When I confront my wife about our sex life my intent is to make her aware that I am unhappy so that we can work together to find a solution. My logic is that if she loved me, and she knew that I was unhappy, then she would make changes in order to try and make me happy. However, according to the book, this logic is flawed for the following reasons. A woman’s sexual desire for a man is largely dependant on how connected she feels to him. If she feels that there is a strong connection then it will increase her desire to have sex with him. If she feels that the connection is weak then it will decrease her desire to have sex with him.

In the beginning of a realtionship things are different because the two people are infatuated with each other and their brains are releasing chemicals that override some of their natural defence mechanisms that might otherwise prevent a relationship from forming. In a sense it causes you to have a rosey view of the other person and feel a strong connection, even if its not really there yet. This makes females more sexually attracted to men that they are infatuated with and therefore more likely to want sex with a man early in a romance (or want to have sex with atrractive celebrities etc).

Of course, infatuation always wears off eventually, and after that a couple needs to work to keep the connection strong. Having kids can often cause strain on the connection between a husband and wife (as can many other things). Here is where the problem comes in for us new dads. If we try to pressure our wives into having sex with us by confronting them or otherwise showing that we are unhappy, then our wives will feel that the security of the marriage (and therefore of the family) is threatened and their sense of connection with us will be reduced. The more you fight about sex (or anything else) the weaker the connection becomes. Even if your wife gives into the demands and starts having sex again, she is doing so out of fear of losing her husband and in the background she still feels that the connection is weak and therefore does not actually want to have sex with you.

It is easy to understand why this is the case. The biological purpose of sex is to reproduce. Reproduction requires much more investment for the female (carrying, delivering and nursing the baby) and thus females will not want to go through this process with a man that they feel is not strongly connected for fear that he will abandon them later.

So to get to the point guys, if you want to persue a better sex life you can’t do it by directly confronting your wife or trying to guilt her into it. Doing so will just weaken her sense of connection with you and push you further from the goal. You have to go about it indirectly by doing things that strengthen her sense of connection with you. You have to do things that make her feel safe and secure in the relationship. If you want to know more about it, read the book.

As a side note for moms, the book also has advice for women about how to increase their sense of connection with their husbands. Men are very sensitive to shame. This is why they get very defensive when they are criticised and why they get upset when their attempts at initiating sex are repeatedly refused. Anything that causes a man to feel like he is not being an adequate husband, lover, provider or whatever will cause him to feel shame and his natural way to deal with shame will be to either attack or flee from whatever is causing the shame. This is why some dads withdraw emotionally from their wives after kids are born or suddenly become argumentative when they never were before. If you want to prevent that from happening then sometimes you have to make an effort to boost your husband’s ego and make him feel that he is still important to you … like having sex with him.

Its a very good book. I reccomend it to anyone that is having relationship issues of any kind (even if they are not kid related). It has a lot of good info on why couples fight and why the fighting rarely accomplishes anything.

I feel your pain. I am also in a relationship where I initiate 99% percent of all intimacy in our relationship. However, I am past the point of being upset about it now. Over time I have come to understand that my wife really and truly is exhausted all the time. We have two small kids who are very intelligent, and also very active. My wife is a stay at home mom and she is completely wiped by the end of a typical working day. Weekends are not much better because thats when we tend to do most of our errands (shopping etc) and socializing. So, point #1 is that life with small kids is exhausting.

Point #2 is that you can’t overcome that kind of fatigue with small periods of respite. By Friday evening my wife is typically so tired that she passes out shortly after the kids are in bed. Even if I let her sleep in Saturday morning she will still be stiff, sore and tired when she wakes up. I have come to understand that she needs the weekends to recover from the week of being a stay at home mom the same way that people who do physical labor need the weekend to recover. So I have also come to accept that even if I let her sleep in and do all the chores and make supper and put the kids to bed, this may do nothing to increase my chances of getting sex. If I was expecting sex as my reward and it didn’t happen, then thats too bad. She is not obligated to reward me for doing nice things for her.

Point #3 is that the situation described above is a phase of life that will evntually pass. This fall Kid #1 will start school. Hopefully Kid #2 will still be taking naps so that my wife can look forward to having some respite every day for at least 2 hours. Over time both kids will become less and less demanding and then my wife will start having some energy left over to get our love life back on track.

I suppose that I could guilt my wife into jump starting our sex life earlier, but I have chossen to not do that. That would just add to her woes and not really do anything to eliviate mine. Will it really make me happy to have sex with my wife if I know she is only doing it for my sake? Instead I have decided to accept that my wife is as much a victim in this scenario as I am. She dosen’t want to be exhausted, and she dosen’t want me to be unhappy, but the exhaustion is a fact and I have to live with the related fact that we will not have a real sex life until the small kids phase is over.

