your insights help Fogul. However, you left people on your own thread hanging and added your updates here on this other person's blog instead.
Questions were asked on your own thread that went unanswered. You seem to answer them here, but most people probably won't see this.
Hi @Magdlyn, as with my earlier comment, I concede I had a difficult time with some of the language of the responses. I’m sure from many of the posters’ perspectives, they were giving a form of tough love and speaking plainly, which I’m not holding against them. I just found myself wanting to seek out a greater relatability to my situation, which I found on other forums.
Over the last year I’ve gotten better about steeling myself on this, but it’s still a very delicate subject for me. I think when first posting, I naively had some unconscious expectation the discussion thread would comparable to that of a group therapy session or something of that sort. Again, I totally own that naivety and I myself didn’t realize how sensitive I’d be to some of the harsher comments until I was reading them.
Ironically, I found this thread by first looking for my own as I was considering the general advice-ish thread idea I also mention earlier above. I then saw @Fogul’s predicament and the immediacy of his coming talk and thought I’d share my situation in an effort to help him specifically. But to be sure, this thread also feels a lot more empathetic and kinder than mine was, which perhaps makes it even easier to share.
Anyway, I may return to my thread soon or start a new one. I just want to come to terms with how much I’m willing to share and if I can have greater fortitude to comparable comments again.
You might have found this thread less challenging because it is a blog. In this section, normally, there is not much feedback, unless the OP asks for it. And while harsh criticism is discouraged across the board, it is entirely forbidden in this section.
This is Fogul's blog, so if you want to share more about your situation, instead of writing out long posts here, you could start your own!
I'm sorry if some of the posters on your other thread seemed overly direct or too opinionated for your liking.
This is Fogul's blog, so if you want to share more about your situation, instead of writing out long posts here, you could start your own!
I'm sorry if some of the posters on your other thread seemed overly direct or too opinionated for your liking.
JaneQSmythe
Well-known member
I agree. (Which is why I stopped responding there - sorry SpMd)
As Mags said, the blogs are more protected - some people don't want others posting in what they are using as an open journal, others (like me) are happy with thoughful commentary. Fogul (correct me if I am wrong) seems to be ok with some level of conversation (if not, he is free to kick us out, or guide us as to how he would like his blog to be respected.) I used to find myself writing long (much longer than this!) replies on someone else's blog - but then MY story is scattered around. Now what I try to do is - post a short reply in the other persons blog with a link to the longer response in my Notebook blog with a link back for reference.
Like you two I am in a long-term (hopefully life-long) relationship with my spouse who is somewhere on the asexual spectrum. The libido mis-match was not evident early on, it was progressively unmasked in part due to the natural decline in testosterone in men over time. Unlike you guys, however, poly was part of the discussion well before the relationship even started. So for me the poly came first and was already at play and the a/sexuality frustrations were a wrinkle that cropped up later.
JaneQ
I am indeed happy with some feedback here. I have found it on the whole to be extremely helpful.
I do have an issue with people presuming to know something about my marriage, which is different from anything I’ve said here.
With the exception of sex, my marriage is very strong; at least as strong as most others, if not stronger. After all something has kept me in it for over 30 years despite the lack of sex.
We have an incompatibility with respect to our sexual needs, it doesn’t mean our marriage is broken.
We have another incompatibility. My wife enjoys musical theatre. I do not, at all. At first I went with her. I thought in time I might begin to enjoy it, but it was in fact always something to be endured, me trying to go somewhere else in my head.
There were things around it I did enjoy, we might go for a meal beforehand, drinks at the interval or afterwards. I enjoyed those bits, but the actual musical theatre, sorry no. It’s not for me.
Over time I gradually stopped going. She would suggest a new show and I would make an excuse, or just straight out refuse. Now I’ve told her how I feel about musical theatre, I don’t go anymore and she doesn’t ask.
She has other friends she goes with, she enjoys it and I’m happy for her.
Sound familiar?
I can understand how people on some other forums might fail to understand how the same solution might apply to sex. I’m surprised when people on here can’t see it as a sensible approach to an incompatibility that doesn’t mean the marriage is broken.
I’m not saying the two situations are the same, they’re not. Clearly sex is a much more emotive and personal thing than musical theatre (to most people, some people seem weirdly (to me) passionate about musical theatre).
I agree your analogy works...to a point. There's a greater intimacy with sharing sex than going to see a show together, and a likely possibility that the sex partners would begin to feel affection for each other in a different way to the people going to a show.
I don't think there's anything wrong with extramarital sex as a solution to mismatched sex drives, you just need to do it with your eyes open about what the parameters are. I've been the "side chick" a lot of times and I don't catch feels every time, although I obviously like the person. Sometimes I do end up loving that person, but also doesn't mean I want relationship with them, fwb is just fine thank you very much.
It really comes down to how it's managed between the people in the situation. If I tell a fwb that I love him, that's private information that he doesn't need to share with his wife. He might not love me back, but is emotionally mature enough to recognise that 1. He doesn't have to, and 2. That's not a deal breaker. On the other hand, he might love me too, but also could be very happy with a loving fwb situation.
Just because sexual intimacy can lead to loving feelings, it doesn't mean that lives need to be overturned. Sometimes it's okay to love and not want to share more than that.
I don't think there's anything wrong with extramarital sex as a solution to mismatched sex drives, you just need to do it with your eyes open about what the parameters are. I've been the "side chick" a lot of times and I don't catch feels every time, although I obviously like the person. Sometimes I do end up loving that person, but also doesn't mean I want relationship with them, fwb is just fine thank you very much.
It really comes down to how it's managed between the people in the situation. If I tell a fwb that I love him, that's private information that he doesn't need to share with his wife. He might not love me back, but is emotionally mature enough to recognise that 1. He doesn't have to, and 2. That's not a deal breaker. On the other hand, he might love me too, but also could be very happy with a loving fwb situation.
Just because sexual intimacy can lead to loving feelings, it doesn't mean that lives need to be overturned. Sometimes it's okay to love and not want to share more than that.