whatsthatcomingoverthehill -
But I see time and time again on here that if there is a sexless marriage it must be because the husband isn't putting the effort in around the home. It does equate doing housework with getting sex and sounds very much like a reward culture. It is also presented as something the wife does for the husband, rather than a mutual thing. How fucked up is that? I am in a sexless marriage (not my choice), but there is no way that I'd want my wife to have sex with me because she feels she ought to, or to reward me for taking the kids out for the day and cooking her a nice meal. That would make me feel like a charity case.
I want sex to be something we do together and for each other. I'd rather not have it if it's one sided. I don't pay for sex outside my marriage, how much worse would it be to feel like you are paying for it inside a relationship?
I can HUGELY relate to this post, and I think it captures one of the problems with these situations from a male POV extremely well.
It's difficult once you start thinking about what you need to to FOR you wife IN ORDER for her to have sex with you. For a start, that's not the way sex usually works at the beginning of a relationship. The perception at least is that the sex ITSELF is there to be satisfying for both partners. If one partner isn't getting anything from it, then you have a problem. But if both partners find it agreeable as a thing in itself, then once a shag is over it's over. It's not a contract you've signed outlining a great long list of debts you've accrued by it.
Unfortunately I do think it can sometimes happen, when sex at the beginning is NOT particularly enjoyable for one partner, that they are not honest about it and pretend it's better than it is. Maybe that's all part of "getting" a marriage partner, I don't know. It sometimes seems to be a way of getting children, and then once that partner has the children the sex has served its purpose and doesn't need to be endured any more. By the sound of things, this might be the case with the OP's wife.
But the problem with talking about how the sex might rekindle "if only you did X... Y.... Z.... etc." is that it's self defeating. We don't want our wives to begrudgingly have sex with us in return for some other favour external to the sex itself. We want them to WANT us, to want sex with us AS A THING IN ITSELF, the way we want it and the way they used to want it (or, as above, sometimes maybe the way they used to pretend to want it).
So even if it were to work, and after two weeks of the most dutiful housework, childcare and provision of time off, sex were then available, it would feel like we'd earnt some kind of tit-for-tat reward, rather than like we had a wife who actually wanted us. And that's not the point in the first place.
I think this is a dangerous road to go down. You have to try and understand the pressure on a woman bringing up kids, understand how things have changed, the workload has increased etc. and both do your best to support each other through that. But tying all that up with sex seems very dodgy to me. If someone can't be sexual with someone else with some degree of openness, freedom and spontaneity, and if they need to see it as an item on one side of a ledger sheet that has all these implications for all the items on the other side - then they're better off not doing it at all.