another woman

I’m depressed that I can’t see our marriage lasting.

He admitted to being attracted to his co-worker. When I first met her, they had only been working together a few weeks but something about the way he treated her and talked to her made me feel jealous. But he told me I was crazy and insecure.

But half a year later, he has admitted to being attracted to her. And on Saturday morning he admitted that he thought about her before we had sex the night before. The sex was wonderful, but now I know that he was thinking about her, I feel like he was being unfaithful to me while he was having sex with me. Like he was using my body in adultery with her.

Just last weekend we went to a marriage course organised by our church, and we realised we needed to be more open with eachother, because we are drifting apart.

Now, I just don’t want to be closer to him. I don’t want to be married anymore.

Maybe my husband will always be unfaithful to me, and one day he will leave me. You might think I’m over reacting. But I can see it happening, starting off small, just being good friends with a co-worker (who he likes to imagine having sex with). But it ends up with him leaving me for another woman. (when the kids get annoying and the wife gets boring.)

I can’t imagine ever having children, because I cannot trust my marriage, and I don’t think we could ever stand the extra stress on our relationship that kids would be. This makes me really depressed, because I always thought I would have children. I thought that the only reason I wouldn’t have children was because I couldn’t find the right man to marry.

I have married someone who I can’t trust enough to have children with. It makes me feel like we are just marking time, causing more pain to eachother before we inevitably divorce.

kamikaze virgin bride

sometimes I think about how much harder marriage seems because we “did the right thing,” and waited till marriage to have sex. I believed in saving sex till marriage. I thought that sex would work out well once we got married because we seemed to be “soul mates” seemed to understand and love each other and be committed to each other, want the best for each other, and we even seemed to really desire each other sexually. But now we are married and we have grown far apart, have hurt each other so much that we aren’t close and don’t really want to be.

The ideal of not living together and not sleeping together goes something like this: learn to love each other, learn to care for each other, learn to sort out the problems you have while dating, learn a bit about how to disagree and argue well, then decide to stay with this person forever, decide to start a sexual relationship, a shared living relationship, a shared money relationship, a shared sleeping relationship etc…. all at once after the wedding. You decide to be committed and then face all the difficulties of adjusting to your husband’s snoring, his and your bad habits and untidy or differing views on housekeeping, the difficulty of adjusting to sex, the difficulty of sharing your money. It all happens at once, and the theory is that you can sort it all out suddenly because you have decided on a lifelong commitment.

The theory of living together/having sex before marriage goes something like this: You meet someone, go out a while, like them more, decide to have sex, somewhere further down the track decide to live together, decide to share money, decide maybe to commit to each other for the rest of your lives, if you have been able to sort out all these adjustments well.

I think both models are not very realistic. I think if we hadn’t have been married, we would have broken up when we tried to have sex and found we had so many problems. If we didn’t break up then, we would have broken up over sharing our money, or all the problems of trying to adjust to each other’s ways of living and expectations of housekeeping etc. Because we were committed we had to try to work through these things. But we haven’t really worked them out. We never have sex. We have problems with money. I find it hard to sleep in the same bed as him because he snores and talks and yells in his sleep. I find it hard to live with my husband’s quirks and he finds it hard to live with my quirks.

We committed to love each other, but I feel like we haven’t been able to live up to the challenges thrown at us by trying to adapt to so many life changes all at once. If we had have had these changes slowly, I think we would have broken up because we wouldn’t have adapted, and wouldn’t have had the commitment to stay together through all the problems.

I saved myself for marriage because I thought that within this kind of commitment, we would be able to grow the kind of love we need to get through the kinds of problems we are having. But I think I was wrong. I feel so disheartened. I feel like saving myself for marriage has led me to choose a partner who I am not compatible with.

thrush

I seem to have a terrible problem with thrush. I can’t seem to get rid of it. I use a pessary or some cream, and it goes away for a few weeks, but then its back. It seems to come back every time I get my period. So I use a thrush treatment at around my period, then its ok for a week or two, then my period comes around again, and I have thrush again!

I’ve gone back on the pill, and I think that must have something to do with it, but its so irritating. I went to the doctor a month ago and she gave me some stronger cream, and I used two pessaries a few days apart. Which helped a lot, but now it is back again, only about a month later.

It hurts terribly when we make love. Especially if he ejaculates inside me then it stings for hours. It doesn’t hurt much if he doesn’t ejaculate inside me, but it is still slightly painful.

I don’t know what to do. I got thrush first on our honeymoon, I had no idea what was wrong with me, it was so itchy and sore! And since then I’ve had it every couple of months on average, worse when I’ve been on the pill.

I’m really not looking forward to going back to the doctor again.

in praise of naked cuddles

I didn’t want to write again until I had something happy to say. I think starting this blog helped me articulate some of the things that have been getting me down for so long, but that I don’t have anyone to talk to about. People have left such encouraging comments on this blog; it amazes me that sex problems are something we never talk about in real life, but that people could encourage each other about if it weren’t so hard to talk about.

