Then, to my horrified surprise, my libido suddenly sprang from nowhere three years later. What a cruel twist! Now that I was deprived of a sexual partner, it was blatantly obvious that I wasn’t frigid after all! What a shock, after all those married years of supposing my libido dead to discover it most certainly wasn’t! My sexual yearnings had simply lapsed into a long coma because my husband, despite having all the physical attributes, never discovered how to be a lover. Now, when I least needed it, my libido was wide-awake. Like a bear emerging from winter hibernation, it was ravenous. And it wanted feeding NOW! Yet I knew from bitter experience that no matter how insatiable my craving, my sexual desires would vanish again if I had a partner making the same tragic mistake as my husband.

In the hope that I spare you a similar tragedy, I share my story.

From Passionate Bride to Frigid Wife

I was twenty-one and engaged to be married. My husband-to-be was “tall, dark and handsome” and there was a very strong physical attraction between us. He could barely wait for our wedding night, and I wanted him as much as he wanted me.

I thought I was well prepared for marriage. I knew the facts of life. My main preparation for marriage, however, had come from reading romantic novels and watching the great lovers on the silver screen. This, compounded by having had neither father nor brother to relate to, led me to expect that all decent men are articulate, kind, gentle, loving, considerate and romantic. I was in for a rude shock.

I seemed to be marrying the ideal husband. He didn’t drink, smoke or gamble. He was very strong on family loyalty. He was a good provider, and a conscientious employee. He was well thought of in the community; known to be a placid and easygoing. And he was a virgin – I was his first girlfriend. How lucky I was!

But in one assumption, I was tragically mistaken.

I had thought that when relating sexually with me he would express love by:

* Hugging me

* Caressing me

* Passionately kissing me

* Using affectionate terms

* Telling me how much I meant to him

* Making me feel loved, wanted, cherished and special.

He had no such intention. He made it clear that since I was his wife, I wasn’t going to say, “No,” so why waste time on preliminaries? He seemed interested in just one thing: relieving himself sexually. It took next to nothing to sexually arouse him, and once he was aroused, he wanted only to climax and go to sleep. Occasionally, if I begged hard enough, I could hope for a few seconds of manual stimulation to bring me to orgasm. If it took me longer than 30 seconds, his rubbing would be accompanied by heavy sighs of exasperation. His harsh, hurried rubbing hurt me so much that it wasn’t worth begging for. So I gave up asking.

Adding to my distress was my acute embarrassment at the thought that his mother might hear us. We lived in a two-bedroom home and his mother had the other bedroom.

My dreams of episodes of romantic lovemaking soon went down the gurgler. My anticipation that making love would bond us as close emotionally as it did physically, never transpired. Instead of making love, he merely had sex. Taking love out of the act was like taking the heat out of a cup of coffee. Without that key ingredient, what should have been delicious turned my stomach.

If locked within him was genuine love for me, it was tragically wasted because he failed to communicate it in a way that touched my heart. Because he never expressed love in ways that were meaningful to me, any love he had was as useless as inaccessible food to someone dying of starvation.

In bed he acted like a man gulping down water. As a thirsty man focuses only on having his need met and thinks little about the water container, so I began to feel little better than a plastic container. My estimation of how valued I was in his eyes kept lowering, and as it did, so did my desire for sex. I had entered marriage imagining he valued me as a person, and with me craving sex with him. As I began to conclude he saw me as just an object to be used, my longing for sex turned to dread. My sex drive mirrored exactly how valued as a person I thought I was in his eyes. As a balloon cannot lose air without also losing size, so he could not shrink my self-esteem, without shrinking my sexual desires.

He said I was frigid. I could never get him to understand that what would have warmed me up and turned me into the passionate partner he wanted was simply him:

* Speaking kindly to me

* Treating me with respect – especially in front of our children

* Giving me an occasional hug – without any strings attached

* Making allowances when I was tired

* Taking an interest in me as a person

* Valuing my opinions

I couldn’t get through to him just how critical these things were to arousing a woman’s sexual feelings and to our entire relationship. Rather than feel loved, wanted or cherished, I only felt preyed upon. His behavior convinced me that he didn’t want “me,” he only wanted certain parts of my body. I never felt I was a person to him; only a possession.

He usually just called me “Mom”. He only used my first name when speaking to others about me, and this was usually to belittle me, which he thought displayed his good sense of humor.

If in my misery I started crying, his inevitable response was, “What the @#&$% are you crying about now!”

The great tragedy is that by treating me differently he could have made me the great sexual partner he only dreamed about. I would have gone out of my way to please him sexually if he convinced me that I mattered to him, I was special to him - that he valued me outside of the bedroom. We both missed out badly because of what I perceived as his coldness towards me.

Outwardly our marriage seemed ideal. We went everywhere together. We did everything together. He had good qualities. He was faithful. He was a good provider. He understood the mechanics of sex. But he didn’t have a clue about lovemaking. He had grown up on a farm and only understood sex as a biological need, and as the means of reproduction.

He wasn’t nasty. He was just inadequate at expressing his feelings, having been brought up to think that proper men don’t express feelings. And so my expectations of him were unreal. But I had no way of knowing that. It was a Mexican stand-off!

He was happy for me to go to a counselor. In his eyes I obviously needed help to get over my poor attitude to sex. Of course, he wouldn’t need to come. He knew all there was to know about sex.

And if he refused to seek help, neither did I have anyone to help me understand my husband better. Back then, there was no Internet. There was no Grantley Morris with his God-given wisdom. And so our marriage limped on.

He decided to make a project of getting me interested in sex.

He took me to erotic floor shows, but couldn’t understand why they didn’t arouse me. He seemed unable to grasp that what made me sexually inhibited was simply his inability to make me feel valued as a person.

He bought me the The Joy of Sex, making it clear that he didn’t need to read it. He knew how to have sex. I was the one with the problem. For me, the title was meaningless. The way I was treated made “joy” and “sex” incompatible terms. The book might as well have been called The Joy of Being Made to Feel Like Trash.

I know from conversations with other women that I was not alone in my misery. I have shared the sad story of my marriage in the hope that men will be encouraged to listen to their own wives (and not such sources as their male friends, or men’s magazines or previous partners), to find out what will make them happy, contented and thus eager to make love.

The time invested in getting to know one’s wife outside the bedroom, convincing her that she is loved, wanted and valued as a person, will pay enormous dividends in the bedroom!

Who would be so stupid as to repeatedly hurt his own body? Anyone so stupid as to think he could hurt the person he is one flesh with, without hurting himself. The man who doesn't make it his goal to please his wife the way she wants is brother to the man who chops off a little more of his arm each day and then complains about the pain.

You have just read the experience of a highly exceptional woman in that despite the treatment she received, she gave this man sex on demand. Most men like him end up divorced and can’t figure out why. Yet despite all the sex he got, this poor man went to his grave with no conception of the sexual delights he had missed out on simply because he was too thick to learn how to love his wife.

You cannot rob your wife without robbing yourself.

Related Pages

How to Bring a Woman to Orgasm or Increase Her Desire For More Sex

How to Boost Your Wife’s Libido

How to Increase Your Wife’s Sexual Responsiveness

A Second Look at Conjugal Rights

When a Wife Doesn’t Want Sex

The Husband as Head of His Wife

You Can Find Love Receiving Divine Power to be a Lover

Love Sex God Orgasm: Christian Sex Secrets

When One Partner Wants What the Other Fears is Perverted

How Harmless is Porn?