Sexless Marriage: Is Intimacy Still Possible (yes, duh)

I don’t even know where to begin with the Wall Street Journal’s article about sex in marriage. I am honestly completely disgusted by it, but I’ll do my best to express all of the harmful things that it manages to compress into a few pages.

 

The gist of this article is that if a couple has different expectations of sex, particularly if the man wants to have sex more than the woman, then it can be horribly emotionally harmful to the man to be denied that sex, and the woman should “step up her game” to keep him happy. The reasons it cites for this are that men need orgasms to stay happy, men can’t express their feelings verbally so they need sex to express feelings, and men don’t know how to feel intimate without sex.

 

Now the first and absolutely most important response to this piece is that no one owes another human being sex. Ever. Even if you’re married, even if he wants it, even if you told him you would. There is no circumstance in which you have to have sex with someone. It is your basic right as a human being to say no to sex whenever you choose. I don’t think this should have to be reiterated, but apparently it does.

 

To move on to the actual content of the article, the problem with a lot of the conjectures cited (things like “men express themselves through action not word”) is that they are a.unsubstantiated claims about an entire gender and b.not necessarily natural states of things, but probably socially influenced. Because of these things, a more reasonable solution to a man feeling hurt due to a lack of sex would be for both parties to try to come to some understanding of how to both get their needs met. The man could practice being open with words more often. The woman could practice intimate gestures like hugs or kisses. You can meet halfway. The woman is not obligated to solve all of these problems by “making the man happy”.

 

In addition, this whole article is demeaning to men, to the intimacy of marriage, and to relationships in general. If the only thing you feel your wife is good for is sex and you’re depressed because she isn’t meeting your need, then you may need to do some soul-searching about your relationship. If the only time you feel loved or intimate with your wife is when you’re having sex, you might need to make some adjustments to your expectations or ask your wife to do other things that indicate love (like maybe saying “I love you”). There are thousands of ways to express intimacy. There are thousands of ways to express love. Instead of trying to shame your wife into having sex with you, maybe pick up “Love Languages” or some other form of idiotic communication drivel and figure out how to talk to your wife because apparently you never learned communication.

 

Finally, the whole premise of this article is a bit terrifying to me. It seems to advocate emotionally blackmailing someone into having sex with you. If you ever watched an after school special as a kid that dealt with sex and losing your virginity, the boyfriend would always say “if you loved me you’d have sex with me”. And every single time the adults around you said that that was a really bad reason to have sex if you didn’t feel comfortable with it. This still holds true even when you’re grown up and married. “If you loved me you’d do it” is still a very horrible reason, even if it’s couched in terms of “I feel unloved when you don’t have sex with me”. Guilting someone into having sex with you is highly unethical and extremely scary. When people have tried to use this tactic on me, I have felt sexually violated. The fact that people are promoting the idea of doing this is almost as bad as promoting emotional abuse in a relationship.

 

All of the man’s actions in this story were incredibly passive aggressive. Keeping a journal of their sex record made it absolutely clear to the woman that she was not living up to his expectations and that he was keeping record of it. Telling her he felt unloved was guilt-tripping her. These things are not acceptable. His wife had just gone through a traumatic event, of course she wasn’t interested in sex. Maybe he would have felt more connected with her if he had taken the time to help her process the miscarriage and support her through a difficult time. Maybe he would have felt more loved if he had taken the time to really talk to her about what was going on and what they could do. Instead he chose to make it clear to his wife that he was unhappy and she was responsible for his unhappiness. But no one is ever responsible for another person’s feelings. If he feels unloved then it is his responsibility to figure out how to rectify that situation. It is not his wife’s responsibility to become his fuck-bot so that his hormones can spike and he can feel better about himself. She’s committed to helping him deal with his emotions, but she has not committed to taking on the role of a mother who fixes every situation that hurts her husband. No one can do that.

 

(The Funkes are not the ideal image of how to deal with a sexless marriage. Do not take your life lessons from Arrested Development.)

What Is an Egalitarian Relationship?

So yesterday I was exploring new blogs and I ran across a blog written by a polyamorous, skeptical, atheist family. Needless to say, I was pretty excited. This sounded super interesting, and I’d never heard this particular perspective before. I needed to read all their backentries RIGHT NOW.

