One theme in this website’s musings has been the sexual differences between men and women, with husbands typically wanting to have relations more often than wives. This can lead to male resentment at times. I want to offer a few reflections that may offset this tendency.
My marriage is typical, I think. I have a strong libido and my wife has next to none. That is, throughout most of my marriage, I have had a fairly constant and strong desire to have sexual relations. (I would probably, for many years, have done it daily, if I could.) My wife (and many other women, I think) does not have a strong “antecedent” desire for sexual activity, a strong desire to initiate sex for pleasure or other reasons. [As usual, I will have to note that, of course, this is a generalization and that, in some marriages the wife has more interest in sex than the husband does. But I am guessing that might be 20% of marriages. (Some research confirms this guesstimate).]
Note that responsiveness within the marital act is a very different question from “libido.” As I point out elsewhere, following the research of Rosemary Basson, most women in long-term monogamous relations do not experience a spontaneous hunger or desire for sexual activity. As one person summarizes Basson: “From this point of sexual neutrality—where a woman is receptive to being sexual but does not initiate sexual activity—the desire for intimacy prompts her to seek ways to become sexually aroused via conversation, music, reading . . . , or direct stimulation. Once she is aroused, sexual desire emerges and motivates her to continue the activity.” My marital experience suggests that is spot on. A wife’s personal desire for sexual intimacy may be pretty infrequent. The big question is: How does she respond to her husband’s almost constant desire for it?
What Husbands Should Recognize
If we begin from the recognition of, or the failure to recognize, these strong sexual differences between husband and wife, husbands will have very different attitudes toward their wives. If they don’t understand it, or just ignore it as a kind of “defect” in their wives, they are likely to be resentful. And many men, lamentably, fall into this category. (As I have mentioned elsewhere on this website, the Australian book The Sex Diaries – based on sexual diaries of married couples – gives an extensive description of how common these male attitudes are, and how much they poison many marriages.)
In this post, I want to sing the praises of my generous wife, who has so little libido (I sometimes wonder whether she has any) – so little desire to initiate sexual relations herself – but who is willing to respond to my initiation. (As we have gotten older, this means, not so much spontaneous sex, but regularly scheduled sex.) Not as often as I’d like, BUT – as I have come to recognize – SO MUCH MORE than she would, given the choice!
On average, we have had relations a couple of times a week for most of our marriage, though in older age it is more commonly once a week or ten days. There have been many times when that has been frustrating for me, especially when circumstances delay having sex more than usual. I have sometimes become angry and resentful, though I have tried to hide this (partly not to hurt her, and partly for the self-interested reason that this would only make her even less interested!), sometimes with success, at other times showing a coldness that she hasn’t always recognized as stemming from the lack of sex.
As I have come to understand a wife’s natural tendencies regarding sex (i.e., the normal lack of a kind of “male” desire for it), I have more and more come to understand what a generous wife she has been with me in our marital sex life. If we had relations only when she was interested in it, I’d guess that every other week (or less) might have been the frequency. (“More interested” here meaning more receptive to my initiation of it – she just doesn’t initiate it herself.)
How often do we husbands realize that sex that is not particularly desired can be a real “chore” for a wife? (“Not again,” they often think!) For a wife to have relations twice a week, because she loves her husband and understands that he desires her, when she is not usually particularly interested in having them at all, is really generous.
Not Just How Often
The generosity extends beyond the frequency of relations, too. For example, my wife has next-to-zero interest in “variety” in marital relations (different positions, different places, different foreplay). She seems to be a creature of habit when it comes to marital sex. (I, on the other hand, would love to have lots of variety!) What this reflects, though, is that she just doesn’t put the same emphasis on the physical side of sex that I do (like most men). For her, it is, above all, the personal closeness, the union between us (at the personal, not just the physical, level), that is the great desire she has in our sexual relations. The irony – so puzzling to me – is that, once she “gets into” it, I think she is usually much more caught up in the amazing pleasure of marital sex. (As the mythic Teresias said about women’s sexual pleasure . . . ) That is, she feels for a somewhat longer time the intense pleasure that I feel for a short time (again, once she gets into it). But she can only do that if she feels the personal closeness.
An upside to her “next-to-zero interest in variety” is that it reflects the fact that what she wants in sex is not some physical feeling — she wants ME! And that means, also, that she never “grades” me on our sex. She can accept when things go really well and just as much when things don’t go very well (for example, when I lose an erection after having tried to stave off an ejaculation, or when she is tired and distracted and just not in the mood). This is great for me, since it really lessens any performance anxiety concern I might have.
But, despite being less interested in variety and in the physical details of our relations herself, over the course of our marriage, we have slowly done things she would not have done in the early years. First, for example, my oral foreplay on her, and eventually, her oral foreplay on me. The latter she always feels “inadequate” in doing (wow, what a miscalculation!), because it doesn’t come naturally to her. But she has come to do it, out of her spousal love for me.
What a blessing to have a wife who is so driven, in our relations, by love! Not raw physical desire (like me), but love. I try to make my sexual desire for her more full of personal love. Her personal love for me makes her willing to make love much more than she would want to, and sometimes in ways that she wouldn’t (initially, at least) want to. (It helps that we share the same understanding of the moral limits of marital sex.)
In recognizing the mutual differences, we appreciate each other more. She sees that I have often restrained my desire and deferred to her lack of desire for relations at a given time – and she loves me more for that. I see (more clearly as I have aged) how very often she has overcome her lack of interest in sexual relations and engaged in them out of love for me. And I think she also has seen better over time how wonderful marital sex is for deepening the emotional bond of love between us – the emotional bond is what leads to sex and what comes out of it. It’s both cause and effect.
How important it is that a husband and wife avoid a vicious circle of resentment in their sex life and have a virtuous circle based on a recognition of their mutual accommodation and delight out of love.