If Kissing Is An Implicit Sexual Contract, This Is Why Your Wife Doesn’t Touch You

The majority of men who read my stuff err on the side of being too passive and scared of what their wives think. However, there are many other men that can be aggressive and unempathic. A lot of my work focuses on helping women understand that men consider sex a need and is their way to show love. However, if you have been aggressive in bed or if you push your wife to continue physical contact that she doesn’t want, you are moving yourself into the small category of “men whose wives I recommend not to touch them.” What does this look like?

• If your wife has ever tried to stop a sexual encounter and you guilt trip her into continuing
• If there is some idea that if your wife makes you hard, she “has to finish the job”
• If your wife would not bet a million dollars that you would stop sex if she said stop (or used a safe word)
• If you think that a mid-encounter “no” is a negotiation starting place

In any of these cases, your wife is advised NOT TO EVER TOUCH YOU. You are not the intended audience of my posts, because you do not have any empathy for your wife and you are forcing her into sex against her will.

The reason that some women do not ever touch their husbands is because of these guys, who are ruining it for the rest of guys. Here are things people are allowed to do:

• Choose whether they have sex
• Choose at any time during an encounter
• Decide whether foreplay is just not working and they are feeling too sick/tired/upset to have sex after all
• Choose not to do it even if you think that’s some unfair bullshit

If you are a woman who sadly has only been with guys that think “if you start you need to finish,” let me be very clear that this is not the majority of men and you have likely been drawn to selfish and unempathic men because you were treated poorly as a kid or saw a parent treated poorly. The large majority of men will sulk if you stop sex, let’s say, a minute before they are going to climax, but they do not think of it as a possibility to force you to continue. It is like how you are upset about your child misbehaving but you don’t think of it as a possibility to punch them in the face. It is not within your range of possible responses no matter how frustrated you are.

Men who will force their wives to continue having sex certainly need a wakeup call from a couples therapist that this behavior is not okay or normal. I deeply believe that there is a sexual contract of marriage, on a macro level, and that sex should be a part of marriage for those who want it. However, in ANY MOMENT, a woman can say no to sex, and if this is not a possibility, then she should stop all touch so that she is not ever forced into sex.

Teenage boys who start out this way and were never stopped by girlfriends get a very warped view of the world. They are grown, smart men who say things like, “Nobody just kisses [meaning open mouth kissing] and stops” or “I should be able to wake her for sex at any time” or “If she wears something like that then she knows it turns me on so then we’re going to do it” or “That bitch was asking for it.” They won’t say the last one to a couples therapist but all of those statements really mean the last one.

Again, the majority of men that I speak to who are sexually dissatisfied err on the side of never initiating. However, my time on TikTok and some of the extreme comments I get on content around sex in relationships has reminded me that there are many younger men out there that have no idea what it means to be ethical in bed. Here are your options if your wife makes out with you, you initiate sex, she says “I’m sorry, I’m too tired” and goes to sleep:

• Be happy that she is into you and go to sleep eventually because you’re a grown man who can wait
• Initiate sex in the morning or the next day
• Masturbate that night if you really want to
• If this happens multiple times a week start a conversation about it asking if you’re doing something wrong or how she thinks about sex/frequency/foreplay
• Go to couples counseling if this is some big constant issue
• Leave the relationship

Note how your options don’t include continuing to rub your erection against her and saying, “It will only take a minute, you can’t kiss me and not follow through.”

Also: never wake your wife for sex unless she is in the 10% of women who find this sexy and has told you that. It is extremely mean to take sleep away from someone who is tired and has kids/job/you to deal with. Never do this again, it is a boundary violation.

