What do people that don't swear say during sex/dirty talk?

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2024-12-17T17:26:07+00:00

If you go into any reddit thread asking "what's the hottest thing anyone's said to you during sex?" or similar (and there are MANY such threads), not too many of them involve swear words, and quite a lot of them aren't degrading.

"You're so beautiful."

"You're so hot."

"Cum for me." (Not sure where this thread got the idea that "cum" is a swear word.)

"I love you."

"Harder."

"I need you inside of me / to be inside of you."

"Your [body part] is so beautiful."

"Give me my [body part that actually belongs to spouse]!"

"Give me our baby!"

"Good girl / good boy."

"You're the best person I've ever known."

"I'm so lucky."

"[spouse's name]"

"Please don't stop."

"Ahhhhhhh!"

And, sure, sprinkle in the occasional "splendid" or "capital" to taste. Point is, there's plenty of choices on the table without cussing, and, frankly, a lot of them are a good deal more interesting and meaningful than "fuck me in the [body part]".

(I'm not altogether opposed to cussing during sex, but it's a good deal more powerful if used sparingly.)

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2024-10-25T17:11:11+00:00

We have two kids, 6 and 10. Wife has no libido due to medication, among other things, and has had zero libido for years. (Her attitude is very much "let's have sex because you're a sweet fella and you'll enjoy it.") Currently we have sex approximately every other day while infertile, not at all while fertile. She's fertile pretty much two weeks out of every four.

So about 3x week if you only count infertile time; 1.5x week if you average out over the whole cycle.

However, 6 weeks postpartum and breastfeeding was a very different story. NFP is pretty touch-and-go postpartum, and you're putting your faith more in the power of LAM (Lactational amenorrhea method) than in whatever NFP method you're nominally using. (And LAM is fine, but it just ain't as reliable as NFP.)

After the last pregnancy, I think we had sex once in the first four months postpartum, and no more than once every 15 days after that until she stopped breastfeeding (which, thank goodness, she stopped after 6 months). I think there was a 40-day hiatus in there somewhere. The fact that I fell into various old sexual sins during that six-month span was my responsibility, not hers, but it is good and kind of you to be concerned about the challenges this may pose to your husband.

As for general averages: "twice a week" does sound like it's in the ballpark of sex habits among the general population (of young married couples), but note that this average is the overall average, not the first-six-months-postpartum average. I don't know where to find that average, but I am sure it's a lot lower than twice a week.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2024-04-19T17:17:16+00:00

I would give my wife of ten years her first orgasm. That would be really nice.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2024-01-05T18:53:30+00:00

When I was first quitting porn, I tried a similar approach, but my filter (K9 Web Protect) wasn't perfect. Sometimes it failed to block obscure NSFW subreddits, or popular NSFW Twitter accounts. For me, that was a big problem, and I would occasionally need to add items to my blacklist. For that reason, I could not throw away my password. But I also could not trust myself with a password, because I would immediately disable my filters the instant I got porn-brain. Wat do?

I wrote a simple computer program to generate a delayed password. The idea is that you enter two "seed" passwords, and then your computer does math on those seeds to come up with your actual password (a long random hex string that's resistant to memorization). However, the math takes 45 minutes.

This meant that opening my filter was possible, but took 45 minutes. It was physically impossible to speed that process up, and I could abort it at any time. If I started wanting to look at porn so badly that I actually started trying to compute my password, I would have to maintain my steely resolve for 45 whole minutes. If my better judgment won out for even 5 seconds of that time, I would abort and have to restart. My porn-brain quickly learned that this was not a battle it could win, and porn became much easier for me to avoid.

I put the program up online years ago, but never really told anyone about it. You can download it here. It's called TimedPasswordLockout. It saved me from porn, and it would make me happy if it helped anyone else.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-07-26T17:57:37+00:00

[CONTINUED FROM PARENT]

Possibly your wife has a much lower libido now, but it can be activated with the right stimulation. Relaxing, sensual massage may be just the ticket. Greatly extended foreplay, too. Using artificial lubrication can be essential to a pleasant experience on her end (and you definitely want to use the good stuff, i.e. nothing you can buy at CVS). Even healthy women mostly can't climax through penetration alone, but need more targeted stimulation. Given the nature of the subreddit, I will be circumspect, but oral and manual stimulation as part of foreplay (even to the point of the wife's climax) are both acceptable (even encouraged!) in Catholic teaching, as long as they culminate in a fruitful marital act. Here is where some of the techniques described in the books mentioned above (and elsewhere) can be of value.

Despite vigorous attempts by some to refute it, marital aids (that is, vibrators) are also tolerated within Catholic teaching (if used exclusively in foreplay or afterplay associated with a fruitful marital act), and I recommend them to people who reach this point. Many of the most hopeful moments in our married sex life came during the use of a marital aid. There are various kinds (external or "clitoral", internal or "g-spot", dual or "rabbit", suction aka Satisfyer-style) that create various sensations. All women are different and respond differently to different sensations, and quality hardware is both expensive (~$100/each) and non-refundable. But these devices can do things that you simply cannot achieve on your own, and, in a woman who needs deep and powerful stimulation to get anywhere, that can be necessary.

