This story is an "as told to" and anonymous. The mom in this story is a mother of 3, in her mid-40s, living in the Southeast.
For the better part of a decade, I managed to convince myself I just married a man with a low sex drive. I think I even got to a place where I made peace with it. Like, if the only thing I have to b*tch about is that he’s not that sexual, I’m still pretty lucky. In every other way, he’s the kind of partner most people wish they had.
He constantly tells me I’m beautiful. He always wants to be touching me, whether it’s holding hands or just wrapping his arms around me wherever we are. He runs me a bath when I have a bad day, he brags about me to anyone who’ll listen, and he won’t let me lift a finger when he cooks dinner (every night!).
If you saw us together, you’d probably assume we can’t keep our hands off each other behind closed doors. But that wasn’t true… until recently.
Since I first met my husband, health issues caused me to steadily put on weight over the years. Our sex life seemed to dry up along the way, too, but I chalked it up mostly to me and my body image issues. If I ever did bring it up to him, he’d always say the same thing: I’m just not a very sexual guy.
I decided to drop it because, again, we have a great marriage. I rationalized my doubts away. I told myself I’d rather have a man who adores me with my clothes on than one who loves me with my clothes off but treats me like sh*t. I didn’t let myself believe I could have both. Plus, I believed my husband. Why wouldn’t I?
For almost a decade, I told myself this was all no big deal. Who cares if our sex life isn’t super steamy? Only, I did care.
And then one night, I accidentally walked in on him in our home office, headphones in, clearly watching porn and pleasuring himself. I just stood there thinking, Oh. Maybe the switch wasn’t broken; I just wasn’t the one who could flip it.
When he realized I had walked in, he was clearly embarrassed and tried to play the whole thing off. When I told him I didn’t understand how you could be “not a very sexual guy” but do that, he said it wasn’t the same. He said this was just stress relief; it had nothing to do with actual, real, meaningful desire. So, I went back to being the wife of a low-sex-drive husband.
Then I lost weight.
More than 100 pounds across two years. And now, my “low-sex-drive” husband suddenly seems to have rediscovered his libido. He initiates. A lot. The way he looks at me from across the room sometimes makes me blush. It’s really hot.
But it’s also not, because I don’t like what I come up with when I think about what inspired this sudden change in his sex drive. If it can come roaring back like this, maybe it was never about him; maybe it was about me. Maybe it wasn’t that he just didn’t want sex, but that he just didn’t want sex with the body I had then.
Now I’m scared. I’m scared of what that means. I’m scared of gaining the weight back and losing him again. And as a woman who has struggled with body image for a long time, I’m scared that thinking about all of this is really f*cking with my ability to love this new version of myself, because it’s healthy and strong and not because it somehow makes me more desirable. I’m scared that I’m pushing myself to maintain this size (or even lose more weight) to be wanted.
I obviously love my husband. He is still an incredible partner, and the sex is amazing. But there’s a weird kind of loneliness I feel now that I didn’t feel before. I guess in losing the weight, I gained a husband who genuinely can’t keep his hands off me. I just sometimes wonder what the real cost of that trade-off was.
source https://www.scarymommy.com/lifestyle/my-husband-never-wanted-sex-until-i-lost-weight
Comments
Post a Comment