Dear Anna,
My wife and I are both professors and we have one baby. We’ve been married eight years. I love flirting more than actual sex. I love thinking about sex. I like to sext with my wife. Sometimes I ask her to be in another room to sext with me. One of my biggest fantasies is that another guy comes in and services her. But she’s not interested in any MMF threesomes. I even asked her to hire a guy to give her an erotic massage, but she didn’t accept (and actually fought with me). Also, she does not like sexting and thinks it’s a waste of a time, so we only sext a few times a year, and even then she’s reluctant, despite how much this turns me on.
We have sex once a month or sometimes every two to three months. We both want to have sex more than this, but she expects me to want sex with her whenever she wants it, without any preparation. Without any thinking or imagination, I can’t get turned on, and gradually I’ve lost my sex drive. She says I’m not “normal” in this regard and that my fantasy about another guy touching her also isn’t normal. After eight years, nothing has changed between us. Is there any solution? — Evergreen
Dear Evergreen,
It sounds like you’re suffering from a simple case of mismatched desires. And you’re both also seemingly set in your ways about your turn-ons, which is understandable, but working against you. You love to flirt and sext — your wife hates it. You like the idea of another guy in the bedroom — she’d rather keep your sex life between the two of you. On top of all that, you’ve got a baby and that inevitably leads to less sex as you deal with the loss of sleep and general time-suckedness that kids embody.
You both want more sex, but the ways you each want to go about getting that sex are incompatible. And they’re going to stay that way if you both don’t learn to compromise a little.
There’s not a quick fix here, I’m afraid. You’ll need to work together to find common ground. It sounds like you’re both doing this a little bit. She sexts you a couple times a year even though she doesn’t like it. You give her warm-up-free sex sometimes even though you don’t like that. Though I would suggest you drop the MMF talk/erotic massage suggestions for a good long while. It’s not something that turns your wife on, and if you keep bringing it up, it’s going to become a source of resentment. Whereas maybe, if you prove you can cool it a little, it might be something your wife agrees to indulge in as a fantasy or in the dirty talk realm. (She might warm up to the idea of indulging you in this occasionally, the way she has with the sexting. But then again, she might not, and it’ll have to stay in the private theater of your erotic mind. It’s hard to say.)
What you can do is find out where your desires overlap. Find out where the Venn diagram of your sexual selves coincides and start from there. How can you both get what you like without leaving anybody feeling crappy or gross or used? You’re very explicit about your own desires in your letter, but you didn’t say much about your wife’s. What gets her off? What makes sex fun and hot for her, aside from spontaneity?
If you both can work towards putting in a good-faith effort of fulfilling a few of each other’s wants sometimes, it might help you both loosen up and try other ways of connecting you might not have before. Maybe she agrees to let you indulge your MMF kink by chatting with strangers anonymously online sometimes, assuming it doesn’t lead to anything physical. (Maybe she chats you anonymously herself!) Maybe you get yourself hot and bothered when you’re on your own earlier in the day and then give her the “spontaneous” sex she craves that night. How can you find pleasure in giving each other pleasure, even when it’s not necessarily your first choice?
The long and short of it is this: The erotic script you’ve been writing hasn’t been working. It’s time to write a new one. You both admit that you’d like different/better/more frequent sex. Now you have to figure out how to make it happen.
Go easy on yourselves, however. This is going to require patience and time and creativity. Plus, it’s a pandemic (still) and you’ve got a small child under foot, on top of your jobs and other responsibilities. But if you can work together to work some of these kinks out, then, well, some of your kinks will also hopefully work out.
