Reply to Does the Husband backing off and giving space help

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Couple thoughts:
1) This is an overgeneralization, but it does tend to break down along gender lines: for men, sex is a stress reliever. For women, they need to be relaxed to get in the mood. Often culture and gender roles dictate that women should be the "pleaser." It does turn sex into just another job for women, another obligation -- to be a good wife, I have to provide X. That's hard when the To Do list is ten million items long and never going to shrink.
2) How much time does your wife get to herself, without work or family obligations? A woman who doesn't have time to work out, see friends, unwind and do nothing isn't going to have a lot of extra energy left to give. I think this is a common situation for women with multiple young children and work. No opportunity to replenish.
3) It sounds to me like the lifestyle issues have sucked the romance and intimacy out of your marriage. That's really tough. You have to work to shift the whole structure of your lives to put more of that back in -- time for herself and time for the marriage. This isn't going to be something that's solved over night with you taking a different approach to sex or just talking. Think of it as a simple fuel issue. The tank has been running on empty for a long time. Any additional activity that doesn't fill the tank but empties it isn't going to be very successful at this time.
4) I think you need to position yourself, for the long term, as a teammate. Can you hire help to take some of the special needs child's needs off your wife's plate? Can you figure out ways to take her other duties off? If a man were working a very stressful job in past decades, he would have expected to come home and be waited on hand and foot. He would never be in charge of anything that had to do with restocking the kids' clothes, school stuff, their health needs, family's social life, vacation planning, household . . . the list goes on and on. The situation now is that many women do that work and then come hoe and are faced with a second job. 
5) If you do that for a month or two, you'll be in a different position to have a talk with her. Tell her how much you want to keep helping with all this, to make a more manageable and fun family life for everyone. Tell her you want her needs to be met. etc. If she finds that helper and friend in you, it'll be easier for her to open up and talk about her needs, hear your needs, start to feel connected again. 
[/quote]

NP - but this just seems unsustainable. My guess is that OP is stretched pretty thin as well. To expect that he can take his existing burdens, put all of this other stuff on his back indefinitely, and maybe, hopefully, at some point, have his wife regain a bit of her sex drive just seems a little ambitious. I'd have a hard time trusting that it would do any good. [/quote]

I’m am not the previous poster, but does this really seem unsustainable to you?  Consider her perspective, take care of your kids on your own sometimes, think of your spouse as a teammate.   
It just looks to me like someone advocating for a shift in perspective to treat your wife as an equal instead of as an employee who isn’t up to the task.  [/quote]

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