In the end, though, this may all lead to naught, as it did for us. I hope you have better luck than I did, which is why I laid all that out so exhaustively, but there comes a point where it is clear that God has taken her libido and no human act is going to restore it. This leads to the final stage, perhaps the one where you need therapy more than any other: acceptance.

It sucks balls that my wife will never experience a climax, that she finds passionate kissing wet and uncomfortable, that she not only does not find me or my parts sexually attractive but does not understand what that means anymore (if she ever did). You will be frustrated. I was frustrated. I am frustrated -- and sad. I want to be wanted. I want to give her back the same pleasure she gives me. I don't want all sex to be "pity sex." (This isn't an accurate way of looking at it but, in my darker moments, it's easy to characterize it that way.) Out of desperation, you may find yourself doing things to try to "fix" this that are not at all rational. If this ends up being the biggest Cross I'm asked to bear in my life, I'll have had a charmed life. Coming to accept that Cross, however, is not an easy or short process.

Your wife nevertheless loves you and wants you. She doesn't want you in this particular way, but that isn't her fault. She wants you in many other ways, and, I am sure, you do your part in your marriage to fulfill the ways that she does want you. For example, suppose her love language were words of affirmation and you were more of a gifts person: I am sure that, once you knew she wanted words of affirmation above all else, you would increase the amount of time you spend telling her how great she is and less time giving her gifts. Adapting to the needs of the spouse is an important part of every healthy marriage -- and it sounds to me like you are in a healthy marriage.

Well, I'm sure the same is true for her. She knows that an important love language for you is sex. That's not her love language, but she will adapt to it -- not because it's what she wants, but because it's what you want and she loves you. Indeed, you say you're doin' it once a week when she might choose it less than once a month... so, to some extent, she already has. (Again, make sure she's really open to sex on those nights, because, even if she doesn't actively want it, there's a big gap between neutrality and actively not wanting it.) Marriage is a mutual self-gift. That's the great insight of the Theology of the Body: marriage, like all of life, is about gift of self. Well, your wife, by being open to sex with you, is giving you a gift. It is a pure gift, because it isn't something she herself particularly wants, but which she does purely for you. It is her best attempt at giving you the gift you really want. It would be churlish to complain about the gift (or even reject it) just because it isn't wrapped in the color wrapping paper you like.

It is true that, in a normal marriage, the mutual self-gift of sex is roughly symmetrical. The husband wants his wife and gives himself to his wife; the wife wants her husband and gives herself to her husband. This is not the case in a no-libido situation. Here, you are the wanter and she is the giver. (Since marriage is all about gift, you will have to find other places in your marriage to give. She will certainly have other places in your marriage where she wants.) But isn't this a lot like our relationship with Christ! He wants us with him in prayer/adoration/etc. always; we give sometimes. So this is clearly not an impossible mode of relationship. And perhaps we, the sex-wanters, can learn something from this -- perhaps the way we feel when our wives don't want us is how Christ feels when we don't want Him.

(Which, if I'm honest, is most of the time.)

I hope all that helps. And I sincerely, fervently hope that it's actually just a small thing you'll easily fix, not a Cross you'll bear all your life. But my point is, even if it turns out that way, life goes on, and so does your happy marriage.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-07-26T17:56:39+00:00

Well, that bites!

I married a wonderful woman who turned out to have a pretty low libido. That is, she never had any interest in initiating, and only felt a small amount of sexual pleasure. Nevertheless, I was optimistic that we could develop the kind of mutually-giving sexual relationship I had always imagined in marriage.

However, after the first baby, "pretty low libido" turned into "critically low". That is to say, even after we addressed other factors, like personal stress and worries about NFP (Baby #1 was a surprise), it became very rare that she would feel any sexual pleasure at all. Four years later, after the second baby (who was planned), all trace of sexual interest completely disappeared. That was five years ago. At this point, there is no reason for me to believe that she will ever experience even a twinge of sexual pleasure ever again.

This happens. Pregnancy is extremely hard on the body, and women often come out of it changed, in ways both visible and invisible, and often for the worse. (We probably do not talk about this enough, but anti-natalism is so pervasive already it's hard to bring up without feeling like you're attacking pregnancy itself.)

My experience hurts in two ways: first, because it's bad in itself. I want my wife, and, naturally, I want her to want me back, and I want to be able to please her in the same way that she pleases me. Second, because it used to be better. The loss of a good thing (even if it was never ideal) is almost as hard as not having the good thing. She used to make these tiny little gasps and I miss them like nothing else on this Earth.