I had a funny exchange with a guy who explained to me why guys can’t do one option I recommended to help their wives orgasm, which is to switch up the order of operations so that the man comes first. He explained that men have no desire after they orgasm so it feels mechanical! He was not joking. He didn’t realize that I’m trying to address the issue where women feel this way in every encounter! If you are a man who cannot understand what it would feel like to be pushed into sex you don’t want, because you love sex, here are helpful analogies, which include the one helpfully given to me:

• Being force fed another meal after Thanksgiving
• Being forced to run 5 miles when you have the flu
• And now, apparently: being forced to go down on your wife for 20 minutes after you orgasm

I think some of these men who “can’t” give their wives an orgasm after they come are the ones who “can’t” wake up with the baby overnight because they “don’t hear the monitor” (until they are divorced and then they get up with the kids).

Now, are women fully blameless in this dynamic? Certainly not. The woman has stayed with this selfish guy and enabled him to act his worst without asserting herself. She was likely treated pretty poorly as a kid and trained that her worth is being agreeable and never making a problem. The only way she knows to fight back is by going limp, like Gandhi.

The guys that push women into “finishing what they start” are ironically the ones who don’t “finish what THEY start” with their own wife’s orgasm. You guys always love my personal experiences so here’s an anecdote. In college I encountered a couple of guys that “didn’t go down on women.” This was insane to me and I didn’t even really believe them, because I had a lot of positive experiences prior with boyfriends where this was considered a wonderful thing they loved to do. I stated that this was the only way I got off which it was at that point of my life and guess what, they learned how. I now realize with the benefit of hindsight that there are many women who would have just taken them at their word and gone on to even marry them!

I tell you this to say to women: if you are with a selfish guy long term without setting boundaries, you have definitionally enabled his worst self. Moving forward, you owe it to yourself to set firm boundaries and say: “Your orgasm is not the goal of my life, I frequently do not touch you because you use it to force me into sex, I don’t feel that I can get out of any encounter even when it hurts or I’m really physically not in the mood after starting, and this stops today. Also, you do not focus much on me, our encounters make me feel disconnected and lonely, and I think I have let all this happen because I’ve been too weak to stop you.” If you are married with kids, say this, and then start working on your self-esteem and people pleasing with a therapist. If you are just dating, I would recommend getting out of the relationship entirely and going to therapy.

The way a woman can feel warm and close and like her most open, vulnerable sexual self is if she has agency and control of her own body. You would stop liking food if it were forced down your throat with a tube and if this is how a woman feels about sex, she will shut down entirely. Even the highest libido woman will shut down if she is guilt tripped or pushed into sex after saying no.

Now of course, this doesn’t mean you should stay in a sexless marriage, but just that your options don’t include guilt trips or forcing or cajoling or waking or anything else. If you cannot get to a place where you would be okay with your wife making out with you then falling asleep, this means you are probably not mature enough for a sexual relationship. The same wife who makes out with you then falls asleep out of exhaustion is about a million times likelier to want sex the next day as a woman who has stopped ever making out with you because it always “has to” lead to sex, or else she gets punished with whining or sulking.

Either you get a wife who wants to make out or one who doesn’t, and the literal only way to get the former is to accept that there will be sometimes that she doesn’t want sex afterwards. It’s like if every time you got her flowers she looked for the jewelry box also and cried when she didn’t get one. You would be done buying flowers pretty quickly. I hope this post cleared up some misconceptions and helped some men to see the error of their ways. If there’s a behavior that can make even Dr. Psych Mom tell women not to have sex, then you certainly don’t want to be doing it! And till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Better Bet The Guys Who “Didn’t Go Down On Women” Still Expected Women Who Went Down On Men!

For therapy, go here for Dr. Whiten and go here for other clinicians in her group practice Best Life Behavioral Health. For coaching with Dr. Whiten, go here. Order Dr. Whiten’s books, 52 Emails to Transform Your Marriage and How to Talk to Your Kids about Your Divorce: Healthy, Effective Communication Techniques for Your Changing Family, and listen to The Dr. Psych Mom Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Join The Dr. Psych Mom secret Facebook group for more discussion about these kinds of issues!