In the meantime, I have also accepted that the little things that she does do, like spontateous hugs and kisses or surprising me with my favourite meal, are as much an expression of love as sex is. Its like the lyrics in that Bachman Turner Over Drive song …

Any loving is good loving. So I’ll take what I can get.

By the way, I recognize that you are not currently getting the spontaneous hugs. That was something that I had to get going again in our relationship. Early in the small kids phase we argued about sex a lot and the unintended effect of this was my wife started to shy away from any form of affection that I might misinterpret as an invitation for sex. I started giving her spontaneous hugs and kisses without trying to persue things any further and eventually she stopped fretting about what my intentions were and started being affectionate as well. I had to rebuild the trust.

Advice needed though:

My wife and I are in our 30s and have three kids – ages 5, 3, and 1. We both work flexible schedules and share the responsibility of taking care of the kids (no daycare). We’ve been married for 7 years now, and had been dating four years before then. The frequency of our sexual intimacy has been an issue on and off for most of this time. We eventually went to counseling, whereupon our communication improved dramatically and thus our sex life. However, eventually, it waned again…. then more counseling…. then a bit of an improvement…. then waned again.

I realize that we both work, have three young kids, and live in a society where gender roles are being redefined in many areas. However, I am absolutely tired of being the initiator 99% of the time. I feel as if the ball is entirely in her court, and she gets to call all the shots. In short, she is in total control of our sex life. Furthermore, she rarely will stop moving long enough to actually look me in the eye, or give me a meaningful hug or kiss. She is “too busy”. I do chores, take care of sick children, let her sleep in most mornings, I cook all of the meals…. and feel like a tool – an blunt object that is to be used to get a job done with little regard for basic maintenance let alone nurturing. I don’t know what to do, but I feel horribly trapped, unloved, and neglected.

Help.

you and ma wife behave the same….. even i am also finding the solution to overcome of the situation…. is there any body who tell us about the same… my wife never wants to do love making.

In the early days of our marriage my wife and I fell into certain routines that we would go through when having sex. For instance, it was very easy for me to get her warmed up for sex because her nipples were very sensitive. I could almost give her an orgasm just by playing with her nipples.

After breast feeding kid #1 for 10 months her nipples became much less sensitive. I can remember one embrassing episode where after 15 minutes of me trying everything I could think of to excite her nipples she finally said “look, this isn’t going anywhere. You need to do something else.” It was a very awkward moment and definitely killed my sex drive for the day.

The only advice I can give on this subject is to be patient and communicate with your wife. If the old tricks don’t work anymore than you need to be creative and learn new ways to do foreplay. Think of it like cooking. Learning to cook new dishes is not easy. I usually get them wrong the first time. Sometimes I decide that a particular dish wasan’t as good as I thought it would be and never make it again. However, sometimes I stumble onto something really good that becomes a regular part of our meal rotation.

1) You may be just exhausted. Having a baby in the house can wear everybody down, not just mom. In our house I am the lighter sleeper so if one of the kids is up in the night 70% of the time it is me who gets up. Some weeks I feel like a zombie at work and I definitely have no desire for noctural activities on those weeks.

2) You may be depressed. Post-partum depression is common for moms, but dads can get it to. Sometimes it is related to lack of sleep. Sometimes its caused by the sudden changes in your life (especially for first time parents). Depression usually effects all aspects of your life. If you are finding that you have also lost the desire to persure other things that you used to enjoy (hobbies etc) then maybe you should talk to your doctor about depression.

3) Sometimes dads have trouble dealing with the physical changes that their wife has gone through. After birth many moms have to really fight to get the baby weight back off. If you are finding your wife less physically attractive than she used to be then you have to be patient (the weight will come off) and also come to grips with the fact that some changes may be permanent. My wife’s breasts are considerably smaller and droopier than they were before kids. It bothered me at first, but I got over it. I don’t look as good as I did 5 years ago either.

4) You may also find that your wife is generally less affectionate and less concerned with your emotional needs than she used to be. This can cause new dads to feel like they have been shoved aside and they get resentful. Honestly, if this is the case then you just need to suck it up and wait it out. Babies need a lot of love and attention through their first 2-3 years. Eventually your wife will have time for you. You can help by off loading some of her baby duties. Personally, I was jealous of our first child during the breast feeding months. I know it was petty and childish, but I felt like my wife’s breasts were like a favourite toy that had been taken away.

5) You may also be secretly afraid of getting your wife pregnant again. This is a common reason for new moms to avoid sex, but it can happen to dads too. If you are finding that being a dad is stressful then it would not be surprising for you to subconciosuly be avoiding the possibility of going through it again.

Maybe none of these things describe your situation. You may need to talk to your doctor. Men are notorious for not wanting to talk about stuff like this. If it is affecting your happiness then you should face it down.