I’m feeling this bitterness and anger at my wife for not working on her own recovery and self. She has an extreme aversion to sex. She had a history of being abused. She seems me in therapy and recovery and talking to mentors and working my butt off in recovery. Yet she won’t get a therapist.
That sounds incredibly frustrating but there is no doubt you are on the right path. I know it is easy to say and hard to do but the answer is to love her anyway because what you do for her, you are doing for Our Precious Lord. It might help to contemplate Matt 25:36. I am praying for you. Please pray for me.
Ouch. Totally legitimate I think to ask her to address her issues so she can be well, and so you can have a healthy sex life, as you have probably done. But as you also know you can't control her or change her, you can only control and change yourself, with God's help. Find freedom in the covenant. Marriage is a kind of death. But the kind where if you do actually die, you might find you get your life back many times over.
I know the following is no comparison to what you are wrestling with but in case it helps in some small way, I offer it here. I recently went on a week long holiday with my wife. It was with a tour group (not my preferred holiday but appropriate in this case). She constantly went wandering away from the group to look at something that interested her and few others, including me. Her capricious wandering was irritating to me as I felt pressure to stay with the group and not hold up progress. I quickly felt anger and embarassment about her and that caused me to feel guilty. After a couple of days of this, I was given the thought that the greatest gift I could give my wife was the freedom to be herself. She is her own person. She must make her own choices (and trust me she will, whether I like it or not). I am also my own person and I get the freedom to make my choices about myself too. After this obvious but important revelation my irritation abated. I realized that trying to change her is fruitless, dominating and a road to unhappiness.
Good morning all, I’m on vacation in Italy with wife for 5 year anniversary. What a blessing to be here. I am far away from my IRL APs, some I’m going to get some of my feeling out here. Being in a romantic and intimate environment like vacationing in Italy really makes me want to be sexually intimate with my wife. She’s not romantic or sexual, so I am alone in that. However, we have had some real moments of intimacy, though not sexual. She is cuddly and appreciative of me. This is more than enough! We are having a great time and that is a huge blessing. I need to treasure these times. Last night however, I was a little bit dissapointed about lack of love making. I couldn’t sleep and was kind of tormented. I decided to open my Bible and was reading Mark 2. Jesus forgives a paralytic of his sins, then heals them. It reminded me how Jesus is healing me of my sexual addiction. How the closer I get to Him, the more I can be fulfilled by drawing near to His presence. This morning I am spending time in prayer and hear blogging. I feel an unquestionable sense of joy that can only come from our God. This isn’t exaggeration or word play or Christian salesmanship. It is real, yet subtle, joy. It fills me up this morning even in the absence of sex. It is better than sex. In other news, my recovery is in a bit of an odd place. I am about to complete 10 months without MO. Even before that, MO had happened about once a year. Cutting off the sexual response side of P or P-subs has made my viewings of p-subs a pure dopamine problem. When I see p-subs now, usually in the form of adds on the internet, I am not lusting, but am still having a dopamine hit and sometimes high. That is good and bad. It is good, because lust is bad and lust is increasingly foreign to me. Humanizing women and images of them is increasingly normal. However if I do not purposefully humanize the image of the woman in front of me, the dopamine reaction happens automatically. If I see a p-sub and do not make a decision, that dopamine reaction is very automatic. I do believe that will continue to lessen over time. This is all good news. The bad news is that the dopamine is still very addictive, and leads to desiring stronger sources of dopamine, such as true pornography. That is a huge danger, obviously. I am not quite sure how to deal with this dopamine addiction. I have thought about reading the book ‘dopamine nation’, just because it’s the only book on the topic that I’m really aware of. If anyone else has any insights, I’m all ears.
I really think this is valuable insight. Maybe 5-10 years down the road, my wife will have more of a sexual desire that will come from her own personality. It will be worth the wait if that does to come fruition. Thank you for this encouragement @CPilot.
If ads on the internet are the problem, then an ad blocker is the solution. I wouldn't want to go online without one!
