I Live In a Sexless Marriage
When you are in a sexless marriage you are pinned to a board like a butterfly. You are not allowed to live as a complete person because you are being denied the essential part of you that is your sexuality. If that goes on for a very long time it causes a lot of damage to you because it harms you in many ways. It tears apart your self esteem and turns your ego into a ghost that wanders though life looking for any tiny expression of love or affection. In a long term sexless marriage I think you can eventually forget who you once were.
These days I know that I am changed from the energetic happy man I was long ago. Part of it is due to ageing I'm sure but part of it is due to living with someone who is emotionally dead. When you have no one to share living with or to join you in being excited about life it drains away the energy of life from you. You end up becoming very passive and empty eventually with little emotion because you simply lose the ability to feel. Its very much like building up calluses a thick barrier of protection that you have acquired over the years to protect the inner self from destruction. But as that barrier grows it becomes more difficult for you to remain in touch with those feelings and emotions that bare being protected.
But the shell is brittle and it can be cracked by unexpected things and when that happens you can get overwhelmed by what lies within. Behind that dam that we build pressure builds up and even tiny cracks can release unexpected torrents that we are unprepared to deal with. Often anger is the first thing that seeps through a bit of righteous indignation can fuel a big fire. Sometimes that is enough to start the process of change for some people others patch the dam and try to keep the pressure under control but it will keep building.
The awful thing about a sexless marriage is that you have constant proof in your face every day that you are unloved. Constant rejection because how could someone claim to love you and yet be unwilling to share their body with you in the most intimate experience that two people are capable of? That simply does not add up it says they do not love you all the way, they do not love you enough to care about your pleasure or well being and that is the ultimate in rejection from someone that is supposed to be your other half of a two part relationship. They are slapping you in the face with this constantly and that kind of rejection is damnably harmful to a persons well being both mental and physical.
Some people become so beaten down by this that they never truly recover and they will end their days as a shadow of themselves having allowed themselves to be destroyed by someone who didn't love them all the way. Others will become angry and rebel and seek love elsewhere but still try and maintain the fiction of marriage for whatever reasons that they have decided that they need to. The third group will act to free themselves and become whole again.
It is my belief that we can be independent and whole people and love each other without owning each other. But in order to do that we must understand that loving and owning are not compatible. We must also understand that it is possible to love more than one person. Jealousy is a terrible thing that destroys many relationships because people want to own each other they want exclusive rights to each other. If both people agree to that then it is fine but it is not the only way to live and it is a narrow way to live that keeps people from loving other people who could bring richness to their lives.
It takes a mature mind to understand that because I love someone else does not mean that I love you less. But for some reason humans are very competitive and especially about sex they seem to think that our biological urges must be owned which is a primitive sort of instinct that we should be able to overcome with intellectual power. But instinct is powerful and hormones have much more power over us than we would like to think they do.
There are experiments going on and there always have been with multiple partnerships and sometimes they seem to work for a while but they often crash and burn due to rivalries that develop as competition for affection rears its ugly head.
When I was young I fell under the influence of Robert Heinlein's ideas about how people could possibly live in the future. He laid out a picture that fascinated me of a family group of adults that lived together who were married and had sex with each other as they wished but without a defined one on one kind of thing such as we do. The men and women just had sex with each other as the mood struck them and there were no refusals that would have been considered very bad manners. The children of the family were all raised by the "family" and were parented quite firmly by all of the adults and were very well supervised and educated by the "family" and when they became adults they found a mate and became part of another "family" with the option of starting a new group or joining the other persons"family" but there was a certain amount of genetic screening going on to make sure that everyone stayed genetically healthy which made sense. It was a sort of Utopian dream but it did contain things that I think we could learn from in our own culture.