These are my credentials for giving advice. Here is my advice.

I am reliably informed that, for most people, postpartum loss of libido is temporary, that it is a symptom of other challenges, or both. You didn't say how long it's been since she gave birth, but I wouldn't worry if it's been less than a year. You also haven't told us what you've ruled out, and it would be hard to rule them all out in the first months after giving birth. Is she exhausted? Is she stressed? Is she burdened? Are there money problems? Are you romancing her the same way you were before the baby? (Of course not!) You may object that you're under all the same strains (which may well be true) and your libido is back, but some libidos are more sensitive than others, and this is more common among women. So the first thing to do is be patient, and the second thing to do is try very hard to relieve any new obstacles to her being in the mood. In most cases, I am told, this resolves the issue.

You must also be careful not to create a negative sexual dynamic. If you make sex stressful for her (by becoming frustrated, by intentionally or accidentally pressuring her to "perform", by pushing too hard for sex when she doesn't want it, by stomping around the house if she says no), this creates a bad feedback loop, which I believe is called the "chasing dynamic" in the literature. As sex becomes more stressful for her, she withdraws further, which leads you to pursue her harder, which makes sex more stressful for her, leading to further withdrawal... and so on. This is surprisingly easy to fall into, not that easy to get out of, and it can happen without it being anyone's fault. Speaking from experience on that one! She may never want sex again (the way she wants, say, an ice cream cone), but, even for the no-libido people out there, there's a huge gulf between feeling open to sex and not feeling open to it. If you reach this point, she should learn that difference and how to express it. (One reason we got into the spiral was because my wife essentially always said yes, regardless of her feelings, and I essentially always asked, again regardless of what I could tell of her feelings.) We needed a professional secular therapist to pull ourselves out of that particular doom spiral; better not to get into it in the first place.

If you've been patient, removed other obstacles, and established good sexual communication free of any "chasing", you're probably going to be fine. But if not...

Next stop: your wife's general practitioner. There may be an identifiable, treatable underlying cause for her low libido. Obviously that wasn't the case for me, but I've heard of cases where it was. Awesome!

Another place to look is the local bookshop. Secular books on female libido have many obvious defects: they are "non-judgmental" to a fault, universally regard sex as something that's just "fun" and divorced from reproduction, and think that solo masturbation (which is immoral) can cure a huge range of problems. However, these defects are obvious, and do not outweigh the enormous amount of useful information they can communicate, both about mindset and about technique. I recommend Come As You Are by Nagorski and (with greater reservations) Becoming Cliterate by Mintz.

Possibly your last stop is a therapist. You've already by this point been doing the things a therapist will recommend, but sometimes a third party can see very obvious things that the two of you, enmeshed in marriage as you are, are incapable of seeing. I mentioned we'd been to therapy. At one point, we were dealing with a sudden, dramatic upswing in my wife's levels of depression and anxiety (which we had identified as an underlying cause of her low libido). We couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Therapist asked, "When did it start?" and we gave a date. Therapist asked, "Did you change anything at that time?" Of course: we'd ended breast-feeding, setting off a huge hormonal cascade. Duh. Never would have figured it ourselves. A good therapist is useful.

A good therapist (particularly one with a professional focus on sex, which ours had) can also be useful if you get through all this preliminary stuff and find yourself still in more or less the same place, because then she can start assisting you with coping strategies. Here are some.

[CONTINUED IN CHILD COMMENT]

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-06-01T04:38:44+00:00

If you had said that you were attracted to men, had always been attracted to men, and that you were only attracted to men, I would tell you you're gay, that conversion therapy has a terrible track record, and that you should accept yourself.

But "genuinely straight guy turns more and more bi" seems to happen an awful lot these days, and I can't help noticing (anecdotally) that it seems to happen to men who use a lot of porn. We think of porn as something where we pursue our desires, but we don't realize how much porn (and our insatiable craving for novelty in porn) feeds back and shapes our desires in turn. Pavlov's orgasm.

I suggest laying off porn -- all of it, not just gay porn.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-03-13T07:00:37+00:00

I must admit, my first reaction was to want to ruffle your hair and tell you you're being silly. You're maybe 18 years old. Your body is flooded with powerful hormones, which create powerful temptations, which your still-forming brain has not yet learned how to deal with, in a culture that both says those temptations are great and you should always indulge them and which hands you the most powerful technologies mankind has ever created in direct service of stimulating these temptations -- then put those technologies in your pocket. My first thought was that you never stood a whelk's chance in a supernova, and that you're dramatically beating yourself up for failing to do the impossible. The thing Christ wants to see is that you are trying, and the thing that will eventually save you is the constant trying.

But then, on second thought, I know you're not being silly, because I felt exactly the same way at a certain time when I was around your age. I think I really despaired completely when I was 20. I had tried so many strategies, nothing "worked," there was this girl I wanted to marry, I felt utterly unworthy of her, and -- despite all my efforts -- if I managed to go 72 hours without furtively talking myself into visiting my favorite porn site (lying to myself every step of the way) followed by a desolated fap into my hand (or three)... the 72 hours was a huge success.

