The internet exploded this summer after Reddit featured a shocked wife who posted her husband's angry e-mail he sent her as she was driving to the airport. Her spouse sent her a spread sheet documenting how he daily attempted to initiate sexual relations with his wife and then listed all the various reasons his wife gave for denying him. Our sad sack bitterly concluded his missive with the statement that he had only been intimate with his wife three times over a seven week period of almost constant rejection.
The disconnect between men and women on expectations of frequency of sex is a common source of conflict in marriage. Men generally consider sexual relations unconnected to the interpersonal aspect of a marriage or cohabitation. Dr. John Gray, author of the best-seller "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus", observed that resentment is temporarily washed away for men when they enjoy regular sexual relations in a committed relationship. But Marriage and Family Psychotherapist Sonya Rhodes observed that women tend to see sex as a natural result of a healthy relationship. When a committed relationship is ailing, sexual relations tend to be withheld by the woman, while the man wants to have sex even when the relationship is under stress.
The main reason for many men to create a marriage or cohabitation, namely sex, will diminish as his partner's feelings about their relationship wanes.The husband will find his moments of physical intimacy declining with his partner's declining opinion of the emotional intimacy of the union. He will consider the withholding of sex to be fighting unfairly. That's what the spread sheet represents. He is throwing a penalty flag on the marriage. But many fed-up men don't really know what else to do. As the husband becomes more resentful, his partner will find her attempts to address the areas of conflict in the marriage cut short. In a snowball effect, the woman will tend to communicate her growing displeasure about the relationship by withdrawing physically.
As painfully obvious as this is to women, men tend to be blind to the reasons why the physical relations in a marriage or cohabitation decline.They have no idea why their fed-up mates withdraw physically from them.Marriage researcher Pepper Schwartz terms this resulting scenario as the most common type of sexless marriage, where "there's a lot of anger and two people who simply don't know how to change their behavior.
Men in these type of marriages feel victimized when they are denied. They gather in sports bars and golf club locker rooms, card rooms and and bowling alleys to commiserate with one another, rationalizing that this is the way all marriages and cohabitations end up. They often feel no personal responsibility for their present predicament. All they know is "they aren't getting any!"
With both partners angry, resentful and disillusioned, the best outcome is for the couple to hit bottom. This can be a time for healing if the husband and wife realize their union is in serious trouble beyond their ability to fix it on their own. Marriage counseling, psychological services and Twelve Step groups for codependency and individual addictions harming each partner are just some of the resources available to men and women to heal their ailing unions. But both partners have to stop pointing fingers at each other, accept joint responsibility and slowly work together to build a new, better foundation to their marriage or cohabitation.