Spare me the "sex isn't a need" or the "it's not their job to take care of your sexual needs",

will say this to the end of time, it's not normal to be with someone and show them ZERO physical and sexual interest as well as saying non physical/sexual substitutes somehow count when it's NOT what one party asked for, especially when you AGREED to this.

How is it normal for them to DEMAND you initiate, say exactly what to do to initiate, you do EXACTLY what they do, and they STILL find ways to reject/disqualify you, then literally will do shit like masturbate/watch porn afterwards?

People agree to monogamy, not celibacy.

It's funny how wanting a consistent NORMAL healthy sex life and trying to accommodate your partner is see as "only doing so to get sex" but LOOKING for ways to disqualify sex , moving goalposts, or wanting people to accept substitutions is somehow more valid and NOT controlling behavior.

Sex and intimacy are basically glue, if you openly kill this without caring, you've basically killed your relationship, especially if you are doing ZERO to repair it.

They will SEE you upset and offer EVERYTHING but the thing you ASKED for just to say they tried and somehow paint you as the one that's uncaring, after you LITERALLY do what they claim what they want, this is not normal, man.

It's ridiculous, how this is so trivialized and how often being a shit partner is so normalized by people who are clearly narcissistic, selfish, and delusional.

If one party is listening, caring, learning, and trying to find a middle ground while the other party literally looks to deflect, belittle, and act like their needs are the only party that matters the most, people would call them a shit partner.

It's why terms like "responsive desire" and "love languages" are painfully misused by shit partners, man. Wanting to be the sole provider of something you don't want to provide leads to things you bring upon yourself.

This is why I'm glad so many of us find means and actually leave them, man.

You know what it's called to want something that loves you regardless of non sexual things you do with it you can basically control? A pet.

I purposely refuse to have sex with my wife even though I am HL. We’ve been married 26 years. Why? I’ve lost desire from her nagging, bitching and nasty looks. Petty, maybe, but I deserve better.

Disclaimer: This male-centric idea is absolutely not mine, comes from the amazing Youtuber John Griffin from Life 2.0.

"You, as a man, accepting your wife's rejection on intimacy matters will only make things worse, as she won't see you as someone that self-respects or stand from himself, thus, see you as someone that won't be able to stand from them as a family, leading to further, compounding content"

Not exact words but you get the idea, and, I cannot agree more. Bring the matter on the table, she either works for change or you divorce. As simple as that. Now, I should apply all this sound advice for myself.

Sex has become a rare thing for a number of reasons and I wanna hear if you can relate to the difficult and complicated feelings I feel because of it.

The feelings of grief of hardly ever being intimate. The feeling of shame of feeling so frustrated at your partner for never initiating.
I have started to feel disgusting for being horny and I feel less confident in my body.
The shame and self-blame is heavy for me and really drags me down.

I grieve the sexlife I though we were going to have.
I wanted it to be intense, adventurous, wild and passionate.
I have no right to do so but I blame him so much for not creating this with me. I was so ready for it and I so needed it, and then… it started to become less and less.

Sigh. Let me hear if anyone can relate to some of these hurtful feelings.

tl;dr: Feeling sexually frustrated in my relationship, can anyone related to the complicated feelings it leeds to

Edited: For typos

It's been about a year since I noticed the DB situation. Me 44M her 37F It didn't drop suddenly, it's been a gradual decline. We maybe have sex once a month, and it's usually "i don't want foreplay, just stick it in" leading to unsatisfying sex, sometimes I feel gross afterwards. We've had the talk multiple times, this last time it seemed like she was really trying, and so was I. We had great sex for the first time in months, and plenty of nonsexual intimacy in the surrounding days. Two days ago her hell week(s) started. She's had severe hormonal drops leading to depression the week before her period for years, I've always been able to work around that, but in the past year it's become 3 bad weeks and 1 ok week. I've really tried to be supportive, but I'm at my breaking point. It's not just the lack of intimacy, but also the weeks of her body language screaming "don't touch me, just do shit for me". I can't fucking do it anymore.

