The quashing of desire

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

Back when I used to frequent dating sites, one common thread came up among the married women, that  being that their husbands were not interested in having sex with them. This created a great deal of intrigue with me because I was, at that time, married to the least sexual woman on the planet.
Just the thought of these poor horny women having to suffer without sex drove me crazy. I guess it was my training in Boy Scouts but I was always willing to assist someone in need. The truth is as much as I thought about it; I never ended up “assisting” anyone in their time of need.

I find myself thinking about this phenomenon in a different light these days. I have been with my current wife for 5 years and from the beginning made a mental note to pay attention to what really caused tensions in our relationship, especially in the sexual arena. This is of utmost importance to me as I am getting older and don’t want to suffer further arthritis in my wrist from over-use.
I came in from raking the leaves a few weeks back and my usually happy wife was suddenly cold. Her reasons for being this way I will discuss in another post, but for sake of this subject I will just say she was suddenly and unusually cold. From my past experience this would ultimately lead to a back-to-back encounter (read: no sex) later.

This got me thinking about how I typically build sexual tension. I think about sex, a lot. I fantasize about sex and actually a great deal of my fantasizing involves my partner, not other women. Because I trust her with my feelings, I feel a great deal of comfort with her and feel free to be myself around her.
I could randomly select a sexy woman off the street and think to myself, “gee self, I think you/we would really like to ….her” but it would be just that, a fleeting thought.

With my wife the thought process is far more intense because it can be. I already know that I can have sex with her so my fantasy can actually come to fruition. This thought process is my version of foreplay; it is the way in which I build sexual tension. It is a complex mixture (really!) of thoughts and more importantly trust.
When the sudden cold shoulder makes its way into the scenario, the foreplay is interrupted. If this happens every so often, it isn’t a BIG deal, but if it was to become the norm, it would have a detrimental effect on our relationship.

My first wife was the best at withholding sex in order to make a statement. My complaints were always met with her rebuttal that I was “oversexed”. The reality was not that I wanted sex per se; rather my trust in her was waning. I stopped my mental foreplay. There is little sense in torturing oneself…why get yourself feeling hungry by thinking of food, when you already know that the cupboard is bare? The actual physical side of sex I took care of myself but the ability to truly bond with her, the ability to trust her eventually vanished.

So my mind wandered back to these women who stated that their husbands were no longer interested in sex. I wondered if a similar situation had happened. I wonder if they continuously acted in such a way as to make him think twice about mental foreplay. I wonder if they were cold and aloof enough that he stopped trusting them to be an active partner in and out of the bedroom.

With my first wife this “quashing of desire” happened so frequently that it became the norm. I stopped trusting her when it came to sex and stopped respecting her in general. I started looking at her as a complete stranger, a person that I would have no reason to trust, no reason to fantasize about and in the end no reason to love.