I was reading a marriage help book, and it talked about the way that intimacy is lost when you haven’t faced the big hurts, and then niggle over all the little hurts so much that you begin to despair of ever being close. It described what I was feeling so well. I felt trapped in big hurts which had led to a lot of small arguments and had eroded our closeness and made me despair of ever finding it again.

This last week we have spent a lot of time cuddling and talking. We even made love. I feel a tenuous but increasing bond with him. We have talked a lot, and I feel a lot more hopeful.

There is nothing like naked cuddling. You cannot cuddle your husband naked and he cannot cuddle you naked without feeling closer. It makes it easier to talk; it makes you mutually vulnerable – physically and emotionally.

So this is a post praising the joys of naked cuddling. It will work wonders for all that ails your marriage. You must just cuddle naked. Do not have sex (even if you haven’t had it for weeks.) Just cuddle naked. All you need is that you both enter the cuddle with a soft heart, or a heart willing to be softened.

A pornographic attitude

When I went to the uni library one saturday afternoon a few months ago, he googled “kate winslet nude” and masturbated to the image results.

I didn’t know about that when we went to see a movie that night. After the movie, I was feeling emotional. (I can’t remember what the movie was, but I remember that the characters in the movie got divorced.) I was scared and felt that by the time we have been married a little longer, we will have drifted very far apart. I told him that I felt we needed to make sure we stayed honest to eachother or else we’d end up miserably married, or divorced.

That’s when he admitted to masturbating to naked pictures of kate winslet he’d googled.

I’ll never be able to see a movie with kate winslet again without thinking about him wanking while looking at her. I think it feels worse, because he wanted pictures of a particular woman. It also hurts me alot more because he is interested in sex, and does want sex, just not with me.

At that same time he admitted to masturbating to underwear catalogues and watching and re-watching sex scenes in movies to masturbate to, and masturbating when he saw the woman across the road and thought she was hot and other things that I can’t think of at the moment. I think it hurts me so much because he has a pornographic attitude to sex and what turns him on. He would rather masturbate while looking and thinking about other women than have sex with his wife.

I also feel like his pornographic attitude to sex means that I cannot please him, I cannot turn him on, I cannot compete with a porn model or a naked famous actress.

My husband doesn’t like sex

I have a feeling that my husband expected sex to be less real than it is; to be more like an airbrushed porn photo.

We went/are going through problems, like that I was very depressed on the pill so I stopped taking it, and then we had problems with condoms because I’m allergic to latex. And all the while, his anti-depressants cause him to find it very difficult to ejaculate. (Also it seems like he has had too much practice since he was a teenager ejaculating by masturbation that he finds it hard to ejaculate from intercourse.)

But even though we’ve had these problems, I’ve always felt that it’s all part of real sex. Problems with contraception and getting thrush, and having problems ejaculating are normal. I thought that since we are in a safe, loving, married relationship, we’d be in the best place to love each other and still enjoy sex even though it can have difficulties.

But I feel that instead of loving each other through these problems, my husband has just given up, been put off sex. I feel so sad, because I genuinely like having a sexual experience with my husband, but he doesn’t enjoy it because he is so worried that he isn’t ejaculating or isn’t “stiff enough” or whatever. (So worried that I think sometimes he makes it almost impossible for him to do so!)

One night we were talking about the fact that we hadn’t had sex for several weeks, and he said to me that he just doesn’t really like sex. I wish that he could feel safe enough to enjoy even our imperfect and problematic sex as made beautiful with love. I feel depressed by his disappointment at sex. And my optimism for us to be able to love each other through all our problems is waning.

I feel like I’m getting to dislike sex too.

The Difficult Joy of Sex

When I got married about a year ago, I thought sex was as easy as falling, well, into bed.

A year on, and I’m wondering when it starts to be more joy than difficulty. We were both virgins on our wedding night. We’d masturbated a bit together since we got engaged, and my husband had masturbated with two of his ex-girlfriends, but we were both pretty inexperienced.

After the most beautiful, perfect day of my life, we had the most perfectly disastrous first attempt at intercourse. We were exhausted and nervous. It hurt like hell, and I couldn’t even fit him in. I started bleeding, but he hadn’t even managed to make it into me. He fell asleep, and I was left crying, unable to believe it was so painful, and that my new husband could do that to me and then just fall asleep, after having masturbated himself to orgasm.

I was so tired, and we had to be on a plane the next day, but I was too miserable to sleep. I got dressed and wanted to walk out on the nightmare.

Things have got better since then. But sex has been so difficult for us from the very first time right up till now, a year later. Our sex life has been pretty unfulfilling on average, with only the tiniest glimmers of what I thought sex would be like.

This is the hard sex blog that needs to be written. I hope it charts the improvement of our fledgling sex-life, and provides a cathartic outlet for some of the recurrent difficulties we keep running into.