The Sexual Dilemma for Men Who Respect Women
When desires conflict with ethical views of marriage and long-term partnership
When I started dating my now-husband at age 23, our sex life was more babbling brook than raging rapids.
Like most couples in their early days, we had sex regularly at first. He knew how to pleasure me, and I was comfortable and satisfied in bed. Our sex life was egalitarian.
Even during those early days, I can’t remember a moment where he surprised me with a naughty touch or grab, or whispered in my ear what he was going to do to me later.
Though we didn’t share many outward signs of desire, we felt so compatible and ready to take on the world together.
He was the most intelligent person I had ever met. We each spoke multiple languages and had endless travel stories to recount to one another. And we were both on our way to prestigious graduate schools, where we would spend the next few years surrounded by witty, engaging friends.
For over a decade, we let all the deeply satisfying aspects of our partnership overshadow our lukewarm sex life. Slowly, we stopped having sex altogether. And we rarely talked about it.
It’s been 17 years since those early days together. My husband is sitting uncomfortably next to me as we meet with our marriage therapist through a laptop screen. We started therapy during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She knows so many intimate details of our lives and we have yet to meet in person.
In our session, I share that I have never really felt desired by my husband. I share how I felt revived by the sex I had during my open marriage.
Our therapist urges my husband to explore what influenced his early relationship with sex. Why didn’t he ever tell me I was hot, or grab my ass in line at Chipotle?
Finally, my husband says,
“I never said or did those things to you because I thought they were disrespectful.”
He has always seen me as his equal. In his mind, that doesn’t compute with whispering in my ear during sex that I’m his slut.
Don’t get me wrong — I would gladly take him over a man with the opposite view of women. But as I’ve grown and experimented with an open marriage, I’ve tapped into sexual desires that I was perhaps too timid to admit to when I was 23.
At 39, I want to be honored as an equal but also pinned down by my lover. I want dirty things whispered in my ear from time to time.
And though he’s still not comfortable sharing them with me outright, I’m sure my husband also has version of these desires too. Desires that seem to conflict with the way he moves through the world.
Our therapist gives us homework. My husband needs to write me an erotic story or letter. The next day, I receive an email from my husband:
Subject: NSFW
In a few paragraphs, my husband has laid out a fantasy that is pure vulnerability. And it makes me cringe.
It’s an unoriginal tale of me as a submissive wife who gives him head.
I’m dressed up in high heels and a short pleated skirt, red pouty lips. I squat down in my short skirt and seduce him with oral sex on the stairs, looking into his eyes as I take him in my mouth.
There’s a little bit more, but I’ll spare you.
I wish I could say this letter turns our sex life around.
Unfortunately, I learned something pretty clear from this experiment. My husband has spent most of our relationship convinced his own desires were at odds with how a man should treat a woman. And we have spent nearly two decades without sexual playfulness, flirtation, or lust.
Because we never nurtured this side of our relationship, I no longer see him as a man I want to whisper dirty words to me. An erotic story from him just feels silly.
I don’t know if we will find a way to breathe new life into our marriage or if I will one day share my fantasies with a new partner.
But I hope I can find myself in a partnership that reserves space for the sexual desires that make us the complicated people that we are.
