It’s been three months without sex even though we plan for it every week but he’s had sex at least twice with strangers.
I’m in my late 30s, he’s 40. After becoming parents, we started scheduling sex as part of weekly date nights. At first it worked. Lately, though, he’s usually the one saying, should we just not tonight? He’ll say he’s tired, has an early morning, or suggest other things that loosely count as sex but are not really sex IMO.
The problem is the moment I sense he’s not fully into it, I shut down. I have ADHD and pretty bad rejection sensitivity, so I’d rather immediately agree than feel like I’m convincing someone to want me. It’s hard to explain, but once I get even a hint of reluctance, I lose the ability to want it too. Sometimes I also just don’t have the energy to turn it into a discussion.
What complicates this is that we’re open-ish. He travels for work occasionally and I’ve never really minded if he hooks up with someone while away. I genuinely didn’t think it affected our relationship. But lately I’ve started wondering if he’s become too comfortable with our sexual dynamics because he still has sex elsewhere. If we skip sex for another week, it genuinely doesn’t seem to bother him.
Outside of this, he’s very affectionate and we are intimate in other ways. But it’s still not sex. When we do have sex, it’s good. Which honestly makes this harder to understand.
I can’t tell if this is just what long term relationships look like or if I should be worried but I’m not happy. Somehow the solution doesn’t seem as easy as taking the lead and initiating because I do as part of our scheduled sex. The strange thing is we never had this before becoming open-ish, not that I think that’s the main problem. What I can’t understand is that we used to have frequent great sex and sex was never the problem in our relationship until now. How do I stop this weird pattern?