Wives need two plans. Prevent husband losing interest in sex with her and recover if it happens anyway. We’ll cover both.
Prevention. Ben Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The series ‘Sexual Fulfillment for Husbands’ provides details that keep men interested in sex with one woman. Some series may be helpful, ‘Sex in Three Acts’ and others.
Women like to blame the male ego for masculine excesses, but they mostly get it wrong. What women usually call bursts of male ego are natural bursts of dominant and competitive energy.
A man’s ego is his view, aka self-image, of his sexual prowess. Challenges to his ability smack his ego disastrously if he believes the woman challenger. Or competitively if he doesn’t believe her. In the first case, he likely wants to altogether quit sex with her or he responds with “I’ll show her” either with her or someone else. In the second, because men refuse to compete with their women, he withdraws from her and looks for another venue with sexual release.
A man is hopelessly unpredictable when told, it’s implied, or he infers that he doesn’t measure up sexually. It also bombs his masculinity, subverts his sense of significance, and cripples his self-image. Attack his sexual ability and he more likely withdraws to compete elsewhere rather than fighting back with his wife. With his mind focused elsewhere, sexual interest in wife declines or disappears.
Recovery. What’s wife to do if and when husband’s disinterest appears? His ego has been damaged by wife’s intentional criticism or unintentional complaints about his sexual prowess. Pleas for empathy may buy his attention for a while, but it’s unlikely to be a permanent recovery. Guided by the bullets below, wives can figure out what will likely restore their relationships.
- If husband’s disinterest is his fault, wife has no interest in changing herself. If her fault, she’s energized to do something.
- She can’t change him, so she should work on herself and not on his faults. It begs the question, what about her faults? The best answer is this: Ignore them except for not recognizing sooner what was happening in her marriage. Consequently, she can look elsewhere for recovery when faults of both parties are presumed to be nonexistent in her mind, when guilt attaches to neither of them.
Here’s a shocker. Wife’s problem is not with husband’s disinterest in sex but with wife’s basic unhappiness with her marriage. I shall describe a simple plan for wives to change themselves and recover from most disappointments that haunt marriages.
- First, she seeks personal happiness. She doesn’t chase happiness per se but floods her heart with thoughts of how grateful she is for everything around her. For example, husband’s littering or snoring are reminders of how grateful she is to have him with her. Happiness finds her as she finds more and more ways to be grateful for the things and people in her life. Just when she thinks she’s happier, she pushes herself even harder to find more things and people traits and behaviors for which she is grateful. If her search never ends, happiness will follow her for life.
- Second, she finds numerous direct and indirect ways to express gratitude for who her husband is and what he does. She does it in ways that credit him for being a good-and-getting-better husband, mate, father, provider, protector, problem solver, …. Let’s call it husbandly fulfillment to parallel sexual fulfillment.
- Third, wife uses indirectness and plants seeds about her wishes for the future. For example, off-handedly on arising some workday for husband, she just throws out this comment, “Honey, I sure love the way you get me fully prepared for sex. It says so much about your virility. Know what I mean?” (Use virility because it’s meaningful to a man and not compassion, consideration, love, affection, or other term meaningful mostly to women.) Several times at work that day, he will ponder what he does and how to make it better. The self-fulfilling prophecy is always at work. In this case, the seeds are planted and he has time away from her to water the seeds and a night or two later she harvests a better crop.
- Fourth, she strives to fulfill her husband sexually. The three steps above will capture his attention sufficiently well to bring him back to the bedroom with interest in his heart. His interest should increase with her behavior so different from whatever it was before.
Husband’s disinterest in sex with wife comes not from his penetration and orgasm. It flows out of interactions that precede and follow intercourse and convince him either that he’s no good as lover or she’s not worth whatever hassle she represents in bed. Recovery comes from finding gratefulness for everything else in a marriage, planting seeds to credit his sexual prowess, and indirectly enabling him to rethink his disinterest.
No one says life is easy. However, a woman’s mission in life is living life to the best of her ability and one thing she never stops trying or doing: improving her man. Consequently, sexual disinterest is merely another challenge for wives dedicated to perpetuating their marriage.