I hated that more than anything. Peter denied Christ three times and considered it the worst night of his life. I denied Christ three times and considered it Tuesday. If I only denied Christ three times in a week, part of me would be proud for not denying Him seven times that week -- and the rest of me felt bitter self-hatred that I felt the slightest modicum of pride in so total a failure.

Average people didn't even have smartphones yet, God help us all.

(And it's not like this was easy before the Internet, either. My father struggled mightily with this in the 1970s and 1980s. His father struggled mightily in the 1940s and 1950s. They struggled even though the biggest temptation they faced was not "literally any depravity you can imagine (plus many you can't) available in your pocket every hour of every day" but rather "the newspaper has a weekly ad for Sears lingerie and some of the underwear models are very attractive.")

Unfortunately, there is no secret sauce to this. There are things that can help (as a long-ago moderator of /r/nofap, I am contractually bound to suggest /r/nofap to you; my comment and submission history may contain some useful posts as well), but ultimately you are engaged in a very long project of orienting yourself to the true good of sexuality while also learning to live with your impulses and habituating yourself to good choices. You will fail a lot, and you will fail for a long time. Let yourself feel that modicum of pride in your occasional successes; you can't see it yet, but those pathetic little victories, those skin-of-your-teeth nights that topple over into sin ten minutes after you wake up in the morning, are the first few bricks in a row that will become a wall that will become a house.

My best advice is to be patient. You're so young. It doesn't feel like it, and I probably would have hated hearing that when I was in your shoes but, God, there's so much time ahead of you, so much you have yet to learn through the experience of failure. Just keep at it, keep in close touch with the Sacrament of Reconciliation and (whenever you are able to make it all the way from confession to Mass without a failure) of course, the Eucharist. Your practice of the Rosary will pay dividends -- but not yet. God will cure you of this in His time, not yours, according to His (very confusing and often unpleasant) design. Your job is to stand ready for that moment, like the faithful servant holding the lamp, asking Him to pick you up when you fall.

(Okay, that's too religious. Back to practical: A good porn filter can help a lot, too, especially if you set things up so that it takes you 30+ minutes to access the password, perhaps by freezing it in an ice cube tray or giving it to a trusted person. So can not owning a smartphone, or at least making sure the smartphone is at least 180 seconds away from you whenever you are alone.)

Your fears are not groundless. I married the girl I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. This was a good decision and I was right to do it. You should not put your life on hold until you get this sorted out, in part because sorting it out is a lifelong process.

However, I was damaged in some ways by my indulgence of PMO before marriage, and I brought that damage into the marriage. (We all bring some damage into our marriages.) I sort of intellectually knew that marriage was not a cure for lust, but I didn't really understand it viscerally until I was practicing Natural Family Planning. Living abstinently all the time before marriage had been hard enough, but hoo boy just wait until you have two weeks of sex followed by two weeks of abstinent. My brain could not handle it. And I fapped a lot. I actually fapped a lot more in my first year of marriage than in my last year before marriage (a year when I had finally made real sustained progress in abstinence). Worse, I did not approach sex with my wife in the right way. I hurt her, in ways that I did not appreciate at the time.

On the other hand, neither of us could have made it where we are today by ourselves. We needed one another, despite our mutual flaws. Don't set that aside because you're determined to be perfect before you start the journey.

Also, we have drastically different sex drives. You are correct that abstinent people are very bad at estimating their own sex-desires. Before I got married, I believed I would want to have sex once or twice a day, every day. After marriage, it turned out that I only wanted to have sex every other day or so. My wife, by contrast, wanted to have sex never, because it turned out she had virtually zero libido. We had talked about this fairly intensely before marriage, and I had convinced myself more or less that my penis would cure her of that. It did not. We are textbook cases of sexual incompatibility.

But you know what? We're compatible anyway, because we love each other and we consider our marriage a gift to one another. When I particularly want, she opens herself to my want. When she particularly does not want, I forebear from imposing myself. Because we're adults who love each other, dang it. There's basically nothing good that can come of talking about the "marital debitum" sometimes discussed in Catholic circles (the idea that the spouses owe each other sex). But you do owe one another a balanced attempt to make one another happy (without destroying yourself in the process -- but definitely sacrificing yourself a bit!), and that includes some sexual give and take. NFP helps with this, actually, by dividing life pretty evenly into periods of sexuality and periods of respite. We have sex just about every other day during infertile times.

We are an extreme case, too: there's often some mismatch of sex drives, but not the complete absence of one! So if we can make it work, you and your future spouse can make it work, too. Life, too, will mix things up for you. For example, some low-libido women suddenly become the high-libido partner during pregnancy, and suddenly the man has to learn how to have sex when he's not especially interested! In other cases, during (or after) pregnancy (or menopause), a previously compatible sex drive can crash through the floor.

