carolynkl

As I was waiting for my partner to get off the phone with her mother, I picked up a copy of our local newspaper. I was scrolling through, I saw an interesting headline in the advice column entitled "Woman Sees Intimacy as Unnecessary." I read it and was more than a little appalled by what I saw.
The woman seeking advice told the story of her husband, Danny. He was, by her account, a sweet and upstanding man to whom she’d been married to for almost 40 years. He does chores around the house, maintains a yard that is the "envy of the neighborhood," and treats her like a queen. Her problem is that he expects sex once a week:

"Since Day One, I would submit to him because I believed it was my duty, but after 37 years, I consider sex an unnecessary task. When I turn him down, Danny gets depressed and mopes around the house for days."

She concluded that she couldn’t imagine her life without her husband and she just wanted to figure out a way to explain to him that even though she doesn’t want to be intimate, she loved him dearly. The response struck me:

"Please don’t do this. Danny has been a full partner in your marriage. You should be one too, and sex is part of that. When you love someone, you accommodate them in ways that make them happy, whether you get anything out of it or ...