Sex in marriage. Different views

[Iwonder08]

I've seen quite a few posts about different attitude to sex between husband and wife/partner. They might involve various issues, but essentially come to the fact that they have different sex drive.
I've heard a lot of banter from men talking about their wives along the lines 'trying for a second baby was the only way I could get laid' or '' marriage is the best way to kill your sex life' (I don't approve of such banter but it is not the point of this post).
Here on MN I often see the comments about what women consider unreasonable expectations or worse, various sex offences. Before I go any further I absolutely without any doubt support the fact that no person should have sex when they don't want to. However people seem to have different views on things like:

• A man looks at his wife when she is getting dressed/undressed. I saw comments in various posts saying a man must be sex obsessed and a pervert
• A man touches his wife, let's say bottom. It is always labeled as groping and again, it constitutes a sex assault

-A man tells his wife he wants to have sex, she turns him down. If the request is repeated a man is labeled a sex pest

• A man wants to have sex every day/most of the days - he must be a sex addict.

Quite often the posters recommend to LTB if any of the above is present. Another frequent scenario is a woman complains about her other half, but then casually mentions they had no sex for a year. I am genuinely interested - do women and men in 21st century have such a different view on sex in a committed relationship even though the absolute majority had sex before they got into this relationship? Do women make more effort to have sex more often even when they don't want it at the beginning of the relationship? Or do they lose interest after? How can a man initiate sex if all the above are considered inappropriate? If he just waits until a woman does, what about seduction, is not important? With the exception of temporary physical issues (childbirth, operations, pains etc) does a woman fully expect to stay in a relationship without sex/infrequent sex?

AIBU - nobody should expect regular sex in marriage by default
AINBU - it is unreasonable to expect the other partner to settle for unsatisfactory/infrequent /non-existent marriage

@LadyDanburysCane

I’ve read on MN cases where a husband/partner is accused of sexual assault and even rape for starting to caress his wife while she is sleeping or even while she was awake and he hadn’t asked permission first!

To me that is ridiculous. DH and I have never asked one another for permission to instigate intimacy. However if I woke up to DH caressing me and I wasn’t interested he would stop the minute I said I wasn’t interested and vice versa.

DH frequently touches me (gropes/assaults as far as many on MN are concerned) but it just makes me smile and I know he still fancies me after all these years.

I realise everyone is different but asking permission, within a loving relationship, is odd to me.

So, you are another one of these posters who can't understand that different people have different experiences?! You are happy in your relationship so you don't mind your dh touching you when he wants. Fine.

Is it so difficult to understand that in an unhappy relationship where the dw feels unsupported and treated with a lack of respect, that she doesn't want to be constantly touched? Especially when she has asked her dp to stop and he sulks and/or refuses to listen?

Do you think if you really really tried you might be able to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes?!

It's down to the relationship you have in waking hours. When your partner is leering at you and grabbing at you all day when you just want to rest and feel human and not like his toy, and he refuses to stop when asked or sulks and batters you emotionally about your inadequacy and then carries on anyway as he pleases once you're reduced to tears, then proceeds to do unimaginable things to you as you are sound asleep its hardly the foundations of a mutual or respectful relationship.

It's not seduction when they're the only one enjoying it or indeed conscious. It's not endearing to be sexually assaulted by your partner when you've said no. And being in a relationship doesn't give them automatic rights to touch you when it's not welcome.

Whether you are newly in the relationship or 50 years in, boundaries exist, communication is there but when one person tramples that it does become assault.

DH frequently touches me (gropes/assaults as far as many on MN are concerned) but it just makes me smile and I know he still fancies me after all these years.

So you like it, you welcome it, you've never told him to stop doing it, and it's an act of affection, not always just a way of instigating sex that will leave you punished if you don't comply.

Therein lies the difference.

I realise everyone is different

Do you?

asking permission, within a loving relationship, is odd to me.

These aren't usually loving relationships. That's the point.

My husband is like yours. I'm like you. But I read a lot of these accounts and my God, the husband is not like ours.