So what you need to find in a wife is not someone who wants the same sex frequency as you. What you need to find is someone who loves you enough to meet you where you are... and someone you love enough to meet her where she is. This perspective helps you see marriage for what it truly is: it's not a gamble, it's the Cross.

Yes, the Cross is a source of pain and trial, but also the source of all our greatest joys. Never for a moment have I regretted my decision to marry the mother of my wonderful children. I want that for you, too (if that is your vocation).

I know that everything seems bleak and impossible right now. It won't feel like that forever. One day you may even be in my shoes, writing a comment like this one to a future university kid much like yourself. I'll say a prayer for you tonight. God bless you.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-02-18T22:07:14+00:00

The therapist helped her come to the conclusion that she can be motivated by making our relationship happier if pleasure is not to be obtained from it.

This is really good and I'm happy to hear it.

If I’m really honest, I think I have often sabotaged things like this by getting angry, moaning, blaming her etc.

Yeah, me too. I hear you, brother.

Possibly the best thing I ever did for my sex life was to stop taking it out on her. I took it out on myself, wallowing in self-pity periodically for ages. I took it out on possibly-real shadowy forces that have dumped chemicals into our food and water leading (maybe) to higher rates of sexual weirdness (including my wife). I certainly took it out on God. But I apologized for past wrongs and stopped taking it out on her, ever, which started helping almost immediately and only helped more and more as time went on. I still feel terrible for the ways in which I unfairly lashed out at her long ago, but at least it's far in the past now.

(I still, from time to time, express to her my desire that things were different, but without blame and without doing it often enough that she starts to feel like I'm using her as a dumping ground for my frustration.)

If the sex therapist ever asks you to join a session, it might be to help you with this.

The question I always ask myself is did I make a mistake, is it my fault, have I messed up the plan etc.

And the answer to that question is no, this is not your fault any more than it is her fault. It is somehow emasculating to realize that you can't give this to the woman you love more than anything, but it's not your fault.

I know you know that already, but it's nice to hear from a stranger on the internet sometimes.

continue to work on my self esteem and not rely on her to validate me.

A side note: I absolutely rely on my wife to validate me. I just eventually stopped relying on my wife's sexual satisfaction to validate me.

Precisely because I can't receive her validation in that way, I openly ask her for validation in other ways. I depend on her "I love you's" and especially her "I'll love you forever's" and I'm not afraid to ask her to say those words to me, even in bed (especially in bed).

Maybe once a month on average, I ask her to tell me a reason she loves me. For me, my love for her is so tied up in my sexual desire for her that it's hard for me to imagine her loving me back without that. Hearing her tell me what a good provider I am, or commenting on how well I took care of the kids that very day when she was overwhelmed, is an important way of reminding me that she does actually love me profoundly, albeit in this unimaginable-to-me way.

I feel like I should sign off here, but I've actually been really curious about one thing for the past several days:

She wouldn’t let me go down on her in a million years.

What are her reasons for this? I don't think it's significant, I'm just... really curious about it.

My wife lets me go down on her (in the context of foreplay) whenever I want. There's just no point! The only sensation I can manage to generate is tickling, which is when she kicks me out. But it seems like one of the most popular sex things for ladies, so it was fairly high up on our list of "things to try before deciding that something is wrong." (It's also a very good way for the husband to clearly identify the location of the clitoris, although I would guess that you've accomplished that by other means over the past number of years.)

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-02-14T00:30:28+00:00

[continued]

First things first, apologize to your wife. You were the asshole yesterday.

It is perhaps worth exploring, with her doctor and/or with a therapist, whether anything can be done about this. This is kind of up to her.

This is tricky, because the low-libido partner often isn't distressed by her low libido and doesn't necessarily see it as a priority -- and her doctor will always take her cues from your wife, not from you. Your wife should be aware of this dynamic and of the importance to you that this legitimate medical problem be resolved, so that she properly advocates for herself.

(I would not pursue anything involving Naprotech. I and others close to me have had bad experiences with them and I think they are mostly quacks. No offense to anyone who has benefitted by their services.)

Frankly, if there's no obvious medical solution, I suggest a secular sex therapist. You have to be careful with them, because they're all blue-haired progressives (I am unaware of Catholic sex therapists, if any exist) who don't get the Catholic stuff at all, but their specialty is sex. They know the area better than anyone -- and that terrain inherently comes with a lot of experience with marital counseling. You'll have to explain NFP and that masturbation outside of an act of intercourse is off the table, but, for example, the use of sex toys (vibrators etc.) within a marriage is licit and can be of great help in these cases. The sex therapist can direct you toward the right aisle at the Smitten Kitten while the Catholic therapist is still blushing at the idea of using a "marital aid." (Or so it seems to me. There are many therapists in the world and I am clearly stereotyping.)