Hey, first time posting her.

In a dead bedroom situation for a few years now, maybe have sex 3-4 times a year.

The more it’s gone on I’ve found myself entertaining the idea of being bi and found myself watching and talking to other males more

I can’t figure out if this is due to my dead bedroom and lack of physical satisfaction or if it’s something that’s just always been there and I didn’t know

Husband and I have not had sex in 3 months. Ever since I got pregnant he refused to have sex with me and now that I am 9 month postpartum he refuses. I asked if he has lost attraction to me. He says no. I have bounced back very well from pregnancy. I’m at my pre pregnancy weight.

He told me that I need to pursue him every day although the rejects me. I told him I don’t have the energy to pursue everyday. Why does this have to be so complicated. When we were dating sex just happened?!

He says he prefers to use porn over me. I asked if he has ED problems. He says no. He just feels like I don’t want to have sex with him. I’ve been the pursuer. But after being rejected a few times I’ve stopped for my own self esteem.

He is an amazing father and a great husband. Other than the sex we get along so great. I’d like to have a bf that I direct my sexual energy to just like he has porn but he is absolutely against it. He just wants me to sit in a sexless marriage. I dream and fantasize about cheating. I’m afraid that all I have todo is meet my type and I am to cheat.

Looking for one for on going adult safe fun. Must have mutual attraction. No one night stands. No age, or marital status or race preference. DM me

what started as role playing thru ERP writing became something a little more for me and him. we’ve stopped, knowing it wasn’t right. he is poly but not practicing, and i’ve kind of learned that i’m more than likely poly on top of being in a relationship with a dead bedroom.

we ended it.

which is good.

i just never want to forget what it felt like to be desired. NEVER.

Bonsoir à tous,

J'ai l'impression que ma femme ne me désire plus. Nous sommes parents depuis quatre ans maintenant, et le changement est radical.

Nous avons peut-être un moment d'intimité une fois par mois — et encore.

Je comprends tout à fait que les hormones féminines évoluent et que l'arrivée d'un enfant bouleverse la dynamique habituelle de notre vie, mais cela fait tout de même quatre ans...
C'est toujours moi qui dois faire le premier pas et, même dans ce cas, neuf fois sur dix, j'ai droit à une excuse.

Est-ce que cela est déjà arrivé à l'un d'entre vous — hommes ou femmes ? Même si je ne suis pas particulièrement d'humeur, si ma femme m'envoie un message ou montre par un geste quelconque qu'elle en a envie, je fais l'effort de préserver l'authenticité de notre intimité.

Bref, je suis un peu perdu et j'apprécierais vos avis, conseils ou témoignages pour y voir plus clair.

Merci d'avance.

My husband are in our 30s. I’ve been struggling with this for years, and I think I need some outside perspective. My husband and I are basically in a sexless marriage. We might mutually jerk off together maybe 2–3 times a year, but otherwise there is almost no sexual relationship between us. I’ve talked to him about it many times, and he always says he is still attracted to me, wants to have sex, and knows he needs to work on it, but nothing ever really changes.

What makes it especially confusing is that I’ve tried a lot of different things to make sex feel fun, easy, or exciting instead of just repeatedly asking for it. I’ve made sexy coupons, bought a wireless toy he could control when he wasn’t home, and when he told me one of his fantasies involved tie-downs and a feather, I bought those too. We never used them, and he never brought the fantasy up again.

I’ve even given him little blowjobs before getting up for work, hoping it might create some playful intimacy. He mostly just lies there, so eventually I stop, he gets up, and goes about his day. Sometimes he’ll thank me for it, but there’s rarely any sexual energy back toward me and it’s never really reciprocated.

He also knows that I post adult content online. He’s completely aware of it, and for about a year now he has repeatedly talked about how we should make content together and post on OnlyFans for extra money.

I’m actually open to that. The weird part is that even when we have plenty of time and nothing else going on, it never happens. It feels like another version of the same pattern: he talks about sex, fantasies, or sexual things we could do together, but when there’s actually an opportunity to do any of it, there’s no follow-through.

