I too can speak from a man’s perspective. From what I have seen on this site, some women hammer any man who isn’t behaving exactly as they feel is appropriate with the giant “Porn” hammer. They seem unable to believe that a man would or could have nay other reasons for not feeling a great a desire to be intimage with his wife as he may have before.
It is quite possible to have events in your life that change the way you feel about intimacy. It seems like woman know that men are visually stimulated creates and assume that if we’re not interested in being with a woman it’s because we are not physicaly attracted to her. I can assure you there are hundreds of other possible reasons.
If he’s like most husbands, yours is attracted to you (or was, as it may be) because of the total-you, not just the physical you. Can you identify what has changed?
In my own case, I know that my emotional reaction to my wife’s life-changes (not menopause, the changes she initiated in her life that impact the two of us) have caused me to see her very differently. I once saw her as beautiful and attractive not just because of her looks, but because she was special. I’ll say she was on a pedestal for me, but in a good way. I desired her, not just her body. We’ve been married for a long time, but it wasn’t that long ago we were together five or six times a week. Now, we can go two or three weeks in between.
I used to pursue her daily with small acts, words and hints that I wanted her. Again, not her body, but her. I wanted that togetherness - although, let’s be honest, the physical is good too.
I no longer do that, not because I no longer love her, but because she has driven me so far away that I no longer posess the ability to chase her. She has not cheated on me, I have not cheated on her, neither one is hooked on porn. She has just made life altering decisions that affected both of us. We live together, but with seperate lives now. We still look like a model marriage from the outside, but there is no real intimacy within the marriage and that is reflected in the marriage bed.
It’s easy to blame a man and say he has abandoned interest in his wife because she no longer looks the way she did before all the children and years. It may be easier for some women to believe that he went to porn and left them rather than understand that he may yearn to be with her again, but she has changed in such a way as to make that impossible.
Jumping to the porn conclusion is often a lazy attempt at easy diagnosis, if you ask me. Then again, general man-bashing can be an art form here sometimes, so it doesn’t surprise me.
To the OP,
I am not saying that you have done any of these things. You have not posted anything that could give me a hint either way. Perhaps it is porn or another woman, that may well be the case. I’m just urging you to take a hard look at yourself too and see if there is anything you might have done to push your husband away. Are you too wrapped up in the children to see him as a man anymore? Do you express regrets about your life that make him feel like you are sad you made the choice to be with him? Do you demean him? Emotionally abuse him? Complain about his ability to make a living for you and your children? Compare him to your father? Again, these are not accusations, they are questions I think you might want to ponder.