My spiritual trajectory is this: - I was once unable to stop PMO. - Then I was unable to stop P-subMO as well as MO. - Then I was unable to stop depending on O, fantasizing and begging my wife for sex. - Now I am developing the capacity to go to God for fulfillment of my sexual needs and have tools to end fantasizing in my head. However, not having sex in times of intimacy or being turned on by wife bring me arrousal, humilization for that arrousal, feeling of rejection due to wife not feeling the same attraction, and finally feeling unloved as wife cannot bring her self to bring me the happiness of sexual closeness. - The next step is being dependent on cuddling for my sexual needs. The goal is to be happy in a sexless marriage. I have done this for stretches so of course I can do this permanently. There have always been urges to walk backwards. There will probably always be. But I can live in contentment without sex and simply enjoying my wife’s friendship and occasional moments of cuddling. This means I must cut out all fantasy and exposure to dopamine materials, as these drive me wanting O. This is the next step in my recovery. My battle plan is this. Turn to God with every want. When a lasting urge occurs, or when I can see an urge coming, I must get on the phone and call my APs. I need to avoid dopamine seeking at all costs, as this deducts from my main goal of being happy in a sexless marriage. I can only pray that wife works on the recognizing the wall keeping her from enjoying sex.
Your acceptance of the path you are on is inspiring. Thanks for walking out what you believe. It is not easy. You are an encouragement and an example for me to follow. Thank you.
God and cuddling won't meet your sexual needs because you don't have sexual needs. You do have sexual desires. Those aren't going to go away. But you can live as a single person in this area while married if you want to, with God's help. You have a need for connection. God can meet that need, and you can connect with your wife without making love. Making love sure is a fun particular way to connect though. But you can live without it. My question is: Why? Pray for your wife to change, for sure, but aren't you completely free to ask her to work on her stuff too? Does she not recognise that she is depriving you, and herself, by being completely closed to sex? (1 Corinthians 7.) Health issues? Then ask her to address the health issues. There is nothing wrong with you wanting to make love to her. It's an expression of love. Just because your sexual desires got out of kilter with PMO doesn't mean that they are all bad. I don't think the goal should be to be happy in a sexless marriage, though it is great and amazing to be able to aim for that with God--rather the goal should be to be happy in all circumstances including in a marriage where you also have sex as an expression of intimacy and place of connection that binds you together in a way that is mutually pleasurable and fulfilling. That's what God wants! That's what he designed sex for! That's a thing that can be worked on at your end, I think (including the typo ). Why be humiliated for being turned on by your wife? There's no reason at all to feel humiliated by that unless sex is some bad and dirty thing and it is wrong and gross of you to want to have sex with your wife. I think those can be worked on too--it is a kind of rejection, though it does not have to feel so bad if you acknowledge that it comes from your wife's biological wiring, medical issues, past history and particular thinking (and maybe things you have done in the past), and not from anything that is wrong with you. And it is unloving of her not to have sex with you--and also unloving to herself as she is missing out on that expression of intimacy and connection. Getting her to want it, though. Well, that's a whole different thing. I guess that's only come through her choice to address things (her), work (both of you), and recovery (you). Preaching to myself here too. It happens increasingly in my marriage as I go further in recovery.
In addition to previous post, Sorry I missed this before. I am not so sure about the distinction between 'dopamine addiction' and 'lust'. If you see an image of an attractive woman and look at it for long enough your body might just respond with arosual--either just in the brain, or in other parts of the body too. I think lust is both physical and mental/spiritual, but it also can be one without the other, or at least almost completely one without the other. Dopamine is always going to feel good. Attractive women are always going to be exciting. You can't change your very being and your biological wiring. You can change how you respond to dopamine and attractive women events and train your brain in a certain direction though with God's and others' help.
Thank you for this post in particular. It is quite thoughtful. I guess I mean to say that not wanting sex is more of a mindset. It is setting myself up to reject the false god of sex.
