Switching Roles #789

So this was a longer email from a wife.

And so we're going to paraphrase parts of it and we'll have to fill in some of the holes possibly if the conversation goes and it wasn't actually in the email because we've read it, but we're not going to necessarily read the whole thing on the air.

So this is from a wife that says, for almost 20 years, I was the lower desire spouse in my marriage.

I loved my husband, but sex often felt like another task on my to-do list.

I rejected him a lot over the years, and although he never pressured me or showed me disappointment, I know that this hurt him.

A couple of years ago, I discovered he'd had an exchange with inappropriate online messages with another woman, and while nothing physical happened, it completely shook me.

Although it caused me a great deal of pain, but in a strange way, it became one of the best things that ever happened to our marriage.

It forced me to take an honest look at our relationship, my own sexuality, and the role I had played in our intimacy.

Since then, I've done a tremendous amount of work on myself.

I used to hate being touched and would almost bristle when my husband would try to hug me.

Now I'm the biggest hugger in my family.

I've learned about responsive desire, which explains so much.

For years, I thought something was wrong with me.

I worked through a lot of shame around sex, started initiating for the first time in my life, and I genuinely enjoy sex now.

And I actually have a higher libido than I ever imagined possible." The problem is my husband rarely initiates anymore.

He says that after years of rejection, he's adapted.

In his words, getting into your pants became too much work.

He's comfortable having sex every few weeks.

He masturbates in between, and occasionally this can be with porn.

What hurts me is not the porn itself, but it's the lack of the initiation.

When I ask if anything needs to change, he tells me he loves being intimate with me, wouldn't change anything, and feels completely satisfied.

Yet my mind keeps asking if you were truly satisfied with me, wouldn't you want to initiate more? After about four or five days, I genuinely start wanting to be intimate, so I usually end up being the one who initiates.

And in a way, that means he rarely gets the chance to initiate on his own schedule.

So my question is this.