TL;DR:
My boyfriend and I have been together 4 years and his sex drive has gotten very low since we moved in together. I’m the only one initiating now and get rejected most of the time, and when he does agree it feels reluctant or out of guilt. He also often masturbates alone late at night, which hurts because he rarely gets off during sex with me. I’m starting to feel unattractive and discouraged, and although he says he wants to work on our sexual intimacy, I don’t know how to move forward.
Hello, my bf (27M) and I (27F) have been together for 5 years and the first 2 years were long distance. While we were long distance sexual intimacy was a non issue as every time we were together we were always making the most of it. The sex was great. We are now living together and have been for the last 2 years and his sex drive has lowered considerably.
I feel like now that we are living together, things have kind of sizzled out quite a bit. In the past both of us would initiate sex regularly but lately I have been doing all of it, and getting rejected almost every time. The times he does say yes, it’s after first rejecting me. When I back off and we continue watching tv or whatever we were doing, he reluctantly changes his mind(at least it seems to me) and will say something like “Okay fine let’s go to the bedroom”.
It’s a bit of a turnoff for me, because I guess I’m perceiving it as he thinks he should have sex with me because he knows that it’s been a long time. And I think this because a lot of times after we have sex, he’ll say something like “Is that better?” or “feeling better now?” It just feels like anytime we do have sex, it’s because I tried to initiate and then he feels bad about rejecting me. I think maybe his performance issues might play into this? Since I have known him, he has always had some issues with getting/staying hard, etc. In the past, we both kind of attributed it to drinking and maybe being stressed out while we were both in college but we always talked it through and it was never a big deal but these issues have persisted and maybe even grown? We talk about it but he just tells me that his sex drive is just really low and he doesn’t really know what’s wrong but that he’s trying although that it is a lot of pressure.
I really want to be supportive and understanding but here’s where I get a little hurt though. Since living with him, I have caught him masturbating and getting himself off on numerous occasions. My bf likes to stay up really late and I often go to bed around 10pm so that I can get up for work, but I often wake up in the middle of the night around 2-3am. There have been multiple times where I come out into the living room and see him on the couch with his pants pulled slightly down with his phone in hand in front of his face watching something I guess. He can always hear me coming as our room is a ways away from the living room, but I always catch the tail end of him frantically fixing his pants.
I don’t want to shame him for getting off and masturbating, but it hurts because it feels like he can only get hard or get off through those means. And most times we have sex, he more often than not doesn’t get off. I’ve tried having conversations about it, but he just says sometimes he feels he just needs to get off but doesn’t want the pressure of having sex with me, even though he wants to. Just last night, I fell asleep on the couch and walked into my room to go to bed and look for him, and when I came in the room he was across the room with no bottoms on, but rushed to his phone on the bed immediately when I came in. I asked him about it, and he said he was trying to get himself ready so that he could wake me up and we could have sexy time. I know that he meant well, but to me it just feels like i am so unattractive that he has to resort to looking at other things before having sex with me.
It’s gotten to the point where i feel so defeated and undesirable and just unattractive. I hardly initiate anymore because i feel like some sort of horny bastard trying to figure out when he would also like to have sex. And at the same time, trying to initiate but also not in a pressuring stressful way I guess. He’s mentioned before that he doesn’t like initiating and it’s a lot of pressure but after a while the repeated rejections start to really hurt. Idk what to do but he says that he wants to prioritize and work on our sexual intimacy. The only thing is I don’t even know how to go about that. How do we go about trying to work on this? I feel so unconfident and when we have sex now I’m so in my head.