Just to add to these recent notes: I would like my sexual desire for my wife to die and be replaced by a desire to be in the presence of Jesus. My desire to escape into the internet should be replaced with a desire to commune with God. This is coming to fruition and is quite literally my salvation. Desiring sex with my wife and being rejected is my greatest trigger and source of depression. This leads to a strong desire to want to escape. This leads to a hole in my self confidence that has been habitually filled by escape. That escapism has to stop. I need to reject my entire sex life and choose to live without it. I wouldn’t be able to handle a permanent green light from my wife and neither could she. I couldn’t handle it because I would lean on it all the time to fix whatever emotion I am feeling. I am a (recovering) sex addict and that is what we do. We use sex instead of dealing with our emotions. She couldn’t do that because sex gives her an inescapable feeling of being used. Being leaned on for sex makes her feel that her worth is tied to her sexual output. She has been in relationships where the majority of her worth to her partner has been her sexual output. Where her feelings have been untied to her body, and her body has been used in spite of what her feelings are. In a way, I have contributed to this too, as I am willing to have sex with her if she is not feeling 100%. I think that should stop. Think about how wonderful it will feel for me to be the one rejecting sex. I would no longer be the one being rejected. If I no longer want sex, our marriage is freaking wonderful. When I am in the mindset of ‘I don’t want sex’, our time in the bedroom is no longer filled with hints of rejection. When ‘I don’t want sex’, there is no pressure of expectation on my end that one thing will lead to another, and that allows me to enjoy the first thing instead of being dissapointed by it. If I can reject some of her sexual advances, maybe she will understand how I feel. I know I will have to wait weeks for this. She is on her period now, I don’t imagine she will make a sexual advance or invitation until December, or after her next period. Just predicting this from experience. I want to be prepared to reject her advance at that point in the name of FREEDOM.
Friend, I will admit to not following your story as closely as I have others, but I have read a lot of your posts. This most recent post concerns me. One element of concern is that sex in your wife's previous relationships--that of being used--is influencing sex in your marriage now. That is certainly understandable, but perhaps there is something unresolved there that could be worked through. Another element of concern is that you want to reject some of her sexual advances, both to teach her a lesson about how you feel when you are rejected, and also so you can achieve "freedom." I think wanting to be free of being controlled by your desire for sex is a good goal. But for these other matters, it sounds like you, your wife, and both of you together, could benefit from seeing a good counselor to work through some of these issues.
I dunno. He sounds right on the ball to me. @RedeemedIowan is one of my personal heroes. Take that fwiw, of course.
I share the concern. Probably not enough time to write now, sorry, may write more later if I can. But briefly: If you reject your sexual desire for your wife, you are rejecting a part of yourself. It is not bad, it is good and God-given. I think you need to accept it. But apparently you also need to accept in this season that you will not be having sex with your wife, because of her issues and how your relationship stands. That is different from rejecting your sexual desire. Just because you are an addict does not mean you have to actively depend on sex for feeling good (even if left to your own devices you have a tendency to do that) and use your wife to medicate yourself. You can learn with God's help to grow in self-control and not be mastered by the desire for sex for your wife--to still have the desire, but not be mastered by it--and you have already been growing in self-control. One of the best safeguards against being mastered by it is that you can't just have sex with her whenever you want to--she has to want to as well, and it is good to only have it when she wants to as well--this shows her you are not just using her--that you don't just desire sex with her and her body but her. SA have lots of stuff on this for married members. It's about changing our relationship to our sexual desire, not excising it or rejecting it--it's not going to go away because it is healthy and actually shows that you love your wife. You saying you will be the one to reject sounds a lot like me when I feel rejected and think 'OK, no sex for a while now, if my wife ever inititiates (rare anyway) then I'm going to be the one to reject so she can see what it feels like'. The Passionate Marriage podcast (back when it was called Sexy Marriage Radio) call this making a 'deal with the devil'. It actually comes from an immature place because it's 'I feel this way, so I am going to punish you by making you feel it to, so you understand me better'. Conversation and mutual listening are a much better way to being understood. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because you have an addict's tendency to use sex to escape doesn't mean you have to live using sex as an escape, even if in this particular season of your life it appears you are having to live largely as a celibate person for the moment. </sermon> Ah. Turns out I did actually have a fair amount of time to write stuff...
Going out on a limb here, but I just made a post on my journal, @RedeemedIowan, that I think touches on some issues that you and I both share. It would require some time investment, listening to two podcast episodes. But it might be a help to you--and it would be a help to me if you listened and gave me your thoughts on them. @Tao Jones and @Rebooter2022 and others, I'd love to hear your thoughts, too.
Love this input @Wilderness Wanderer @Tao Jones and @Rebooter2022. I actually am reading through Unwanted I think partially bc of your recommendation @Wilderness Wanderer. I’m at work but will dwell on these things later.
I was going to mention this as well, especially the second episode @Wilderness Wanderer posted on his journal.
