Discussing not feeling anything during sex with partner

[Whackamole11]

After 8 years together I think I've worked out that my wife does not feel much during sex. Not just not orgasm, but like the sensation is rubbing your elbow. It took a while because she makes the movements and sounds, but I think its for me. I'm considering talking to her about it so it becomes less of a secret and a burden to her.

When we started dating I eventually asked her how she orgasms. She said that she never has. I went through a phase of trying to be the one to make her come but did not have success with different types of foreplay, oral vibrators etc. She said that oral overstimulates her. I eventually settled on keeping things varied trusting that she enjoyed it and that she wasn't able to orgasm. The frequency goes up and down depending on stress and life, but has typically been 3-5 times per month.

Our children are getting older, and we have our lives back to an extent. I thought she might have had more energy and interest, but she is receptive only, and never asks for specific things, never touches herself, and wants things to stop after I come. I read a lot of relationship blogs and learned about receptive desire, loss of desire in monogamy etc. So I tried more romance, foreplay, being the best partner I can be. I could tell it stressed her out and of course little changed. She has never brought up sex in a conversation and is uncomfortable when I do.

The best explanation I can think of is that she doesn't actually feel much. I think she is worried about being 'broken' or not enough'. She is scared Inwill be upset/angry and that it will push us apart or lead to an affair.

The thing she most enjoys is a long slow massage. Should I try to bring this up and see if we can change. More massages. When we do have sex, focus on closeness and forget the toys and foreplay that doesn't seem to work, and have aftercare. I feel like being accepted not having to perform/pretend would have to be better for her. I know that she has persisted for my sake and cannot imagine what it is like.

I have read the whole thread thanks.
I stand by my comment.

"What is an appropriate time interval at which to try to persuade my wife, who currently doesnt seem to enjoy sex, to have sex with me?"

I think you should keep offering her massages with NO sex. For several weeks. Make them the best massages they can be, all about her. See how it goes

I think the issue would have been for me is that over so many years - massage = sex expected, it got to the stage that kissing = sex expected.

I didn't want to have sex with my ex any more because I purely didn't fancy him. I, like many women did continue to. I'd get to a certain position that I knew would make him come more quickly.

I would have hated to be spoken about on a forum or any where that indicated that I had issues. I was/am a very sexual person and I was masturbating lots.
I'd fob him off and say don't be silly if he said you don't fancy me any more do you? I'd use hormones, childbirth, antidepressants anything as an excuse not to hurt his feelings.

We separated thank goodness because I couldn't have lived like that. I was single for 10 years following and went from no orgasm through penetration, only clitoril to having all this time and space to explore myself - just with fingers - to finding the most amazing arousal spots.
I tried vibrators/dildos etc but they left me a bit cold too (literally sometimes!).

I've had 2 sexual partners since, I was in a relationship with both and I was so much more confident to either guide them or take control and steer myself. Penetration, although still no orgasm became amazing and I could really feel where they were and where I wanted them and if was great.

If I hadn't had that time alone though, even with numerous partners previously that I desperately fancied, there was that lack of feeling. I used enjoy in that respect that they'd bring me to climax with fingers and then enter me as was climaxing.

But... Once the attraction had gone in my main relationship I'd be on all avoidance modes. Through no fault of either of us and to both our detriments. I think being labelled asexual is quite a leap. Or trying to work on fixing her.

Maybe she just never wants to have sex with you again. I would have been more open to cuddles etc with ex if I knew I wasn't going to feel pestered, but that would have been no life for either of us.

I came on to say, please don’t use the massages as foreplay, so I’m glad you want them to remain platonic. Hopefully you will find a solution to make sex more satisfying for both of you, but at least you share the enjoyment and intimacy of massage. Not exactly what you want but is a form of physical bonding

Does she even want to be massaged? You say you feel the need to offer. Does she ask?

I do think you're going to have to speak to her if only to say I'm not expecting sex... Even that comment would have turned me off though... There's still the pressure... It's okay, I know you don't want it, so I'm doing purely for your enjoyment. She knows you'd want if she offered. That's the problem, there's no half way if one wants and one doesn't. One is left feeling guilty, the other is left thinking how long?

100% this.

Also- OP says

“I feel like being accepted not having to perform/pretend would have to be better for her. I know that she has persisted for my sake and cannot imagine what it is like.“

But what would that even look like? So she wouldn’t pretend anymore, but you would still have sex? She would just lay there with her legs open? Or have I got that wrong?

