Family Forum / Marriage / Marriage / June 2006

"Sarah_P <sarahpowers34bspamnot@hotmail.com>" wrote:

It doesn't matter how he compares to other men.  You didn't marry any
other men, you married him.  That said, what you describe doesn't sound
the least bit unusual.  As for "revving himself up", some women have
posted to this group that their husbands have replaced them with looking
at porn.  It may be that because he's looking at other women less, he's
liking you more.

A TV show about the Nazis included the following quotation attributed
to Adolf Hitler:

   When a man is hungry, and he dreams in the night, he does not dream
   about bread and butter.  He dreams about caviar and champagne.

What this means for you is that, the longer your husband is hungry for
sex and thinking about it, the more far-out his fantasies are likely to
get.  If you can work out a situation where he's well satisfied a couple
nights a week, it's likely that he'll be less particular about exactly
what it is you're getting up to.  (He may have specific fetishes or
long-term fantasies, and those won't go away, but even in that case they
may occupy less of his mind, or become less extreme, if you can manage
even part of them.)

I read somewhere (maybe "alt.romance"?) about a couple that had the
problem that he liked her to wear dresses and skirts and look feminine,
and she preferred to cook dinner in shorts and a t-shirt, and besides he
wore denim jeans more than anything else.  They came to an explicit
deal, that twice a month they'd both dress up one level of fancy and eat
at a restaurant with cloth napkins.  In exchange for her dressing up all
pretty, he would get dressed up himself and take her out to eat.  They
had both decided they liked it -- what started as a somewhat mercenary
quid-pro-quo, each doing something to get something in return, had
turned into something they both actively enjoyed.  Neither felt they
were giving anything up.

It may seem a little detached, or something, somehow, to work out a
bargain with your partner, when you hope that they'll just spontaneously
start doing exactly what you want out of pure love and telepathy, but
telepathy is in short supply.  At least an explicit deal has the
advantage that each person gets something they want, and neither will
have to do something they don't want to.

So maybe you and your husband should work out some sort of explicit
deal.  You might start by telling him what you don't want to do, what
you really like to do, and what things you do because he likes them, and
because, while they don't hold any attraction for you in isolation, you
like the *effect they have on him*.  Then tell him what obstacles stand
in the way of doing things more often, and what you'd like him to do to
help deal with them.  Tell him you'll make an effort if he'll make an
effort too.  (As a stay-at-home mom, maybe dressing up and going out
twice a month to eat with cloth napkins would do you a world of good.)

I have often felt that the best single book on getting along with people
is _The Screwtape Letters_, by CS Lewis.  You might want to read, with
your husband, Letter 26, in which Screwtape describes how to sow the
seeds which later turn into domestic hatred.  He advises that you can
get people, who are being "unselfish" by trying to do what the other
person wants, to end up with nobody doing what they want, and everybody
feeling that they were taken advantage of and their sacrifice not even
appreciated.  Honestly saying what you want, and taking turns or working
out bargains, is a much better way to go.

Darren Provine ! kilroy@elvis.rowan.edu ! http://www.rowan.edu/~kilroy
"If everybody gives a little, everybody gets a lot." -- Pete Cottrell