MEM11363

Marie,
A few things have really helped this area of my marriage. A very genuine recognition that there are different types of desire. For instance, my W kept patiently repeating the message below until I understood it:

I don't directly control the level of sexual desire I feel. If you tie your emotional state to the degree of lust I feel, you are signing up for a massive world of misery that is not necessary. Because I DO have a much greater degree of conscious control over my desire to "please YOU". Loosely speaking you can separate these into:
- Lust = the desire to be pleased
- Love = the desire to please you

If you cannot accept my love, freely given from my heart, unless accompanied by lust, you are dooming us both to tension, conflict and perhaps ultimately dissolution.

As a man, you can't help but keep stats as if somehow this were a type of baseball game with one player on each team.

Darling, this isn't baseball and I am not your opponent. The idea that unless you please "me", you have played badly is entirely valid. What you fail to understand is that pleasing me, and taking me to the rapture are absolutely not the same thing. As a man, I believe you when you tell me how frustrating it feels to be intensely aroused, but not finished. Why is it that you refuse to accept that as a woman, I often feel differently? Your touch, the love you envelope me with, the sound of your breathing, the way you hold me after, these things bring me happiness.

As I accept that you are a man, and as a man are very different, I ask that you accept that I am a woman, and as a woman am very unlike you. This focus you have on my pleasure, while beautiful is misplaced. Instead of insisting that "what is important to you must be important to me", I need you to actually "ask me", what I want.

I do need to warn you in advance. If you continue to insist that whenever we connect, either I reach the rapture, or the whole exercise is a disaster for your male ego, I see an increasingly bleak road ahead for us.

As much as I love you, my patience is beginning to wear thin on this topic. If you truly need a "physiologically" equal partner I suggest you login to the "men seeking men" area on craigslist.....