The short version is that I left my husband because we didn’t have sex any more.
The long version is, as you’d expect, a lot more complicated than that, but it hits the highlights well enough. Because it’s never just about not having sex. It’s about all the reasons (the ones you know, and the ones you don’t) why you’re not having sex, it’s about how not having sex makes you feel about yourself and your partner, it’s about needing to feel loved and needed and wanted by the one person in your life who is supposed to want you more than anyone else in the world.
For me, it was also about not wanting to cheat on him. Yes, I could have. In fact, I had his permission to. During the last crumbling months of our marriage, he suggested I just go out and get the sex if I wanted it so damn much. With his blessing. I even tried. But I couldn’t do it. Felt wrong.
And that’s when I realized that sex in and of itself wasn’t the problem.
There’s a reason I’m boring you all with my sob story. It’s because over the last three years I’ve been astounded to find out how many couples were like us. Sometimes she doesn’t want it, sometimes he doesn’t want it, but on every street in your city, there’s at least one couple going through this right now.
Got me thinking about the inequality. In fact, I don’t know a single married couple right now (well, at least out of the couples I know who are open in discussing their sex lives) who have anything approaching equality in their sex wants and needs.
Do we do it to ourselves? Deliberately set ourselves up to be with people who for any number of reasons turn out to be sexually incompatible?
What do you do when you realize your needs aren’t being met?