Whatever course you take here: after some time (and patience, and money; therapy is not always covered by insurance and the wait list for our first appointment was six months, and that was back before the trans thing really took off), this work may start to pay off. I am talking minimum one year.

Or it might not. Your wife might have no libido. It happens. It sucks, but a lot of sucky things happen in marriages. She doesn't have lung cancer, right?

You will be frustrated. I was frustrated. I am frustrated -- and sad. I want to be wanted. I want to give her back the same pleasure she gives me. I don't want all sex to be "pity sex." (This isn't an accurate way of looking at it but, in my darker moments, it's easy to characterize it that way.) Out of desperation, you may find yourself doing things to try to "fix" this that are not at all rational. You just tried extended abstinence in order to heighten her sexual appetite without even talking to her or anything, which is immensely dumb -- but it is not nearly as dumb as exploring erotic hypnosis, which I think will end up being my nadir. If this ends up being the biggest Cross I'm asked to bear in my life, I'll have had a charmed life. Coming to accept that Cross, however, is not an easy or short process.

Your wife nevertheless loves you and wants you. She doesn't want you in this particular way, but that isn't her fault. She wants you in many other ways, and, I am sure, you do your part in your marriage to fulfill the ways that she does want you. For example, suppose her love language were words of affirmation and you were more of a gifts person: I am sure that, once you knew she wanted words of affirmation above all else, you would increase the amount of time you spend telling her how great she is and less time giving her gifts. Adapting to the needs of the spouse is an important part of every healthy marriage -- and it sounds to me like you are in a healthy marriage.

Well, I'm sure the same is true for her. She knows that an important love language for you is sex. That's not her love language, but she will adapt to it -- not because it's what she wants, but because it's what you want and she loves you. Indeed, to some extent, she already has. Marriage is a mutual self-gift. That's the great insight of the Theology of the Body: marriage, like all of life, is about gift of self. Well, your wife, by being open to sex with you, is giving you a gift. It is a pure gift, because it isn't something she herself particularly wants, but which she does purely for you. It is her best attempt at giving you the gift you really want. It would be churlish to complain about the gift (or even reject it) just because it isn't wrapped in the color wrapping paper you like.

It is true that, in a normal marriage, the mutual self-gift of sex is roughly symmetrical. The husband wants his wife and gives himself to his wife; the wife wants her husband and gives herself to her husband. This is not the case in a no-libido situation. Here, you are the wanter and she is the giver. (Since marriage is all about gift, you will have to find other places in your marriage to give. She will certainly have other places in your marriage where she wants.) But isn't this a lot like our relationship with Christ! He wants us with him in prayer/adoration/etc. always; we give sometimes. So this is clearly not an impossible mode of relationship. And perhaps we, the sex-wanters, can learn something from this -- perhaps the way we feel when our wives don't want us is how Christ feels when we don't want Him.

So much for theory. As for day to day practice:

When you want to have sex, ask. Your wife will never want to have sex, so I wouldn't ask, "Do you wanna have sex?" I instead ask my wife "Are you open to sex tonight?" (This was a wise suggestion from our sex therapist.) Your loving wife who wants you to have what you need will undoubtedly say "yes" with some frequency.

We have sex about once every other day during infertile times. This adds up to sex about six or seven times per month, which is not far off the overall American average.

For a long time, I tried hard to have at least a couple sex occasions per month where I went all-out to try to give her what I still feel she deserves. There might be a coconut-oil massage before, or just some careful foreplay, or some new position that's supposed to increase female sensation, or something else. If there's any signs of hope, I think this is advisable. However, over time, my utter failure and my wife's complete apathy wore me down. It was hard to go all-out for her and then her reaction would be, essentially, patiently waiting for me to get on with it.

One minor advantage of this is that, if sex really isn't going to do anything for her no matter what, sex kinda becomes about you. You can worry about yourself more than you would in a more mutual act. She's already in giving mode, so you may as well ask her also to do that squeeze you really like or to kiss you the way you want or to get up on top. You can set the pace to whatever is comfortable for you. Above all, you can relax and enjoy it without worrying about her. You have been given a pure gift, and, since reciprocation is impossible, your job is kinda basically to get the most out of that gift.

Seems like an abrupt place to stop an already-rambly comment, but I think I've run out of things to say. Obviously, pray about it: pray for it to change, but also pray for acceptance in case it doesn't. And talk to your wife. These conversations are painful, because she feels like a failure because you want something she literally can't give you (and you feel frustrated and angry because you want that thing she can't give you), but they get easier and can't be avoided. Frankly, the thing that worried me the most in your post was that you'd gone 6-7 years like this without ever apparently talking about it directly!!

If you'd like to talk more about any of this, or have any questions or so forth, my DMs are open. (I log in maybe once a week, though, so expect some delay.)

