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After nine years of knowing each other and eight years of marriage, my husband and I had fallen into a rut — and it wasn’t a rut of not having enough sex.
It was a rut of having sex several nights a week, even though I was exhausted and really had no desire. He could feel it.
As a result, he’d be disappointed that I wasn’t “into it,” and I’d be left feeling guilty and wishing I could crawl into my bed alone at night without anyone expecting anything from me after another long day of working, mothering and doing all the invisible labor women in a domestic situation do.
I was in my late 40s and sex had started to feel like the last thing I wanted — not to mention needed. Resentment built from both of us, whether we actually managed to do the deed or not. It left me wondering why my husband couldn’t leave me alone just as much as I wondered why I couldn’t be the woman I was when he first met me (something he often wondered aloud to me, too).
It’s not that our sex life was ever bad.
At the beginning of our relationship, as many relationships start, we were obsessed with each other’s bodies, toppling into the bedroom several times a day for those first few blissful months of getting to know one another. But one child came along, and then another. Soon enough I was tired in a way that maybe only a working American mom who waited to have kids until her early 40s can understand.
I was full, too, from a lifetime of relationships with men and an all-you-can-eat buffet of sex that spanned decades of my life. I felt like I’d had my fill.
But my husband didn’t understand what had changed between us and I couldn’t explain it either. The truth is that it was never just one thing.
This is when therapists would likely say that it’s time to schedule sex. To put a day of the week in the calendar when it will happen, then make it happen in a quality way. To be fully present because, after all, you’ve planned for this moment! To tell your partner what you need from him or her, to be into it, to communicate.
I had, of course, read every article touting this advice in an attempt to reinvigorate my marriage, to step up to the plate and be the woman and wife those articles said I could be. And then I asked myself what was wrong with me that I couldn’t just follow the advice. I did mention scheduling sex to my husband as an option. I was far too exhausted for several days a week, but surely, I could rally for one time a week if he would agree that it’s enough.
But it all felt too impersonal to him, he said, too planned. He said it killed everything he enjoyed about sex. So, we were back to square one.
And then I decided to do something perhaps no therapist has ever advised and that, in turn, has finally gotten me to a place in my relationship where I feel there might be a chance for us to endure.
Rather than scheduling sex, I unscheduled it entirely.
Instead of continuing to rally for sex several times a week and resenting it, I asked my husband to move to the downstairs bedroom to give me some space. I said I wanted a sex hiatus.
Becoming roommates is often seen as the death knell of a relationship, the beginning of the end. We’ve been so conditioned to believe that a healthy sex life is intrinsic to a healthy relationship. That married couples should share the same bed.
But so far, removing the pressure of sex-on-tap from my relationship has only made things better.
He talks to me about other things. We sleep on the first and third floors of the house in separate bedrooms but meet more in the middle now on everything else. Sometimes, I walk downstairs in the darkness of night and get under the covers with him. And I’m reminded how much I love the way he smells, how soft his skin is and how calm he is when he sleeps, because these are no longer things I experience every night. Is it absence making the heart grow fonder or something else?
Knowing that my husband respects my boundaries right now and lets me experience him in a non-sexual way feels so much more intimate to me. It makes me want him more. It makes me love him more.
We slipped up once and broke our planned dry spell that has no long-term expiry date. He came into my room, which used to be our room, at 4 a.m. one night when I happened to be up. I welcomed him into the bed that used to be ours. We talked for an hour and then we had sex.
A common adage of wifedom is that if you don’t have sex with your husband, then someone else will. But I don’t live in fear of this. I have had so much sex in my life that I know it can feel great and awful, it can make you feel close to someone and also very, very far away.
If he can wait for me, it means more than I can say. I now feel he knows this without me saying it. And if he can’t live without the sexual part of our equation for some time, then maybe we are just wired too differently to be meant for the long haul anyway.
I am open to different eventualities, but I am not open to continuing the rut of having sex regularly and resenting it because it’s what we’re told we’re supposed to do.
For now, I love that we might meet in the morning and embrace in the kitchen over coffee, sit on the couch and talk before the kids are stirring and the off-to-school chaos starts. There is so much more room to breathe and be by removing the tension that comes with the expectation of sex because it’s been too long, because we’re married and that’s what you’re supposed to do, because of all the “becauses.”
Now, we even split the division of domestic duties more in the way of roommates, more equally. Being roommates isn’t so bad. I’ve stepped up to the plate more in other ways he’s wanted, and he has, too, for me.
These last six months of taking sex stress out of our lives have made me love my husband more. I feel more loved by him, too. Who knows, maybe it won’t be long before I reach back out to him for something more than a cuddle.
But tonight, I’m happy to go to sleep alone.
Have any of you stopped having sex with your partner? Let us know in the comments below.
The Girlfriend Staff
Follow Article Topics: Relationships
