Sex Q&A: What’s Wrong With Wanting Sex?

Sex As its Own Reward

Doug from Berea, Ohio asks:

It’s not a question, but I was a guy on the other end of that! I didn’t start off not having sex. The sex was good, but her attitude about sex put me off! I don’t like being thought of as a dirty, seedy, sex-hungry guy. In other words, something is wrong here because I think about sex—the passion and the heat (that’s the short version). Yes, I want to be loved for who I am. Yes, I have desires and I love sex, and with her it was good until she filled my head with her stuff. Honestly, I couldn’t and did not stay. She had her own story and the truth didn’t matter. Before that, I was married for 24 years to a woman that claimed there was something wrong with me because I didn’t orgasm in her time allotment for sex. It was just that she didn’t want to have sex with me! (Makes me wonder why she married me and what was I thinking.)

Good job, Liam! I’ve always gotten good advice from you, so thank you. Girls/Women, it takes two to make it, good or bad, and there are, as we say, deal breakers. The relationship may be fine, but sex can be a deal breaker and the reverse is true also.

Love, Doug

Liam’s Response:

Greetings, Doug, and thanks for giving us a bit of the male perspective on things. Your observations are infused with the pain of experience, and the wisdom that comes with hard choices. Sexual problems are in no way gender specific, and in them we see the trends and expressions that result from our social conditioning and how our notions of how relationships should work—with tight confines and social power roles—lead to a tremendous amount of internal resentment and misunderstanding.

In the ancient world, sex almost never came with expectations of monogamy. A wife was a piece of property, often given in tribute to a warrior king or chieftain. Her only value lay in her bloodlines or beauty and her ability to provide heirs. Men of the common ranks generally weren’t so fortunate. In most ancient cultures, breeding rights were reserved for those with the means to afford them. That’s Nature at work. The notion of pair-bonding developed in poorer hunter/gatherer cultures as a sort of barter exchange, but sexual monogamy was never part of the bargain. That came with patriarchal religion which likes to control every aspect of human behavior it possibly can.

Modern marriage began as a bone tossed to lower-class males. It was a goal they might attain. If they made enough money, garnered enough favor or fought bravely enough in battle they might be given a wife, get to have some sex and produce a kid or two before they died. It sort of curbed the resentment against the ruling classes who had for the most part been hoarding all the women for themselves. In short, Doug, sex is a commodity. It was then and is still is now.

Both the women you describe utilized their natural gifts in order to lure you into a promise of standard, modern monogamy. No doubt, in the beginning of the mating cycle, it seemed a good bargain for everybody. But the fact is the human mating cycle is very short. Time passed and the initial sexual interest faded as it always does. You, being a man, felt you had met your part of the pair-bond bargain and your natural expectation was that these women would meet theirs, continuing to be sexual with you on a regular basis. But they opted to use their sexuality as a weapon instead… a dagger in the passive-aggressive game that is all modern pair-bonding. They’d store up resentments, fears, feelings of loss and hopelessness and then punish you by withholding the one thing you were expecting to be given freely. In the end, as so often happens, you utilized your option to trade both of them in on other models. And that’s the way things go these days…

Let everyone who values their long-term relationships take heed. As Big Mama said in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” if there’s a problem in the marriage it started in the bedroom. A man leaving a long-term relationship might cite a million p.c. reasons why in order to appease his family and friends. But the truth is, sex or more pointedly the lack thereof, will always be the main reason. Always.

Liam

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