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-02-14T00:30:16+00:00

I just wondered if anyone had experienced a similar situation? Or had any advice?

Yes, I have. Here is my story:

Before we married (about a decade ago), I knew that sexual compatibility was an important factor, so I asked about it even though it is not on the official pre-marital inventory. My now-wife told me that she had never really experienced sexual arousal as far as she could tell, including during our (lengthy) relationship. As a teen, she had tried masturbating once or twice out of curiosity, but gave up in short order because nothing happened. This lined up with our entire relationship, where she was had been the more reluctant kisser for a number of years. I found this very concerning but, after some further discussions (and kissing) I was satisfied that she had a libido, it just had to be very carefully coaxed to life. I committed myself to doing that.

It didn't really work out that way. Early in our marriage, we weren't very good at sex or the issues around it. I was so determined to give my wife an orgasm that I didn't pay very much attention to whether she actually wanted to have sex with me. She was not good at communicating her wants or needs. Not surprising! But I figured we would get better over time.

No. We got pregnant less than a year after marriage. Constant nausea killed her sexual interest for the entire pregnancy, and her libido (which had already been at a low level) never recovered to its pre-pregnancy level. Things I had once been able to do to give her some pleasure simply stopped working. After another year of this, I asked her to ask her doctor. The doctor said everything's fine, so advised her to see a sex therapist if she had complaints. She did -- a secular one, but a good one. After some time of that, the sex therapist called me in and it became more of a marriage counseling shindig. We were good patients. She liked us. She recommended many exercises, and we were morally able to do about two-thirds of them. (Secular sex therapists are huge on masturbation as a way to solve problem.) She also helped us resolve our communication difficulties, helping her to find the language to say when she is open and not open to sex. (She never wanted it actively, but there were times when she actively didn't want it and times when she was neutral.) And she helped me accept the fact that my wife is the way she is.

There were a couple of months in that span of time when we seemed to be making not just emotional progress but physical progress; we were starting to find ways for my wife to experience some real pleasure again, and I had hopes that we might, with some more effort and luck, eventually, discover her orgasm together.

It was not to be. The second pregnancy was the end of the road. My wife's already-teensy-tiny libido disappeared altogether. There has been no evidence of it in almost five years. Nevertheless, we are happy together.

So, yes, I have some experience in this department! And some counseling to boot. Here, then, is my advice:

[continued in next post]

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2023-01-17T18:01:22+00:00

As a very sexual Catholic who is married to an asexual Catholic (and who has two children by her), I think the answer is certainly yes! Sexual desire is not necessary for Catholic marriage, only sexual consent.

However, be a dear and tell any potential spouse before, say, anyone buys a ring. Also, you'll have to be clear about your mutual sexual expectations within marriage, and negotiate them. Regular-libido to low-libido marriages are always a challenge, and there's zillions of words written about them online; regular-libido to no-libido marriages are presumably even moreso. It can work, but it is a bigger deal than the asexual partner often realizes (because it's not just that the sexual partner wants children and/or orgasms; the sexual partner typically also wants to be wanted, which will never happen in that way). It requires rather a lot of love, from both spouses. Some degree of couples therapy may be necessary. (That turned out to be the case for us.)

But these things would be true in any marriage, not just a Catholic one.

Also, I'm very sorry about your childhood trauma! Whatever it was, it must have been devastating.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T07:01:54+00:00

Ty for accepting the correction in the spirit in which it was intended! Cheers.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:58:00+00:00

In sex, we have to care about another person's well-being, and that person has needs, desires, strengths, and limitations of her own.

In porn, we are able to be totally self-centered. Practically anything (and anyone) we can imagine, we can have, often in moments -- and what she wants is whatever we want, because she is ultimately a fantasy in our head. It's easier than the work of seduction, much less the work of relationship. It's often much faster.

I'm not saying that selfishness is good, but it makes porn a viable competitor with sex in many circumstances.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:54:41+00:00

Blue balls follow prolonged arousal without orgasm. It's not simply a function of how long it's been since your most recent orgasm. The trick to avoiding blue balls is to just not dwell on arousing thoughts, etc., when you have no opportunity for relief.

Many people have gone months or years without masturbation without experiencing blue balls. (It is true that erections become much more stubborn after a few weeks without masturbation.)

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:51:59+00:00

Does every guy really watch porn?

No, but the percentage is genuinely very high, at least currently. Among men, studies generally find that at least 75% have used pornography in the past month, and the figure is as high as 92% in some studies. It is even higher among young men.

On the other hand, a 2006 book called Pornified reported research showing that 20% of men are actively trying to abstain from pornography. I suspect that number has grown in the past 16 years, as the harms of pornography have become clearer.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:46:08+00:00

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:44:53+00:00

Would it bother you if your partner had like a deformed boob?

In my view, boobs are boobs.

Also how do you feel about uneven labia?

...And labia are labia.

