"My wife recently admitted that she has lost interest in having sex be a part of her life (not just our marriage) ... [B]y staying married to me in this arrangement she doesn’t have to have sex with anyone. Presumably if we divorced and she wanted to be partnered she’d have to confront the issue of possibly having sex with someone else. For me, I’d prefer to have a sex life with my wife. I hate that if my secret life is ever discovered I look like the one betraying my wife."
My wife of almost 40 years stopped having sex with me over 20 years ago. She had left her career to be the primary caretaker of our three daughters, while also taking on significant volunteer work. At the time I was traveling the globe relentlessly for work.
We went to marital therapy. I wanted to stay married and keep our family together, and at the same time, I needed what I’ll refer to as a fully intimate, loving relationship. In other words, sex. With her. Preferably with her. That’s what I wanted. She wanted to stay married and keep our family together, and did not need, affirmatively did not want, sex to be part of it. She said we had “lost each other” in some irreconcilable way that was integral to her wanting sex with me. That wouldn’t change even if I made changes to be a better husband to her, she said. She wanted to stay married to me, just without the sex.
I asked, but never got a response to, the question of whether, in her conception of our marriage, she thought I should just be okay with an entirely sexless life (as it relates to other human beings). I am using sex as a shorthand for intimacy here, but I think we can all acknowledge at this point that sex is the one critical thing that many men need to feel loved. Like if you talk about the “five love languages,” sex is a man’s number one love language. Or at least me and every man I personally know. But sure, I don’t know every man alive.
My wife and I never reached an agreement on the key irreconcilable point. Sex. But having hit a mutually acknowledged wall, if not an understanding on how to scale it, we stopped therapy. I’m Italian and she is Jewish and our nuclear family has always been highly intertwined with our respective families of origin, not to mention with the families of our kids’ friends. So the marriage continued. I felt unloved, ignored, rejected, displaced, ugly, unhappy. Deflated. Eventually I had an affair, fell in love and left my wife. She was furious. And shocked, no less.
The separation was brutal for me. My daughters, teens at the time, aligned with my wife and would not speak to me. Refused any contact. Talk about shock. I did not see that coming - losing my daughters. I believed I had close direct one-on-one relationships with each of them. I went to nearly every game, performance and parent-teacher conference — I arranged travel around that. We hosted them and their friends overnight at our weekend place; I played games with them, was the primary chef, drove them anywhere and everywhere. But then again, of course they didn’t (still don’t) have the full picture, and just wanted their family to stay together. On top of that, their mother was upset and she was their primary caretaker so I suppose I was a fool to be so surprised.
To be clear, it wasn’t just my immediate family that I lost. All the families that we are friends with, my kids’ friends and their parents. My wife’s extended family. Last Thanksgiving we hosted 27 people who were family and friends. I lost those types of experiences as well.
At any rate, I grew up in a tight-knit devoted family. The experience of being estranged from daughters though was brutal for me. I went over to my parents house one night for dinner and crashed there. I didn’t get out of bed for a week. For months I went between bursts of getting the bare minimum done at work, and days in bed.
After eight months I went back to my wife. My girlfriend was long gone at that point. My wife and I did not have any real conversation beyond her asking me if I was just showing up to get something from the closet or had decided to come back. I responded by going to my study, shutting the door, logging into my computer, working and then sleeping on the couch. My girls were thrilled that I was back and our life as a family resumed.
That pattern — of me working and then falling asleep alone on the couch — has continued ever since. But we also fell into a comfortable, calm and effective, if not loving, everyday partnership. We don’t fight, we just get on. After I went back, because I was cast as the villain, I have bent over backwards to get along.
About a decade into that, which is about a decade ago, I began to enter into what became a series of exclusive caring, sexual relationships. Exclusive in the sense that I was involved with one woman at a time, with whom I was from the outset entirely transparent about my marital situation. I was going to remain married to my wife and my availability, as well as the scope of our activities together, would be restricted by that, I always explained. The women have been, for various reasons, at stages of their lives where they were okay with that. One was separated but not divorced and eager to keep things discreet. Another was planning to move across the country once her son graduated high school and didn’t want somebody who might mess that up. Another was not wired for commitment. All of them believed that some real intimacy in the context of an ongoing, caring (if not long-term) relationship was better than their other options, like completely going without. In each case, given the limitations, emotions were kept in check. Goodbyes were warm and not without sadness, but also not conflict-filled or dramatic.
My wife caught on but admitted she preferred this arrangement to divorce (or, I should reiterate, physical intimacy at this stage in her life) as long as I am discreet and my relationships are contained. As in, they don’t interfere with my family, which has a geographic and time component to it. I am rarely not around my family. Under my arrangement(s), things get scheduled after/around my wife. She likes to travel with her girlfriends. If she schedules something, I will then schedule something. I’d say I’m seeing whoever I might be dating once a month for 2-3 days. Of course, I go long periods without a girlfriend. My family spends the whole summer together at our weekend house (my daughters have their friends out, there is plenty of room for everyone to work remotely) so I don’t see anyone I am dating over the summer, for instance.
It is not perfect for any of us. It might not look like it but it is much better for my wife than anyone else involved, either me or the few girlfriends I’ve had. My wife recently admitted that she has lost interest in having sex be a part of her life (not just our marriage, but with anyone). Now I realize that by staying married to me in this arrangement my wife doesn’t have to have sex with anyone. Presumably if we divorced and she wanted to be partnered she’d have to confront the issue of possibly having sex with someone else. For me, I’d prefer to have a sex life with my wife. I hate that if my secret life is ever discovered I look like the one betraying my wife. I don’t think that’s fair because it is a form of betrayal to give up on taking care of your partner’s most intimate needs. “To have and to hold,” is literally the promise. And as far as the women I’ve been involved with, it has worked for each of them for a while but they are clear that they are not my priority, my family is, and ultimately the relationships aren’t sturdy.
I am certainly not advocating this for anyone else. I am not even defending it. I am explaining how I get by. I understand this series to be a way to be honest about how we are actually dealing with the balance of responsibilities, needs and realities we have at this stage. This is how I’m dealing. For what it’s worth, I feel like I’m choosing love. My family’s love. Being in the fold of that loving structure, more precisely. It is like the “too-short a sheet” analogy Dish made in the Crush Letter 99. In life, you are given a sheet that’s too short. You have to choose what stays warm. My choice is to be wrapped in the blanket of warmth I get from the friends and family who are part of my family’s structure. But my arms are shivering without someone to hold. That’s life.
Stay tuned to this continuing series. Got a TOPIX? Write to me! Dish@PrimeCrush.com
The Crush Letter
The Crush Letter is a weekly newsletter from Dish Stanley curating articles & intelligence on everything love & connection - friendship, romance, self-love, sex. If you’d like to take a look at some of our best stories go to Read Us. Want the Dish?
