u/ThrowAway220989

We've been together for almost 4 years and he's a great partner, but I'd really like us to work on our sex life. We've tried couples therapy but he gets so clammed up and embarrassed about sex that conversations are just dead ends. He's supposed to be working through his sex-embarrassment in individual therapy but it's been over a year since he's seen his therapist. No history of SA or CSA.

For context, my partner isn't asexual. He loves sex and will have it as much as I want to (within reason and with consent of course) and he's amazing at it. But he is so reserved. NEVER initiates, I've never received a sexy text, random sexual groping/touching, any verbal representation that he's horny/aroused, or dick pics or literally anything indicating spontaneous sexual arousal/desire. It's like our sex life is entirely my job/in my control because he's too afraid/shy/embarrassed about his own sexuality that he simply doesn't express it unless I coax it out of him.

It makes it really hard to talk about sex, give feedback about what I like / dislike, signal that it's okay to initiate or that I'm in the mood... Ultimately it feels like our sex life simply won't exist at all unless I do all of the steering, organizing, planning, arousing, etc. and his commitment to not being embarrassed or rejected always trumping my that I need more active demonstration of his desire is really wearing me down.

We've had numerous convos about this over the years in and out of therapy. I know people's relationships with sex are deeply intimate and hard to untangle, and that he's trying. Not looking to break up or anything because he is a beautiful partner and when we do have sex, the sex is amazing (!!!!!).

How do I navigate his sex-neutrality? Has anyone here been with a partner who is this averse to sexual vulnerability & expression?

May not be super polished since I'm on lunch. I work at an F500, and our company announced we were being acquired a year ago. It's been hell since then.

My team has always been small and understaffed. We had an onsite last May where the written feedback from all 4 of us (3 senior managers + me, a senior analyst at the time) was that we took on way too much work, the workflows are disorganized, the work ends up being useless/unapplied, and we need more headcount. Our team lead (director) agrees - every team meeting she echoes the sentiment and vents/complains with us. But nothing changes.

Things got worse after the acquisition - 2 of the 3 senior managers left for other roles and the remaining senior manager was moved to a different team. Instead of backfilling the 3 senior manager roles, they promoted me to manager and hired a new grad/analyst. So it's been our director, me, and an analyst running the ops for the last 8 months.

But to make matters worse, the work has probably doubled in the same time span. The budgets of the teams we provide reports to (mostly marketing) ballooned, so they have hammered us with double the amount of projects.

I've said taking on this level of work with limited capacity after the brain drain of losing SMs who had been here 5, 6 years each is unsustainable and unworkable in team meetings and weekly 1:1s with my manager. She will agree, vent herself about how burnt out she is, how overwhelming the workload is, how unreasonable the deadlines are, how she finds it hard to say no, etc.. then literally adds more. She says yes to every single new project request. Never pushes back, never load manages, doesn't even hint to upper management that we are a skeleton crew and can't feasibly do this volume of work.

I've said I'm at limited capacity multiple times to my manager, and her response is consistently: "can you just get the analyst to do it?" The analyst has no training in the work that I do - she was hired for an entirely separate function and skillset. To train her to do the task would take more time than the task. Manager will respond to this: "Well let me know if I can do anything" but nothing short of her literally doing the projects end to end or... not accepting them would really help here.

I'm not sure how to more firmly push back on the workload when my manager is really frantic/last minute/forgetful/disorganized herself and seemingly has no ability to resource manage for our team to upper management. I'm already interviewing for other roles, but for my health and sanity in the meantime, what advice do ya'll have here?