Who said it was anal?

@StrawberryJangle , thanks for sharing your experience, yes I think the massage to sex thing has to stop.

8 years to work this out- wow. You must have realised bits before and yet you continue to have sex with her.

Not sure! Take away pleasure and you are left with closeness and emotional connection.

Thanks for your comment

I don’t think it’s at all uncommon for women to consent to sex they don’t particularly want to have, because they love their partner and are otherwise happy in the relationship. In fact, I think it’s an extremely common compromise within marriage.

Has she ever had an orgasm, OP?

Do you talk much as a couple about other things? Open, honest communication is the lifeblood of relationships but it takes practice, it’s a skill to hone and starting with a difficult topic like sex isn’t going to lead to anything if you don’t already have a well established foundation of being able to talk about everything else.

Something that has added hugely to my marriage, is our habit of taking a walk together after dinner. It’s become our time to talk, and to listen to each other. Mostly we just share the humdrum minutiae of our day, sometimes we talk about world events and wider issues and very occasionally about harder things. We have a signal to let each other know when we need to talk something out without interruption.

It’s not an exercise in communication either. It’s just a walk. The point is really that it’s completely low pressure in every way.

It’s a different kind of intimacy, and obviously one that is completely unrelated to sex. But that’s the point. The more we trust each other with our ordinary vulnerabilities of a run in with the boss, a frustrating parent, an issue we wished we handled differently, the more natural it feels to be honest and vulnerable in the bedroom.

We don't know whether DW likes the closeness of sex.

And the problem OP will face, if/when he talks to her about this, is that she is not going to be honest because sex is obviously very important to OP: (1) she won't want to hurt his feelings and (2) she will REALLY want to not wreck the stable financial and emotional and logistical set up she currently has for herself and her children. So she will avoid the topic like the plague (what she's doing now) or - when the topic is forced - she will say she'll do better (meanwhile wincing in her head) and grit her teeth trying to have more sex and pretend harder to like it/not show how much she dislikes it.

I do think that this is a case of very misaligned and incompatible sex drives that has led to a pattern of unwanted consensual sex: she consents but doesn't want it.

OP, you called the idea of not having sex again or having it much more rarely as "scary". I found that an odd word. Why would that be scary? What does sex mean to you that the prospect of its diminishment/lack would frighten you?

I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions about what she feels and wants based on internet labels. Many women like the intimacy and closeness of sex even if they don’t orgasm. Talk to her, but don’t push this too much as you know it makes her uncomfortable and don’t withhold sex because she’s not responding “correctly” as that will make her feel worse. Just focus on being gentle and loving in bed, and make sure you pay as much attention to other elements of your relationship.

@LouiseMadetheBestBroccoliPasta thanks for your insight. It's not an outcome I want while still young.

@LouiseMadetheBestBroccoliPasta (I do like this username!) I would've found the prospect of a sexless marriage 'scary', I don't think this is odd.

Now I'm post-meno and on hefty SSRIs, I'm close to asexual and it's ... convenient, as my circumstances make a successful sexual relationship extremely unlikely. During my active years, though, I would not have contemplated a 'sexual relationship' without sex. When I got together with a man, I was not looking for a flatmate with massages thrown in!

My first marriage went through the well-worn decline in sexual activity while, as it predictably emerged, he was getting his affair under way. There is no loneliness deeper than that of sharing a bed, night after night for months, with someone who is your partner but no longer wants you.

I could've quite comfortably shared a bed with a flatmate, of either sex, whom I didn't love and had no sexual feelings for. But he was my husband. It was a continuous rejection. To deliberately choose that, as some here are asking OP to do, would've been an act of self harm.

It's surprising that OP's wife seems to have chosen marriage despite, presumably, knowing she wasn't really into the "with my body" part of the deal. But people do things for all sorts of reasons; this isn't the question now being asked. Whether he feels he can live happily with a very weakly reciprocal sex life is for him to figure out - but I agree with him that the prospect of no sex, ever, is indeed scary.

... Mind you, if he ended up seriously depressed by it, he'd be prescribed antidepressants and that might leave him in sync with his wife 👀

My DP is a lot like yours @Whackamole11 , had never orgasmed before she met me, and that continued to be the case for the first 17 years of our relationship. As a result, while she does enjoy the sensations involved in sex, it's also an exercise in frustration for her, as she gets close and then it just gets too much.