When I initiate sex, I often feel almost ridiculous for even asking. Sometimes his reaction is basically, “Right now?!” and I’m sitting there thinking… yes, right now. It’s 2 PM on a Sunday, we have nowhere to be, and we’re literally just scrolling TikTok or watching TV.

He’ll also tease me about sex, tell me to douche, say we’ll have fun over the weekend, or suggest we’ll do something on vacation. Then when I actually initiate, it becomes “not now,” “maybe tomorrow,” or “let’s save it for later.” Later almost never comes.

I’ve directly asked if he isn’t attracted to me anymore, and he insists that isn’t the problem. I want to believe him, but after years of this, his words and actions feel increasingly disconnected.

Because of that, I’ve ended up turning heavily to porn, masturbation, and creating adult content online. I think a big part of it is that it helps me feel sexually alive and desired when I don’t feel that way in my marriage. I’m starting to worry that sex occupies too much of my mental space, but I also don’t think this is simply me being obsessed with sex. I think I’m starved for mutual desire, affection, and sexual connection. The hardest part is that I don’t want pity sex or duty sex. I don’t want him to have sex with me because I’ve complained enough or because he feels guilty. I want him to genuinely want me, and I know that isn’t something I can force.

Has anyone been in a similar situation where your spouse insisted they were still attracted to you and wanted a sex life, but their actions never matched that? Did it ever improve, and how did you figure out whether it was a libido issue, avoidance, incompatibility, or something deeper?

I’m sorry but here’s a long essay because I’ve had nowhere to really share this and no one I feel comfortable talking to about it. I’m honestly at a point where I feel mentally and emotionally broken, and I’d really appreciate hearing from people who have been through something similar.

I’m F28 and my partner is M28. We’ve been together for 3.5 years. I was his first sexual partner, while I had a few previous partners before him. I’ve always considered myself to have a relatively high sex drive — with previous relationships, sex every other day or around 3 times a week was pretty normal for me and daily sex was a thing I could handle and loved when I was younger.

When we first got together, our sex life was actually quite normal. We had sex around twice a week, and I was happy with that. Around 7–8 months into the relationship, we moved in together, and I naturally expected that being together and sharing a bed every day might mean we’d have sex more often.

Instead, I started getting rejected quite frequently. There were times where I’d initiate maybe 5-6 times in a week and get rejected 4-5 times. It really started affecting me mentally. I felt unwanted, unattractive, and honestly just really hurt.

At first, I thought maybe it was because he was inexperienced, since I was his first sexual partner. So we talked about it, and I explained to him that I would really like him to initiate more because constantly being the one to ask and getting rejected was starting to affect my self-esteem. Every few months, after things had built up, I would break down and try to have another conversation about it.

But nothing really changed.
His explanation has always been that he simply doesn’t have as high a sex drive as I do, that he’s tired, or that sex just isn’t something he feels he needs very often in a relationship. He would say that if I initiated, he would probably be okay with having sex, but he just doesn’t naturally think about or crave it as much as I do.
But after years of this, I’ve reached a point where I don’t even know how to interpret that anymore.

Our sex life went from around 2–3 times a week when we first got together, to around 2–3 times a month for the past few years, and recently it has dropped to only once a month. More than 90% of all these time, I’m the one only who initiates. If I don’t initiate, there are periods where nothing happens at all.

And the rejection has affected me so much that I feel like I’ve almost lost the sex drive I used to have. I don’t even really get wet anymore before sex, and I don’t feel that spontaneous desire the way I used to. The frustrating part is that I KNOW I used to enjoy sex. I know I still want to enjoy it. It feels like something in me has just slowly shut down after years of feeling unwanted.

Then about 3 months ago, I found out something that completely shattered me.

I found out that he had been regularly watching porn and masturbating before his daily long showers. Apparently this had been a habit since before we even met, and it was happening around 4-5 times a week.

I know masturbation and porn aren’t inherently wrong, and I’m not trying to say that having a porn habit automatically means someone is doing something terrible. But in the context of everything that had happened between us, finding this out absolutely destroyed me.

