Have you ever told your wife how sexual refusal makes you feel? I bet you haven’t, and part of why I’m fairly sure of that is I doubt you’ve been honest with yourself about how it feels.
Part of this is men don’t tend to analyse their feelings very much. It feels bad, I know it feels bad, time to move on. This also goes back to distress tolerance – the ability to stay in an emotionally painful place rather than resorting to fight or flight. We learn that fighting about sexual frequency does more harm than good, so we try to avoid doing that. We don’t want to sit in our pain, so we set it aside or medicate it. None of this puts us in touch with our feelings.
Aside from it being a good thing to know how you feel, I think how sexual refusal makes you feel matters to your wife. Because men are focused on the physical side of sex we tend to make sexual refusal about this both in our own minds and in what we say to our wives. I think what most wives hear is “You should have sex with me because it feels good” or “Because I need release” or “So I’m not tempted to lust, look at porn, or cheat.” Even when we don’t say these things our focus on the physical aspects of sex make these the things our wives hear.
While there are varying amounts of truth to all those reasons, I don’t think they’re the most important issues, and I don’t think they get to the heart of how we feel when our wife says no to sex. Sexual refusal is saying no to something you want that only your wife can provide. Masturbation can dull the physical urge, but we all know what we really want if far more than an orgasm.
Guys who read a blog about trying to be a better husband are looking for more than just “getting their rocks off.” You don’t just want sex, you want to make love with the women you love. Sex is about intimacy and relationship. That means being told no causes problems worse than being “hard up”. Sexual refusal is being rejected in a deep and personal way by the woman you thought would always want to be with you.
If you really allow yourself to feel it, sexual refusal hurts a whole lot, in a whole lot of ways. It’s deeply personal and it cuts at the roots of your love for your wife. It’s not a minor thing and the pain is far deeper than a bit of physical frustration. I suspect many of us don’t want to face the truth because we have no idea how to deal with it. What’s more, we have no idea how we would survive if we told our wife about it and nothing changed. It’s much easier and safer to tell ourselves it’s just about our need for physical release or avoiding temptation. Easier and safer, but not the truth. And while the truth does set us free, the process can be extremely painful.
Do you think you can handle the truth?
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I had that difficult conversation about a year ago, and things then began to get better. I had to be honest with myself first, though. I was thinking too much about how bad my body felt because of refusal, but what was really missing was the intimate connection with my wife. I was simply lonely and lost without that emotional connection. So not only was my body hurting and frustrated, I was becoming empty inside. She began to understand that I wasn’t simply after sex, but desiring closeness with her, in the way in which I was most vulnerable and receptive. As we worked though all the pain, we found that we had a stronger marriage than we had realized, but we were missing the deepest intimacy. The nakedness of the body exemplifies the nakedness of the soul.
Refusal hurts really bad, because it felt like a rejection of me, not just as a man, but as HER man.
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I am a formerly sexually refused wife and I honestly thought that increasing the sexual frequency would fix the problem. After some marriage couseling and talking through stuff sexual frequency is up and it’s good.
However, I am left with all this emotional pain I am having a terrible time sorting through – it’s crazy. I’m scheduled for personal couseling but I am kind of at a loss. I thought we would just have more sex and everything would be ok but I just feel so sad still.
I cannot understand how I was so low on my husband’s priorities so long and I was suffering much crying myself to sleep and he had no idea because I was too ashamed to talk about it for the longest time.
How do you do it though? Tolerate distress and work through how you feel? I think I avoid my feelings most of the time for most of my life. To the point where I dont realized I’m stressed until after I’ve snapped at people, completely lost my appetite and a portion of my will to live, and can’t move my neck/ get migraines.
I think that triggers major depressive episodes, where I have to ignore my feeling because my feelings tell me to stay in bed, cry and kill myself. Not necessarily in that order.
This is not healthy, obviously, but I don’t know what yo do about it.
@alchemist – Not being in touch with our own feelings is a common issue for men. I’ve discussed it in the past, and I need to do it again.