I've found that women don't tend to start posting on here until they're already at a certain point. What we often see as drip feeding is frequently the OP bringing up things that have troubled her, but she's normalised them and isn't fully aware of how serious they are. Their negative effect is still felt, though.

As far as your question OP.

You can't expect anyone to be forced to have sex or be compliant for the sake of keeping their partner happy at the expense of their own comfort. Sex drives come and go, it is unrealistic and unreasonable to expect regular sex in marriage whether their partner wants to or not.
And you can't expect the other party to stay if their sexual needs outweigh their partners right to say no.

The issue being some are quite happy with a sexless life, or a life with less sex but mutual and enjoyable for both and some are not snd simply want it all the time whether or not their partner is enjoying themselves too. If you're in the position of not being balanced in your relationship you should leave it. Resentment will always build otherwise.

In my case, I tried to leave often. And repeatedly he said no, you can't leave me. Followed with heavy insults, and threats of suicide. Making out that I'd fail alone and that no one would ever love me like he does and that I wouldn't be able to raise my children on my own, then he'd torch my little savings so I couldn't afford to go. And repeat.

Agree with crikycroc

1. Boredom
2. No genuine sharing of childcare and other responsibilities means that for many women their partner is actually a burden rather than an equal.

Oh god I hope birth didn't put my husband off. We've only managed sex twice in four months since because baby doesn't sleep anywhere but on one of us 😭

I don’t agree with your OP. Those things in isolation might be annoying, but they’re not abusive.

If you’re beginning to avoid your husband because he won’t stop touching you sexually any time you’re near him - that’s a problem.

a sexual relationship is part of a marriage, otherwise you are just friends

I completely disagree. We joke that our libidos have gone off on holiday together and are having a lovely time without us. After more than 20 years our marriage is far, far more than friendship despite sex becoming a very infrequent occurrence since I hit the menopause. We still show affection physically.

Sex drive is not a constant, set in stone thing.

For men it often is. That's the difference.

[quote Iwonder08]@scentedgeranium - my experience is what I thought was typical. Relatively small number of partners, some bad sex, some good, no abuse. Happily married with a regular and satisfying sex. The reason behind my question was a lot of comments I saw on different threads effectively criminalising male behaviour which I consider perfectly normal. I genuinely want to understand if my view is different from an absolute majority[/quote]
I think on those particular threads, the women ask the men to stop touching but the men ignore her wishes and keep doing it. That's why it's called groping and pestering.

I think that women actually get bored of the same sexual partner sooner than men do.

I've somewhat forgotten the details, but a few years ago I read about research that shows that women's sex drive goes down the longer they are with one partner, but goes back up if they get someone new. There's a particularly stark statistic that I'm trying to remember, that says something like most women over 30 who've been in a relationship for more than ten years are no longer interested in sex with their partner.

In contrast to women, men's sex drive is not affected by length of current relationship.

By "most" I mean more than half.

@Divebar2021

There are a steady stream of threads here where the OP has discovered their DH is having an affair. Very often they will say “ we don’t have sex but he’s been so understanding about it” or “ we have mis matched sex drives “ or a phrase of that sort. If you are the person who has celibacy thrust upon you then there’s a good chance you’ll think about going elsewhere to get that need met. Think about it.... maybe not do it but think about it. It’s really only a small step from there to being unfaithful. Whole websites like Ashley Maddison have evolved to allow people in unsatisfactory sexual relationships to meet each other so you have to think it’s not an uncommon situation. No one in a sexless relationship should be surprised if their partner goes outside the marriage to get their needs met. It’s an unpopular view here but reflects the reality of the situation.

I fully agree with this ,on this forum there are also a number (lesser number) of females leaving sexless marriages. In general it seems that if the sexual needs/wants of one partner is not being met, that partner will either look elsewhere or leave.

@Arrivederla you clearly missed this bit I realise everyone is different but asking permission, within a loving relationship, is odd to me.

Where I clearly say “I realise everyone is different” and that is is “odd to ME”. That’s ME, not everyone.

What a weird post!