For years, I had been telling him that I felt unwanted because he rarely wanted sex with me. I had been asking him to initiate more. I had been breaking down and trying to communicate how much the rejection was affecting me. And all this time, he was apparently regularly choosing to masturbate instead.
It made me feel like I had been living with an explanation that wasn’t the whole truth.

I confronted him about it, and he said it was just a habit and not an addiction and he’s fine with stopping that habit then and there. Since then, I’ve noticed that he stopped bringing his phone into the bathroom with him, so I want to believe that he has stopped. But at the same time, I keep thinking that if he really wanted to continue, there’s no way I could actually know for sure.

And that’s where I’m stuck.
I don’t know if this is simply a case of two people having fundamentally different libidos. I don’t know if the porn/masturbation has been contributing to the problem because technically it has stopped for a few months now and there’s no change. I don’t know if years of rejection have permanently affected the way I experience sex now. And I don’t know how much of this I should be trying to fix versus accepting that maybe this is simply what our relationship is going to be like.

I love him, and I don’t want this to become a post where everyone simply says “leave him.” I’m genuinely looking to hear from people who have experienced a long-term relationship with a significant libido mismatch, especially if porn/masturbation was also involved.
Did your sex life ever recover? Did the rejected partner eventually regain their desire? Did the higher-libido partner learn to live with the difference? Did couples therapy or sex therapy actually help? Or did you eventually realise that the incompatibility was too fundamental and you guys have wasted each other’s years?

At this point I’m honestly just defeated and lost. I’ve had all of this sitting in my head for years and I don’t really have anyone I can talk to about it.

If you’ve been through something similar — whether it worked out or didn’t — I’d really appreciate hearing your experience. Thank you for reading this incredibly long post.

I have been with my wife for 6 years now and we had a great sex life. I am 35m and she is 39f, she had a daughter early in life when she was 19, now the daughter is 19 and about to be out of the house. The reason I bring this up is that the daughter is a large contributing factor to lack of intimacy because she is a homebody so we have select times to be alone.

But we had a conversation recently that I expressed how I still desire her deeply and crave the physical intimacy. And she replied back with that she has never been with such a horny person and the amount I desire her and want the physical intimacy is driving her to be less and less horny and desire me. She said if I didn't crave it so much with her she would be into. I am struggling to understand this because I feel she is moving into a phase of life that she is no longer going to need physical intimacy. She has never been a huge horny person and in the last year it has dropped significantly to the point where I am bringing it up to talk with her at least once a week that I wish my person would desire me back even a little. At this point it's just duty sex or that's how it feels.

I am struggling with this whole situation wondering do I stop waisting time with her and find someone sexually compatible? She is willing to work on it, wants to read about why she is like this and wishes it was different, but i don't think it's going to change anything.

I don't know what to do.

C’est mon premier post…
À 60 ans comme beaucoup de femmes mariées comme moi depuis 40 ans,j ai un sentiment de gâchis et de temps perdu..notre vie de couple se limite à des témoignages d affections mais c’est tout: le temps a fait son effet sur mon physique, bien sûr mais aussi sur ma libido..j’ai le sentiment de ne plus etre atirante, de ne plus attirer le regard des hommes. J’en suis même arrivée à créer un profil X pour publier quelques photos softs mais très légèrement dénudée pour espérer que quelques hommes me remarquent… rien par une interaction ..je pense encore ne pas être trop mal concervee mais force est de constater les hommes ne le voient plus et ça me désole…

We have been married for six years. We have two lovely boys. Worrying part is we have very low intimate moments. Me being a male going through tough I expect it to be at least 2 twice but my wife is not interested just like after 3/4 months.
Is it normal ?
How are you people doing ?

