sex.. or lack thereof.

[abejita]

how do you deal with discrepancies concerning sex? my partner loves me - this i know. i don't doubt this. i know people find me sexually attractive. but i really am having a hard time dealing with this no sex for a month or two at a time thing. things were not always this way - naturally. i've brought this up more than a few times, but nothing seems to change anything. i just end up feeling like a jerk. and i don't want to be an asshole that pressures someone into being intimate with me. what do i do? do i just learn to deal? until someone comes about that i am into it and have a connection with - and could maybe have my sexual needs met then? i'm just at my wits end. it makes me cry some times which might sound dumb - but this is literally the only thing about this relationship that bothers me. i'm having a hard time.

any advice or just similar stories would be appreciated.

 

[SchrodingersCat]

There can be a lot of reasons. Your partner could be depressed, there could be emotional or communications problems in the relationship and they're preventing him from feeling aroused.

We went through a few phases like that. I had to pry the reason out of my husband. It turned out the reason was that I'd gained a lot of weight and he wasn't attracted to me. It was a devastating blow to my self-esteem, which had been previously unmarred, even though adolescence. But I looked at myself and realized, I really had let myself go, through sheer laziness and carelessness. Sexual attraction in men is very physical, and while it might sound callous for him to be so superficial, and certainly that's how I took it at the time... I've thought about it a lot over the years. Also, for him, it's related to his mother-issues. She let herself go as soon as she got married, just got lazy and started sitting around watching tv all the time, eating junk food. So he associates weight gain like that with the old bait'n'switch.

I have a low sex drive. Once in a while, I'll think about the fact that my husband and I don't have sex that often. My rational brain will take over and try to tell me that married people in a healthy relationship should have lots of sex. But I don't actually care whether we do, we're intimate in other ways. When I bring this up, he points out that sex has never been a major part of our relationship, and I'm forced to agree.