 

But then I got to this article, which was about 3 posts in, and I just couldn’t stomach anymore. The basic premise of this article is that “polyamory is not inherently egalitarian, but all egalitarian relationships must be polyamorous, or at least merely de facto monogamous (and open).” Then I got to this article, whose main point was that ” To be monogamous would be to say to Gina “if you develop a sexual or romantic interest in someone other than me, I want you to ignore or suppress those feelings,” because exploring them would hurt me.  Put simpler, it would be saying “If you get what you want, that is bad for me.”  Monogamy, like all rules in a relationship, sets the two partners against each other.  For one to gain, the other must lose.” 

 

I was a little incensed. I happen to be monogamous, and not just an accidental monogamy, but the kind of monogamy that was agreed upon by both partners so that neither one of us would get hurt. According to these people, my partner and I are being selfish and limiting, pitting ourselves against each other, because we’re willing to not hurt the other person. The logic here is ridiculous. There ARE some instances in which partners have differing interests and desires. There ARE some instances in which “if you get what you want, that is bad for me”. To take a very clear example, in some instances, that would be rape (if one partner wants sex and the other doesn’t, it would be very bad for them to give their partner what they want). This model of relationships seems to circulate around the idea that there is no compromise in relationships, that we don’t sometimes give up things that we want in order to keep our relationship happy and healthy. 

 

This does not of course mean that we don’t love our partner if we sometimes ask them not to do something they’d like. It means that we are balancing our own mental and emotional needs against the desires of our partner. Because there are in fact TWO people in a relationship, and we have to look out for BOTH of those people in a relationship. This kind of rhetoric is extremely harmful because it asks individuals to ignore their feelings and desires so that their partner can be happy. Want to know where else that kind of rhetoric exists? Rape culture. It invalidates your feelings, and means that you don’t get to ask for anything. 

 

You DO get to ask for things in relationships. You DON’T have to be entirely “selfless”, because if you were then your partner would not be getting the happiest version of you possible. Every relationship has these instances of give and take, where one partner might desire something and the other might be hurt by it. If it’s a healthy relationship, they then discuss it and try to decide which course of action leads to the most happiness in the relationship. For example, in my relationship right now I’ve been struggling with some memories of bad relationships in the past. I’ve asked my boyfriend to stop doing certain things that are a little bit triggering to me. He may really desire those things, but he has stopped doing them because my trauma is a bigger harm to our relationship than his desire. Or a more mundane example, I hate the sound of people chewing, so if he’s eating and I’m not, I ask him to turn on the TV so that I can’t hear it. And he does, even if he may want to converse with me while he’s eating, because it’s really not hard for him and it means something to me.

 

But there are certain instances where it falls out the other way. I had a boyfriend in the past who told me that he was uncomfortable with me swing dancing because I was with other guys. Swing dancing brought me a GREAT deal of joy though, and I had already made certain compromises about what I would do with certain other people to keep his anxieties more settled, and we talked about it to keep both of us feeling comfortable. In that case, the balance swung the other way.

 

And sometimes, you can’t figure out the balance. Each individual thinks that their side is more important. For this writer, perhaps the freedom to have sex outside the relationship is HUGELY important in their ability to feel happy and fulfilled in life, and they simply can’t survive without it. Their partner might be incredibly hurt by it, and feel betrayed and alone and unwanted. In those cases, it might simply mean that the individuals are incompatible. However just because one individual can only imagine a life where everyone would want to give complete untethered freedom to their partner and want that complete freedom for themselves, does not mean that’s the only way to be egalitarian. Letting both partners have a say in what they do is egalitarian. His version of “egalitarian” is just as one sided as a single partner demanding that the other stay locked in the house. It’s simply the other direction. It’s holding your partner a slave to the idea of “freedom” even when that idea hurts them, and saying that if they can’t accept this abstract notion of freedom, they don’t love you. It invalidates your partner’s choices and ability to gauge for themselves what their level of emotional tolerance is for certain things.

 

Asking your partner to ignore their feelings so that you can pay attention to your own feelings is NOT egalitarian. A relationship that balances the feelings of both partners IS egaliatarian. It might be open, it might not be. That depends on the weight of the feelings of those involved. But the idea that we should ignore when we feel hurt, unwanted, vulnerable, betrayed, alone, jealous, or any other feeling you might get when your partner is with someone else is extremely invalidating, and ignores one half of the relationship. It promotes the idea that freedom is more important than respect for those you love. And that is NOT a healthy idea.

 

It is NOT inherently selfish to ask your partner to stop doing something that is hurting you. It IS inherently selfish for your partner to expect you to ignore those feelings of hurt if they’re having a good time.