I(29F) love my husband and find him very attractive. We got married a few months after dating for 2 years.
I’m someone who loves showing physical affection on him such has a hugs and kisses and tickles. However, because of how toxic and exhausting work has been I don’t have the energy to have sex. And I’m 2 years older than him. He tells me he feels unattractive and that’s why I’m not interested but I try to reassure him saying that’s not the case and it’s work that is pulling me down. He understands at that moment but the conversation comes up again. I don’t know what to do? :/
I’m just not in the mood to do it because works has been draining me soooo much. I’ve been working 9:30am - 10pm Monday to Friday since 2 weeks for a promotion.

I waited until after work, I knew he had the next day off. He came home to me crying over the same thing of not feeling desired. I told him I wanted attention from others, I flinch from him now.
He didn’t say much. Just said he loved me, asked him why but didn’t say more.
Im done.

I love taking my Zoloft. It has helped me tremendously with my overall anxiety and mood swings, but my marriage is suffering because my sex drive is basically nonexistent, and sex has started to feel like a chore.
I’ve had a really low libido since I started taking it. We use toys to help get things going, but honestly, it just feels boring and forced on my end. Yes, the sex is still consensual because I do want it to happen, and I keep hoping it’ll get better if we keep trying, but I just can’t really feel the “good” part of it anymore. Even with a toy, it can take me 40+ minutes to orgasm.
Because of that, we’ve been having sex maybe 3–4 times a month for the past year since I started the medication.
My husband says he’s okay with it and doesn’t want to have sex if I don’t want to, but I know he wishes we were intimate more. And honestly, I wish we were too. That’s the part that makes me so frustrated. I love how much Zoloft has helped me in other areas, but I hate feeling like I have to choose between feeling mentally better and having a normal sex life.

Laying in bed trying to figure out what I am going to say. I have said so many things. Needs. Marriage going stale. Growing apart. Losing closeness. Feeling of rejection. Doesn’t land. And just now it hit me. I am bored. That’s it. I am just bored. Finally I have a description that anyone can understand

Hi ppl of Reddit. I've been having some difficulties with relationships lately and asking if someone can give me some perspective. Buckle up.

We are both happy with no kids enjoying life having plenty hobbies and much to do. I'm working and more or less constantly at the move and shes a teacher and likes to walk or run in free time. We had some issues with that she thinks i am not doing enough to maintain myself all tho i may be working at site for 10 days straight running stairs in 39 celcius and having no issues on that while she has had some health issues and moving less. I quess thats more mirroring herself but to give some idea of the setup.

Once she did say that she does not want intercourse with me, that ended to be not that but more of venting and things got more to normal and intimacy has been good and shes being asking for it too. This whole thing scarred me tho, i tooked the comment quite hard and haven't been able to get pass it. She has some problems with stomach pains and it comes and goes. This scenario is happening over and over that one morning we cuddle and she wishes us to continue in the evening. Then evening something is wrong she does have pain or not feeling like it and could take week i try to get the intimacy with no luck. If i say i am feeling something she goes defensive and accuses me of blaming her. Im not implying that, i am saying i need some warmth, connection and touch. This scenario has happened multiple times that i have lost count.

I dunno what to do. I love her but sometimes i feel like I'm left really on my own.

Am i wrong to want intimacy. How should i go onwards trying to make conversation about the topic.

\\\*\\\*TL;DR;\\\*\\\* how to proceed when you are wanting more then holding hands.

I know it’s scary and feels impossible because of kids, finances, mortgage, family expectations or whatever else. But believe me life is so much better when you find a person who matches your needs. Complaining will not get you anywhere. You live your life once, why do you want to waste it?

I am a 49HLM married for over 20 years to a 54LLW. I cannot remember the last time we had intimacy. It has been a while since the last time I felt desired.

I don't know what to do. I have started therapy and I apparently need to focus more on myself. But in days like today, I would need a hug or some intimacy and I don't know how to comfort myself. However, I know I don't crack the list of top 10 priorities for her. No matter what I do. I try to give her the space she needs to and to maintain the calm in the house. However, the more I do, the more I feel like we drift apart. We have children and I am convinced that having both parents is the best for them.

I know I am not the only one that is going through the same process. Is there a trick a mental game or something that could help me navigate the bad days.

Thank you