Apologies if this gets long!!
Background – me, 50M; wife, 49F; 10yo son. Married for 20yrs, together for 23years. She was my first (and only) partner I’ve ever had intercourse with. We’ve had ups and downs in our sex life, but the past 10 years (after son was born), we’ve had sex about 5 times until mid-2025 (more on this below). There are many contributing factors – my wife has a lot of mental health challenges originating from neglect and emotional abuse in childhood (cPTSD) that has led to depression, anxiety, etc. A lot of this has led to a complicated relationship with sex and her own body. From my side, I grew up in an environment where dating outside of immediate marriage goal was discouraged, and I definitely internalized negative attitudes towards sex/physical intimacy for pleasure.
A lot of the past decade’s sexless marriage has been a result of these internal/personal issues between us, which is what I want to address, but a lot of it has also been external – pregnancy and postpartum, COVID, then my wife had a surgery with a much longer than expected recovery process, wife had professional burnout, and I had a lot of work stress/chaos during this time.
A couple of years ago, I started trying to talk about the sexless marriage, but I was initially met with a lot of defensive reactions and a specific ask that we first find emotional connection. Over 2024 and 2025, we started to repair this divide. At the same time, I started individual therapy to help with this, but also work stress, and the added load of carrying a lot of the family responsibilities as my wife recovered from her burnout. Therapy helped me start to be able to express myself better, and over time we reintroduced a lot of non-sexual touch and physicality.
Around August, I specifically initiated (which I hadn’t done since my wife got pregnant; the few times we had sex after our son was born were at her initiation), and I told her that I missed connecting with her physically, and I asked her if she would be open to physical intimacy. I ended up giving her a massage that ended with cuddling and eventually me getting her off manually. We then had sex two more times over the next couple of months, and the last time (the night of our 20th anniversary) was one of the best nights of sex we’ve had.
We haven’t had a chance to reconnect since then due to a lot of travel and then illnesses (damn flu!).
But I am more and more aware of the fact that part of our disconnect has been my inability to easily express myself and my own wants/desires. I am just now, at age 50, coming to terms with the fact that I need the physical connection to feel connected to my wife. For most of my dating and married life, I compartmentalized and separated love and emotional connection from physical intimacy and sex. The sex negativity from my upbringing combined with a deep desire to not perpetuate patriarchal stereotypes has made it really hard for me to acknowledge to my wife the importance of physical intimacy for me.
I guess this post is a plea to anyone who has advice on how to navigate this with my wife. I am particularly sensitive/wary of anything that could be received as pressuring my wife, but I also want to be more open with her and share some of this…ideally I would open a conversation by letting her know that I want to share some of this but that I have no expectations from her. But I do want to let her know that for me, physical intimacy is both important to feeling connected and that compartmentalizing sex as something “less virtuous” is something I want to break. I don’t need her to meet me there, and I am OK with her having a different relationship with sex and physical intimacy, but we can’t even figure out managing the differences if it’s not acknowledged.
Not sure if any of this makes any sense…if you’ve read this far, bless you! And any insight/advice would be greatly appreciated!