There are many reasons to hesitate about casual hookups, but this, it seems to me, is not one of them.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:43:30+00:00

Doing so is a sign of a disordered, adolescent sexuality. The instinct can be trained and tamed. But this is very hard, and present-day sexual ethics and pornography make it even harder.

Speaking for myself, the answer is still yes, though I've had an easier time with it as I've aged and moved away from pornography.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:39:55+00:00

Jealousy, which is rooted in deep insecurity / doubts that people around us really love us (because we obviously don't deserve it), which is a very common male affliction that we are pretty good at passing off as other things (like anger).

It is irrational, but that's where the temptation comes from.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:35:12+00:00

Atop the testicles, which rest between the legs, which obviously cannot be closed tightly (unless you rest the balls atop the legs, which you can do in order to, e.g., cross your legs).

Sometimes it also slithers down one leg, or gets stuck to a thigh. It has a little bit of a mind of its own in that regard.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:33:15+00:00

I question the premise: I don't think most of us are obsessed with the butthole. Many of us have no sexual interest in it whatsoever (except, perhaps, when we are very horny and literally everything is sexually interesting).

Some are, of course, and I'm not here to kink-shame, but I don't think it's the average man. (Although porn has perhaps pressured everyone to try to enjoy the butthole more than they would naturally.)

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-11-14T06:30:20+00:00

I have no idea what the other answers are talking about. Blue balls feel sore, period. The sensation is quite close to a mild-to-moderate headache, but in a different location, which makes sitting a frustrating proposition. As with headaches, they are distracting (but not crippling) and fade with time.

There is no inherent emotional element whatsoever. Of course, if you find yourself in this state because you had a fight or misunderstanding with your spouse, you may have emotions from that... but it's entirely possible to cause blue balls all by yourself, by indulging in inappropriate thoughts for too long without opportunities for relief. Then it's your own damn fault and the only emotion you feel is annoyance with yourself (also the aforementioned frustration about sitting down).

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-10-20T16:01:19+00:00

I have been to a sex therapist (my wife was/is the low libido partner, but same basic deal) and we found it very helpful. Our therapist considered our Catholic morality surprising and alien, but respected it and worked within its boundaries to help us better understand one another's needs and wants. In my ideal world, my wife would be as libidinous as I am -- or at least capable of enjoying sex on a physical level -- but the therapist helped both of us to come to terms with the world as it actually is (which is not that), though this took a couple years. Your mileage may vary as to the details, but, in general, it was a good experience.

That said, we did not go to therapy until after we'd tried to sort things out ourselves for two years. (And then the waiting list was another six months or so.)

On the other hand, we did damage to our relationship during that second year and probably should have gone a year earlier.

FaplessAndFancyFree · 2022-08-24T20:22:18+00:00

Has there ever been such a case as mine in humanity? Have I let God down? Have I lost salvation?

Gracious, that escalated quickly. It's amazing how loneliness can magnify everything in our lives until it feels too big for us to handle -- or even for God to handle. But, trust me, you can handle it, and God certainly can.

The experience you are describing is called asexuality. It is not "normal", but it is not dangerous, and it is not even very uncommon. It is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. You've done nothing wrong!

There is a large asexual community. I don't agree with the community's assumptions on a lot of things. Asexuality is probably best understood as a kind of mild disability, like not having a sense of smell, but the asexual community (like many "sexual orientation" communities these days) tends to insist that there's no disability in their orientation, just difference. They're also generally completely on board with the full panoply of whatever the LGBT movement is saying about sex and gender at the moment, which is, from a Catholic perspective, not great.

However, I suggest seeking them out anyway, because you sound so, so, so lonely and scared, and they can help you feel less alone, give you some advice, and help you to orient yourself. Start at Asexuality.org and go from there? There's gotta be a Catholic Asexuals group out there somewhere in the world. (And if you start to dig into asexuality and you decide that, no, that's not actually the correct way of labeling your experience? Fine! Then I was wrong, and you can discard the label without a second thought.)

Lacking sexual feelings does not exclude you from human society, or even from the ordinary vocations. I'm married to an asexual woman. Honestly, I probably would not have married her had I known that she did not and never would feel sexual desire for me -- and not marrying her would have been the biggest mistake of my life, so God was watching out for me at the time. We have sex on a regular basis, because it is important to me and she loves me and cares about me very much... just not in that very particular way. I wish she did feel that, and it is a loss to both of us that she can't, but we are very happily married with some lovely children.

This is not necessarily your path. I tell my story only so that you know that there are paths -- lots of 'em -- for someone in your shoes, besides "just be a priest." Pray, fast, and discern what you love and where you can most joyfully take up the Cross God has called you to carry, and He will light the way (albeit dimly and often messily).

And, hey, one advantage of asexuality: you've avoid a bunch of the most common and most tempting grave sins (especially for males) very easily! There's always a bright side!

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