As a result she also never masturbated, as what was the point. Shed tried it when she was younger, but she lived in quite a chaotic house growing up, so didn't have a lot of opportunity, and I don't know if that had any bearing on why she never discovered how to orgasm, or whether it was a physical thing. Who knows.

Anyway, I was much like you. Wanted to be the one who could do that for her, to let her feel something that I considered a pretty vital part of life. Like you, I tried different techniques, toys etc, but nothing worked.

After a few years, I accepted it wasn't going to happen, so I stopped focusing on it. And that actually improved our sex life. Instead of focussing on the destination, I learnt better what she enjoyed about the journey, how to keep her at the point before it got "too much", and so minimise her frustration.

It sounds like you're on that track now OP. You mention your DP likes massage, my DP likes to have her body stroked. Her back, her arms, ears, back of her neck etc. I learnt to see this as sex, it includes the closeness, the physical touch, the intimacy, just not the genitals. And often,that stroking will lead to "proper" sex, but for DP to enjoy the stroking, then it needs to come without the expectation that sex has to follow.

Secondly, you have this idea in your head that your partner doesn't enjoy sex. You have absolutely no idea if that's true right now. You need to talk to her about it. I've felt the same at times but it's not true, at least not for my DP. She found sex frustrating, but the actual physical sensations, she enjoyed, right up until the moment she didn't. She's not asexual, she gets turned on, she enjoys giving as much as recieving, and she enjoys the feeling of PIV and of me orgasming. She enjoys the intimacy and closeness. She just didn't enjoy the feeling of pain that came where an orgasm should.

Your really need to communicate with your partner, no matter how difficult and awkward it is, work out what your sex life can look like, because at the moment you're just assuming,without her input.

And finally, just to give you some hope. Last year, at the age of 43, 17 years into our relationship, DP had her first orgasm. She entered perimenopause last year and it has changed something. We weren't doing anything special, nothing new, and then bang, earth shattering orgasm. Since then, theres been no stopping her. The frequency we're having sex has increased dramatically, quite frankly I can't keep up!

Oh, @Sundayafternooning, no one said it was anal, but it’s a clear comparison for his wife having to ‘lie back and think if England’ a few times a month

Except not, because there's no suggestion PIV hurts her or is uncomfortable.

"My first marriage went through the well-worn decline in sexual activity while, as it predictably emerged, he was getting his affair under way. There is no loneliness deeper than that of sharing a bed, night after night for months, with someone who is your partner but no longer wants you...he was my husband. It was a continuous rejection."

So in your case, scary means scared of rejection. And I can definitely see that being cheated on is an absolute assault on your sense of self-worth (even though - as an aside - cheaters do NOT cheat because of the failings or unattractiveness or unworthiness of their betrayed spouse, they cheat because they have a hole inside them that desperately craves validation).

But in OP's case, DW is not avoiding sex because she finds OP unattractive or unworthy, she's avoiding it because she doesn't feel sexual pleasure and it's a chore that involves penetration of her body. So logically OP should not feel rejected in this case - because it's a fundamental incompatibility, not a deliberate choice on DW's part (whereas it WAS a choice of your ex to cheat).

I asked the question about the word "scary" because maybe that will help OP reflect on what sex means to him, and why, and to ask himself, "Why am I scared at the prospect of a low/no sex life?"

That may help him tease out whether the reasons for being scared are strong enough for him to leave, or weak enough for him to stay.

I don’t understand the comments telling op having sex with his wife is akin to rape. Can you not consider that this woman is happy with her arrangement, and prefers this arrangement, and would rather it continue? By making such harsh accusations you might put him off even trying to be intimate. Yes, men have sex with women who don’t enjoy it, and that’s sad. But many women prefer that arrangement and that’s up to her, not for internet strangers to plant ideas in his head that it’s rape.

What a lovely story, @VimesandhisCardboardBoots! I'm forever marvelling at human variety - all 8 billion of us are the same, and each of us very different in unexpected ways. I'm really happy you're having so much fun together now.

Dare I say 'make hay while the sun shines'? Peri/menopause often brings renewed sexual vitality - for some of us, this continues (my mum lost interest well after her 90th birthday) and, for many, it doesn't. No way of telling how it'll work out. Crossing my fingers for you both!

We don't know whether it hurts her physically, maybe not, but there is evidence that it is unpleasant for her mentally and perhaps also emotionally: otherwise she'd be more keen. From what OP has said, it seems she consents without enthusiasm, which suggests that her consent comes at a personal cost.