My situation - apologies if this turns into a long post

Thanks Sadgirl. I guess I should have known that - it must be somewhere on this site. Well my own experience seems to back that up. So I have to contend with psychological and physical reasons for the increased urges at about this time. Useful to know.

ANH

 

Hi Jolie,
One of the very few posts of yours that I don't agree with, but it was bound to happen in the end.

Good luck with all the difficult things happening in your life at the moment. Your support and advice has helped me and many others here. May you get the outcomes you are looking for. You deserve good fortune and happiness.

Best wishes

ANH

 

A couple of nights sleeping alone. My wife has not been in the mood to join me, but unlike in some previous cycles, this hasn't been troubling me. I haven't been lying awake, craving, hoping.

We have had a good couple of days - cooking each other meals, having a bit of time together without our daughter and using it to have some useful conversations (not about PMO, mostly about raising our daughter). Feeling close. Feeling loved.

So all is positive. If we didn't have our 'only she initiates' rule, I would have cuddled my wife with hope/plan to make love. She didn't initiate, so she wasn't in the mood, so we move on.

Tonight is Sunday and that is often when her thoughts do seem to turn to love-making so maybe tonight I will have a pleasant interruption to my sleep .

ANH

 

Or maybe not.

Went to bed before my wife as usual. I awoke to pee at about 02:30. I saw that the lights were on and was surprised that my wife was still up as she had been complaining of being tired during the day. Foolishly, allowed myself to get my hopes up that she might be getting ready to join me which made me firstly horny, and secondly disappointed when 15 minutes later she just went to her room to go to sleep. Checked the iPad this morning and found she had just been watching 'Young Dracula' on YouTube.

Trying hard to fight feelings of resentment that she can stay up to do that, but was not interested in intimacy with me.
But telling myself to be patient and not to take it personally if she is not in the mood. We are in a much better place than we have been. We are making love once every 7 - 10 days. There have been plenty of periods of our marriage where it was more like once per month and during her menopause it was not at all for more than 2 years. The difference then, I guess, is that I had the unhealthy crutch of MO to get me through the long gaps. Trying hard not to be envious of the partners of some of the women here who want to make love every day . Mismatched libidos suck.

<Deep Breath>

So all I can do is keep loving her, keep demonstrating my love in the ways I know she appreciates, be patient and try to move my mind away from sex as much as possible.

ANH

 

It may sound like that, but that isn't it. Believe me, I have been in the doghouse, so I know the difference!
ANH

 

It is very satisfying when you make a plan, take a risk and it all works out as you hoped...

So, the package from the adult store arrived yesterday and I managed to hide it away so that neither my wife nor daughter were aware that anything had been delivered. While my wife was out at the shops, I opened it and gift wrapped the sexy dress and wrote a message on a gift tag. I hid the toy in my room.

Just before I went to bed, at midnight, I put the wrapped dress on my wife's bed, put her sexiest pair of heels somewhere where she would see them and without her seeing, set up the iPad she uses so that it would send her a message 30 minutes later telling her that there was a present for her on her bed. Then I went to bed and despite the obvious anticipation, managed to fall asleep.

Warning, potential triggers ahead

She woke me up wearing the dress and heels with the words 'Thank you for my present'
She looked amazing. She is a big woman and heels make her very imposing. The dress was stretchy and clung in all the right places. After more than a week since our last love making I was desperate for her and she for me. We kissed and made out passionately. In the gift tag I had told her I'd bought her a second present but not what it was. At the right point in the lovemaking I brought out the toy. Without going into details, it is something designed to arouse the woman on the receiving end. It worked. I used it to excite her and tease her. With it, I took her right to the edge and held her there while we made love. Eventually I let her have her O while I was deep inside her. From her reaction, it was a good one! [A little later, we shifted the focus to me, and mine was a good one too!].

OK, safe now

So I took a risk that she would like the gifts that I bought her and she would feel sexy in the outfit, not fat. I took a risk that she would like the toy, not think it was tacky or kinky. I took a risk that she would not see the heavy hints (new outfit, heels, promise of a second present) as pressuring her to have sex which is a no-no in our relationship. But everything was fine - better than fine.

It all depends on judging the mood, judging the moment. What the no-initiating by me rule actually means is that I can initiate but it has to be subtle and I have to be pretty sure she is in the mood first.

I think most women like to feel loved and desired. As long as she is in the right mood, the lust she can see I have for her, the way I look at her with longing and desperation is a good thing - a welcome validation that she really is desirable and that the body she is often unhappy with is enough to turn me into a drooling animal who would crawl over broken glass to make love to her.

So in the right mood, the gifts were the right gifts, the preparations I had made (choosing and buying the gifts in secret, wrapping the dress, sending the message) were seen as me making an effort, thinking of her, demonstrating my love. If she had been in the wrong mood, it could all have gone horribly wrong but it didn't. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

So a happy post from me today.

ANH

 

I wish he did too.
ANH

 

Hi noexcuses,

I understand your question, but we clearly don't share the same mindset.

The most revealing line in your post is "To me it seems unfair to so drastically change the "terms" of a relationship." That suggests that you think the marriage vows should read something along the lines of: "...from this day forward, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you still look hot." I have known my wife for 32 years and we have been together for 30. If you put pictures of how we were in 1985 against how we are in 2017 - guess what - we look older and no longer in our prime. If you measure people against an artificial gold standard of youthful physical attractiveness (which society often does for women) then neither of us has "improved" in that time. Any male-pattern-baldness fetishists out there want to disagree?

But surely a relationship is built on more than waist to hip ratio and BMI? Don't personality, intellect, behaviour, sense of humour etc. count for rather more? And these things endure. That's before you factor in 32 years of shared experiences, life goals and understanding.

Why do I find my wife physically attractive even though she's put on weight? Because I love her, you dummy!! There is a song from the 1920's called "That's my weakness now" that sums it up pretty well. To quote just one verse:

She's got dimpled cheeks;
I never cared for dimpled cheeks,
But she's got dimpled cheeks,
And that's my weakness now!

Making love to her now excites me just as much as it did when she was 21. Not because I have failing eyesight, or because we do it with the lights out or because I close my eyes and imagine she is younger and slimmer: none of those are true. But because I love her with all my heart. The female body is a wonderful thing - the adventure playground to end all adventure playgrounds - and that is true whether or not it is carrying a few extra pounds. I hope to be still making love to her when she is 81 and that my final breath is perfumed with the scent of her body.

ANH