DEAR READERS: Two weeks ago, I announced I would be taking a nice long break from questions about miserable sexless marriages. (I don’t get questions about happily sexless marriages.) I tossed out my standard line of advice to those who’ve exhausted medical, psychological, and situational fixes (“Do what you need to do to stay married and stay sane”), and I moved on to other relationship problems. Readers impacted by sexless marriages—men and women on “both sides of the bed”—wrote in to share their experiences and insights. I’ve decided to let them have the last word on the subject.
If my ex-husband wrote to you, he’d say I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore and he was going crazy. The truth is, I wanted to have sex—but I didn’t want it to be in one of the same three positions we’d been doing it for seven years. I was bored and asked for some variety, and he refused to do it. My boredom turned into frustration, and frustration turned into anger. At a certain point, the idea of having sex with him made me want to beat the living shit out of something. Was I supposed to continue satisfying him when my needs weren’t being met? Our mistake was waiting until I hit the angry point to get into therapy. We should have gone when I was bored. He wound up having an affair and blamed me because I didn’t want to have sex with him. But there was a good reason why I didn’t want to have sex with him. Maybe before you advise people in “sexless” marriages to have affairs, you could tell them to do some self-examination first? —Husband’s Always Right
