Her Facebook highlights wedding pictures, but she hasn’t desired her husband in six years.
At first she blames her lack of desire of him on her thyroid.
I tell him this makes little sense, since the thyroid doesn’t regulate her libido.
It also doesn’t explain why she doesn’t want to kiss him or why she tells him it’s sexual harassment when he tries to touch her.
She also tells her husband his smell doesn’t eroticize.
Over the years the excuses pile up. It’s because of her back pain. It’s because she has to do the cooking. It’s because – mysteriously – it can only be done with the help of toys.
The most desperate message I ever see from him is when she outright refuses to read an article explaining what happens to a man inside a sexless marriage.
He internalizes all her comments and over the years often tells me he’s not attractive.
His low self-esteem is so low that at one point he decides to show pictures of me and she reacts, yes, THAT one is attractive.
I think she did this mostly to put him down and punish him for not magically being a man she desires.
His response to being sexually locked out is further as follows:
- he travels where she wants to travel, even if it involves flying, he hates flying
- he starts seeing their only son as a burden and often thinks out loud about sending him away, to grandparents, summer camp, workshops…
The man himself was kept away from home as much as possible through after school activities. He has no idea he is repeating one of his own childhood wounds. He was treated as too much. He is doing the same to his son. His wife is doing exactly the same to him. This is a case of trauma repetition. His parents fed him, clothed him, gave him very strict rules around money, now his wife does that.
The man often tells me he comes up with rules for himself. He can drink only four half a liter beers in one evening. Or for every beer he has to drink a non alcoholic one. He never manages to stick to these rules.
Everything is too expensive in his world. Like going to the cinema or buying a boardgame, but spending thousands of euros on a trip to Greece that nobody enjoys, not he, not she, not their son, is ok. Even though he claims he could have a way better holiday for the same money inside Slovakia.
The man puts up with years of being castrated, put down and given all kinds of rules, but at one point does reveal he actually no longer loves her or at least realizes on some level that she doesn’t love him.
He says:
‘If I knew I had terminal cancer and had only three months to live, I wouldn’t tell her, I would vanish and go skiing alone in some resort in the time I have left.’
The man’s attitude to his wife also translates to Slovak politicians.
He says:
‘We have to accept they are corrupt and will steal because they think their salary is not big enough, because they are experienced. If we want experienced politicians running the country we have to tolerate they steal.’
This points to his whole survival strategy:
‘You can step on me, as long as you give me some crumbs.’
The man was abandoned by his father before adulthood, they are not in touch.
Mum was quite bossy.
Ties with siblings remain, but are not particularly deep.
No friends who challenge him.
Goes to Church in Slovakia and so regularly gets the message: suffering is good for your soul!!
The man fixes his entirely legitimate sexual desires and touch starvation by getting a tantra massage twice a year. Only twice, because, you know, if going to the cinema is too expensive, then a tantra massage is an outrageous cost. Note that the man has a very good salary compared to most Slovaks.
His English is good. His German is not. His only motivation to learn German is to ‘maybe get a better paying IT project in Vienna.’ This is an absolutely terrible kind of motivation to learn a language.
Plus, the man is running on fumes and learning a language requires a lot of energy, passion, even some eros or the promise of eros. To learn something as alive as language YOU need to be alive and open to aliveness.
These two will stay together. Without sex. The man is gaining weight.
I once caught a glimpse of them while I was on a bus and they couldn’t see him. It was the three of them and each looked lonely. As if all three were dazed, wandering around in a desert. About the only thing they do together on weekends is going for long walks in nature. They looked defeated. The woman quietly angry, he deflated. The boy looked lonely and subdued. It was a sad sight, especially knowing their entire history, from how they met, to some sex until they got married, and then no more sex.
Even though the man clearly saw being a father as a burden – not having sex will do that to a man if he was not given an engine in childhood to draw strength from in dry spells – he once mentioned he would like to have a second child.
A person’s wishes always have deeper roots, often not so flattering, and what he was really thinking was:
if we go for a second child we will at least have sex again for a while!!
And so this man helps his wife clean the whole apartment every Saturday in the completely false hope that if he does more in the household she will finally have the space to want sex with him. Unfortunately his attitude is so submissive in this that he further kills any possibility of sex. Plus, that he even wants to have sex with her is already a sign of lack of self-respect. Because this woman clearly treats sex only as an end to a means.
The most telling is the following incident:
One day they are in a restaurant.
He wants pizza.
She tells him pizza is too expensive.
Ridiculous, cause pizza is cheap in Slovakia. And they had just blown thousands of euros on a holiday in Greece he didn’t want.
He gets up and leaves in anger.
He adds that mysteriously they did finally have sex that one time, that one evening.
I try to make him see the connection, but I know it’s not possible.
He is not ready for change.
He refuses to see that when he chooses himself, he becomes sexually attractive.
But the conditioning is too strong.
And so this man can forever bend over backwards to win over his wife for some touch, some acceptance of his manhood and she is for sure also playing out her own childhood drama by playing her husband as a puppet, even if it keeps her in permanent sexual frost.
You think this couple is exceptional?
No, they are not.
If I had to bet on it I would say at least 20 percent of European married couples live a variation of this hidden cold war style relationship….
A clear and very real picture of how two people locked in a sexless marriage totter to the grave with frozen faces. On the way they set up their kid for the same fate, cause he doesn’t get a model of an erotically charged couple. He learns desire, passion has no real outlet. Worse, he may grow up feeling like he is his father’s jailor, because dad erroneously thinks he can’t walk out on the woman, because of the son….
If you would like some advice on a dynamic like this, contact me.
The Confessor 