As though women are an homogenous group and all think and act the same. As though there aren't 3bn women on the planet, from different backgrounds and cultures who approach life very differently.

Some women love sex, some are not bothered, some are asexual. Some come from a place of trauma, others may have a disability which makes sex difficult, some may have gone off their partner, some are from a religion where sex is 'bad' and so on.

These questions come across to me as coming from a place of misogyny. Where women are seen as some kind of separate species that have 'their' own ways of thinking and behaving and are a puzzle to be worked out. I hate to break it to you but women are human beings, complex, multifaceted and what works for one person, doesn't necessarily work for another. Women aren't rubik cubes that have a special formula that cracks the code.

My response to your OP is that if people relate to the people they're in relationships with as people, rather than automota, or service-providers, most of the issues you describe would not occur.

This is probably an unfashionable and unpopular view, but I think it's largely biological/evolutionary. Men can theoretically impregnate lots of women at any time, and are fertile for a far longer span of their life than women, so it makes sense that their sex drive would be constant.

Women, on the other hand, are only fertile for a few days each month, decline in fertility with age and then hit menopause. Periods get in the way. Then there's the possibility of unwanted pregnancy and the fact that childbirth is incredibly painful and still potentially dangerous. Birth control is often down to the woman but can involve hormonal problems including loss of libido.

If you add to that the way many women are treated by their partners, and the way that women are made to feel paranoid and unattractive by the ludicrous beauty standards in the media, it's a wonder that women want to have sex at all tbh.

Yes agree @lazylinguist - sex does carry risk for women, whereas it’s risk-fee for men.

It’s disingenuous to think this doesn’t come with implications.

And then add into that - that men just have to pump away for a couple of minutes and are pretty much guaranteed an orgasm, whereas a woman will only have one if some effort is put it.

[quote LadyDanburysCane]**@Arrivederla* you clearly missed this bit I realise everyone is different but asking permission, within a loving relationship, is odd to me.*

Where I clearly say “I realise everyone is different” and that is is “odd to ME”. That’s ME, not everyone.[/quote]
Odd to you even when you know that some women are in difficult and stressful relationships?

I don't think you expressed yourself very well here.

The thread is you quoted in the first post were a lit more complicated than that.
It's always a lot more complicated that that.

Every marriage is different. You can't generalise like that

I agree with most of this.

The other thing that's noteworthy is that I think the sort of behaviour which women will tolerate in a jokey way in the first flush of romance becomes quite draining and irritating in a settled relationship.

For example, having your bum slapped in a joking or ironic fashion by someone you really fancy who you've just got together with and had a night of rip-roaring sex with is passable.

A bum slap from the same bloke, five years and two kids in when you're trying to cook a meal while he's standing looking at football scores on his phone and refusing to lift a finger could be considerably less charming.

And many men find this shift very difficult to grasp. "She was always fine with it, now she's really uptight". You can explain that its to do with mental load or your period or whatever, but they regard it as in you in some way having breached contract.

Also the way you've worded it Op is pretty one sided....A man does this......
A man does that....
How about a woman who is used as a sexual object doesn't want her bottom touched?? You can word it in many other ways.

Answers all depends on context. Individual circumstances.......individual people......the details of their marriage.....if a woman has past sexual trauma.....anything.

A really really ambiguous and unanswerable post

For example, having your bum slapped in a joking or ironic fashion by someone you really fancy who you've just got together with and had a night of rip-roaring sex with is passable.

A bum slap from the same bloke, five years and two kids in when you're trying to cook a meal while he's standing looking at football scores on his phone and refusing to lift a finger could be considerably less charming.

Too right! Well put.

Wearywithteens

"I think it’s the quality of the relationship and the quality of the women’s self esteem that is more telling than the sex they’re having."

You say they are coerced: that's a pretty big price to pay for keeping a marriage going...

I realise that there are some grey areas in marriages which stop short of rape but where the woman goes along with something she's not really up for to keep the peace. But having to "sort him out" out of obligation or just to keep the marriage going or whatever would make you really resentful after a while.