I believe that we would be much better of if we could separate the ideas of love and ownership. One is not the other. I do not have to own you to love you. If I love you I should be happy to allow you to be free and vice versa if we truly love each other we should be able to be free and the love should be able to exist without ownership. But it would require I think some changes in the way that we define love. But that may require a next step in human evolution. This is what you get when you read too many books and spend too much time thinking.
These days I know that I am changed from the energetic happy man I was long ago. Part of it is due to ageing I'm sure but part of it is due to living with someone who is emotionally dead. When you have no one to share living with or to join you in being excited about life it drains away the energy of life from you. You end up becoming very passive and empty eventually with little emotion because you simply lose the ability to feel. Its very much like building up calluses a thick barrier of protection that you have acquired over the years to protect the inner self from destruction. But as that barrier grows it becomes more difficult for you to remain in touch with those feelings and emotions that bare being protected.
But the shell is brittle and it can be cracked by unexpected things and when that happens you can get overwhelmed by what lies within. Behind that dam that we build pressure builds up and even tiny cracks can release unexpected torrents that we are unprepared to deal with. Often anger is the first thing that seeps through a bit of righteous indignation can fuel a big fire. Sometimes that is enough to start the process of change for some people others patch the dam and try to keep the pressure under control but it will keep building.
The awful thing about a sexless marriage is that you have constant proof in your face every day that you are unloved. Constant rejection because how could someone claim to love you and yet be unwilling to share their body with you in the most intimate experience that two people are capable of? That simply does not add up it says they do not love you all the way, they do not love you enough to care about your pleasure or well being and that is the ultimate in rejection from someone that is supposed to be your other half of a two part relationship. They are slapping you in the face with this constantly and that kind of rejection is damnably harmful to a persons well being both mental and physical.
Some people become so beaten down by this that they never truly recover and they will end their days as a shadow of themselves having allowed themselves to be destroyed by someone who didn't love them all the way. Others will become angry and rebel and seek love elsewhere but still try and maintain the fiction of marriage for whatever reasons that they have decided that they need to. The third group will act to free themselves and become whole again.
It is my belief that we can be independent and whole people and love each other without owning each other. But in order to do that we must understand that loving and owning are not compatible. We must also understand that it is possible to love more than one person. Jealousy is a terrible thing that destroys many relationships because people want to own each other they want exclusive rights to each other. If both people agree to that then it is fine but it is not the only way to live and it is a narrow way to live that keeps people from loving other people who could bring richness to their lives.
It takes a mature mind to understand that because I love someone else does not mean that I love you less. But for some reason humans are very competitive and especially about sex they seem to think that our biological urges must be owned which is a primitive sort of instinct that we should be able to overcome with intellectual power. But instinct is powerful and hormones have much more power over us than we would like to think they do.
There are experiments going on and there always have been with multiple partnerships and sometimes they seem to work for a while but they often crash and burn due to rivalries that develop as competition for affection rears its ugly head.
When I was young I fell under the influence of Robert Heinlein's ideas about how people could possibly live in the future. He laid out a picture that fascinated me of a family group of adults that lived together who were married and had sex with each other as they wished but without a defined one on one kind of thing such as we do. The men and women just had sex with each other as the mood struck them and there were no refusals that would have been considered very bad manners. The children of the family were all raised by the "family" and were parented quite firmly by all of the adults and were very well supervised and educated by the "family" and when they became adults they found a mate and became part of another "family" with the option of starting a new group or joining the other persons"family" but there was a certain amount of genetic screening going on to make sure that everyone stayed genetically healthy which made sense. It was a sort of Utopian dream but it did contain things that I think we could learn from in our own culture.
I believe that we would be much better of if we could separate the ideas of love and ownership. One is not the other. I do not have to own you to love you. If I love you I should be happy to allow you to be free and vice versa if we truly love each other we should be able to be free and the love should be able to exist without ownership. But it would require I think some changes in the way that we define love. But that may require a next step in human evolution. This is what you get when you read too many books and spend too much time thinking.
By:
Warriorpoett
Age:
56-60
,
Male
