When a Sexless Partner Changes his Mind
Whenever people speak about wanting their partner to change, it’s usually with an air of half-resignation that their partner won’t (or can’t). Yet I have discovered that when the impossible happens and a partner does start changing their attitude and behavior, it’s not quite as easy an adjustment as I had originally thought.
In my situation, my partner of eleven years has been uninterested in pursuing a physical relationship with me. I actually wrote a piece about this entitled “Living with a Sexless Partner” that generated with quite a few people. I had been unaware up until that time that there were other couples whom were together but living uncomfortably and painfully with the silent rejection of their partner because of his/her lack of intimacy interest. I’d never known before how common it is.
But now, my partner has become immensely more awake in his awareness of my loneliness and he’s taken the steps to prove it. The problem is, it’s such a turn around and one that I really never thought could happen at this stage of the game, that it’s taking me awhile to adjust to it.
He’s no longer sexless, you see, and this has become a difficult re-adjustment for me.
I shouldn’t be so hard on myself really: for after spending over a decade waiting for him to show some sexual interest, it would be the normal thing for anyone to look at this new behavior with a kind of suspicion and awkwardness. Did I think that if and when he would change that things would automatically ease into being? I certainly did and I was dead wrong. Maybe for others it has happened that way but for me, it’s kind of bringing up all sorts of stuff. Like…
All of a sudden he’s accepting my body?
Now he’s okay with kissing?
He wants me to experience orgasms-before him?
He’s talking about including and using, a vibrator on me?
Who is this man?
We’ve been intimidate the past two weeks more than we have in ten years and I find myself lying there almost frantically trying to get my mind to hurry up my body. But the reality of it is that there was an awfully long time between no-attention to this now-there is-attention, and I’m just not equipped with a turn on/turn off button. For so long I’ve had to deal with the particular ache that comes with living with this situation that I’m having quite a bit of difficuly in accepting that this is real. I think that it is, if I can believe what I see but emotionally I’m still kind of working my way through it.
The feelings I have are feelings of confusion, hopefulness, suspicion, awkwardness, some slowly developing desire and something else that I can’t quite define at the moment. Since this is all so new for me, I’ll let you know what happens as we proceed along. I’m sure there are other women who are experiencing the same thing.