DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m not sure where to go from here. We just had our one year anniversary. In our first year of marriage, while attempting to have a baby, we’ve maybe had sex 20 times. On our two week honeymoon in New Zealand, we didn’t even have sex once. I have told him I’d like to have sex every other night, but it doesn’t happen.
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He’s blamed it on erectile dysfunction. I’ve been trying to be understanding and not put even more pressure on the issue. The few times we do have sex, he’ll wake me up at 2 in the morning when I’m dead asleep and barely participating. The other night I found out he had been watching porn.
This is the second time I’ve caught him. I was able to enter his password for his private browser and he forgot to close out of the screen. It was a MILF video.
My husband and I have a 15 year old age difference, I am in my early twenties. I like to think of myself as a beautiful, fit, successful wife. I make as much money as he does and have done a lot for my age. We both have masters degrees.
I confronted him about the issue again. He tried lying about it at first. He claims that I just so happened to catch him the second time he’s done it all year since we have been married, which I also don’t believe.
It’s an awkward conversation and I can tell he continues to avoid it. One excuse he made is that I need to sleep naked. Since I sleep in a t-shirt and sweats he feels like he’s sleeping next to his 12 year old cousin. I have tried making jokes out of it. If he asks for something, I’ll say not until you go sit in the corner and think about what you did. He’ll roll his eyes at me and tries to blame it on me.
I’m not sure how to move forward, if there is any hope for us, or what this means. I also don’t want to bring a baby into a family if he’s not the right person, or the person I thought he was.
I can’t understand how a man would prefer to watch porn than have sex with his young, beautiful, willing wife. Any advice is greatly appreciated!
No Love No Life
DEAR NO LOVE NO LIFE: This is one of those times when I wish you’d included a little more detail, NLNL, because that could help clear some things up. You don’t say, for example, how long you two have been together, or how much sex you were having before you got married. It would help clarify things to know if this is one year of marriage after say, five years of being together in general, or if the sex has been gradually diminishing, if it’s always been this infrequent or if the sex you were having fell off a cliff after a certain point. It would be concerning if you’ve only been together for, say, two years and are already having problems like this.
I also wish you had said a little more about the conversations you’ve had about your sex life and the porn you’ve found him watching. This could also go a long way to providing some much needed context to your relationship, as well as affecting the advice I’d have to give.
That having been said, there’s a pretty big warning sign in your letter, and it isn’t the porn, or even the fact that he’s watching MILF porn while married to a young and vibrant twenty-something. It’s that you only had sex around 20 times in the first year of your marriage while trying for a baby. Twenty times in the span of a year is less than once every two weeks.
Here’s the thing: it takes a lot of effort to get pregnant, even when you want to. Couples often find that it takes a full year of regular, unprotected sex to conceive – with doctors recommending having sex daily in the fertility windows before and after ovulation.
Even if you two were being rigorously scientific in your family planning – maintaining a fertility calendar, taking temperatures and mucosal measurements to find peak fertility – that’s a lot more sex than the two of you were having. That suggests to me that his heart (and/or other organs) isn’t exactly in it.
Now, it certainly sounds like there’re some issues going on here. It sounds like your husband is reluctant to discuss things and keeps deflecting the conversation. There’re a lot of possible reasons for this. It could, for example, be around feelings of shame – he knows things aren’t sparking the way they should and he feels emasculated because of it and doesn’t want to think about it. It could be that he doesn’t actually want a baby and doesn’t know how to tell you. Or it could be that he’s somewhere on the asexual spectrum and either doesn’t realize it or is ashamed of it.
(And before you ask: yes, some asexual people watch porn, for a variety of reasons.)
Or – and I hate to say it – he may want sex… he just doesn’t want sex with you.
The only person who can say what’s going on is your husband, so he’s the one you’ll need to ask.
The key, however, is going to be how you ask. One of the issues that comes up in these situations is that the conversations often get very blame-y and shame-y, even inadvertently, and these can shut the conversation down. It’s hard to the heart of the matter if, for example, you’re saying “how can you watch that smut when I’m right here?” or if the other person is feeling judged.
A lot of the reason why guys will toss excuse after excuse out – no matter how flimsy – is because they’re feeling defensive and are trying to end the feeling of being attacked or shamed. This encourages them to deflect or create reasons why it’s not their fault… especially if they’re already feeling weird or uncomfortable about the issue. If they feel like they’re going to be attacked or yelled at if they’re honest about how they feel, then they’re going to be incentivized to not actually tell you.
If you want to actually fix the problem, you have to be willing to reign in the instinct to go on about having caught him or whether he’s lying or not. Focusing on whether he’s lying is a distraction from the real issue at hand – the fact that you two aren’t having sex. There’re almost always reasons why that have nothing to do with whatever you found in his search history or porn collection.
As aggravating as it may be, you have to be willing to let that go for now and instead come to it from a position of trying to understand and reconcile the seeming disparity between your wanting sex with your husband and your husband seeming to forgo sex for porn. It’s much easier to have this conversation when you put aside judgement and blame – things that will just make him get defensive – and instead work on what he’s feeling. Treating this as a collaboration, where you’re both trying to work out a mutually satisfying solution together, will encourage more honesty. And honesty is going to be a vital part of reaching a better outcome than ultimately deciding that divorce is the only answer.
It may be that this is a conversation that will be a lot easier with a third party to help mediate and facilitate things. I’d suggest that you and your husband find a sex-positive marriage counselor to talk things through. The sex-positive aspect is going to be important; if you or they lead with “watching porn is bad”, that’s going to be as unhelpful as the situation you’re already in. All that will do is shut things down and your husband won’t be as willing to participate. It needs to be a space where you and your husband can both express yourselves openly and honestly, even if it’s uncomfortable, shameful or might lead to other, harder discussions. Those may well be discussions that need to happen to make this relationship work, even if they’re painful in the moment.
That having been said: it’s possible that this is an irreconcilable problem. Even with marriage counseling, this may end up being an issue with no viable solution and that’ll suck. But it’s better to find that out now and to pivot to how to wind this marriage down, than to spend years of letting this fester into bitterness and resentment.
But none of that can happen until you and he are able to actually talk things through, in an environment where it’ll be possible to actually discuss and resolve things, rather than point fingers and assign levels of blame. If you want to try to make it work with him, start with putting judgement aside and having the conversation. Then you’ll both be better able to decide if it’s worth trying to keep this relationship going.
Good luck.
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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com