TLDR: When I go to bed, or wake up, my partner almost 100% of the time initiates sex. The frequency, and the pouting and tantrums around it, are a turn-off and makes me upset that I’m not allowed to just rest. How do couples set expectations around bed behavior?
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I have been lucky (or avoidant) to live alone or with housemates up until this year. Sure I’ve had long-term relationships where we spend a lot of time at each other’s house. However, this arrangement is proving extra-difficult.
Our place is a loft with very little privacy, and we are both here almost all the time (he goes into an office about 12 hours a week). I’m used to my home being a sanctuary, where I can relax and rest and I don’t have to be “on.” (yes speaking introvert here).
When it comes time to go to bed, and when we wake up, he wants intimacy. Like a full sloppy make-out session, ideally leading to sex, but at minimum very intense kissing and gazing into each other’s eyes.
But I usually want to either watch TV (and cuddle!), or read and try to fall asleep. In the morning, I like to grab a cup of coffee and if I am alone, I get back into bed with my dog and read emails to start the day. Side note, I’m not sleeping well because I am a light sleeper – his dog jumps on my side probably 5x a night, he pulls the covers or makes a noise, last night I woke up because it started raining harder! I’ve tried earplugs but they freak me out because I worry I won’t hear something happening and wake up when I need to (have lived through a couple emergencies like that). So I’m desperate for sleep to the point that I drive out to our cabin every week to get one or two nights alone. If I say I’m going to sleep on the couch then I get a big ultimatum about how he doesn’t want that kind of relationship. Which I find selfish (it’s actual torture to get no sleep) and reinforces my feeling that he just won’t leave me alone, and I have very little space or time to myself anymore.
So -now my bed is like a battleground of fragile man emotions. I feel the pressure the moment I start walking toward bed, which as you might imagine is frustrating when you are actually tired and done with the day.
If I don’t immediately switch gears and go along with what he is initiating, he pouts and tells me I am crushing his ego and his self-worth. Why am I even with him if I am so repelled by him. Etc. It’s a whole spiral. He can’t seem to put the brakes on it.
This weekend morning he reached for me, and I said “Hey, is it ok with you if today I just relax a little bit? and read?” He got up, went into the other room, then came back and picked an angry fight with me about some insignificant stuff from the night before. So angry for hours, that I had to leave the house and lost a whole day of work, time in my studio (also in the loft, also no freaking walls), time I needed to get ready for an event the next day, etc.
I am up for intimacy after dinner, maybe after I’ve had a bath or a little back rub in the evening. We’ve discussed with a counselor that he tends to use intimacy to soothe himself or relieve anxiety, while I need to relax and wind down first, in order to be ready to be intimate. I also hate feeling like a fleshlight or sex dispenser on demand.
I think it’s fine to just masturbate if you’re in the mood, but again we really have no privacy, so even that turns into something that isn’t neutral (like I have to choose whether to ignore him, or get up and leave which feels more judgmental than I really am, but I also don’t want to have to drop what I am doing, snap to attention and become part of what he is doing, either).
I’m more of a 3-4x a week person. Definitely not twice a day, which is what he says he considers normal. I am also sensitive to certain factors – I don’t really want to do 20 minutes of tongue kissing with someone who has morning breath and has to be told to even rinse his mouth. Or someone who hasn’t showered and reeks of sweat (he’s a lot bigger than me). I also have some physical fears and panic triggers from having a large man on top of me, or having someone breathing heavily in my face and I can’t move away (thanks Covid!) He is trying vaguely to have better hygiene (I had to buy him deodorant) and be considerate of the breathing but it certainly hasn’t all gone away.
In a way that I consider immature at best and coercive at worst, he is totally insecure about this, even if we are already having sex about every other day. There is no humor, acceptance, we’ll get to it tomorrow, etc. just immediately he’s in emotional pain from the rejection and lashing out at me. Everything is a trigger for Mr. Sensitive/ Anxious.
He’s broken up with a partner in the past (who he is otherwise super compatible with and is still friends with) over a similar situation. We both love each other and feel lucky to have found each other, and want to make this work, but also I can see if the dual issue of 1) coercion/manipulation and 2) unregulated emotions that then get blamed on me doesn’t actually change or improve, that I can’t really put up with living like that in the long-term. I would love if we could have separate homes again. But in this economy… unlikely that will happen unless we prioritize that for the survival of this relationship. Again that’s “not the relationship he wants to be in” either.
It’s easy to say throw the whole man away. Believe me, I have in the past.
We are compatible in many other ways, and I don’t expect to find a perfect partner. We have tried counseling and I am signing us back up – it at least gives us a place to talk about this stuff, though we tend to go around and around without getting anywhere. He’s now in therapy at my insistence and after a month’s separation, and I am hoping that will eventually shore up his self-worth.
It’s like we’re trapped in a bad cycle where he is pursuing and I am retreating – I have to say no to him 2/3rd of the time, because he is asking so constantly. So I feel pressured and annoyed (not sexy).
I had to train him not to ask me during the workday (so rude, as if I’m not working) and not to just repeat it over and over throughout the day at random times (yes, he is on the spectrum). I have tried to say, please back off and let me initiate when I am ready. He still feels resentful then because he is “never” getting what he wants, even if in actuality we are still having sex 3-4x a week. He also likes to randomly say it doesn’t count, if he changes mood during it for example, so at the end of the week, according to him we didn’t have sex at all, when to me, doing penetrative sex even if nobody comes, or other levels beyond kissing for 20 minutes, definitely counts.
So! I guess I am asking, how do people share a bed? How do you settle on what is a safe space to rest vs. a place and time to initiate sex?
I already had to make a rule – no fighting or discussions in bed. Imagine how annoying that was, so often I had to make a rule!
I would love to settle down to – this is where we sleep first and foremost. Then secondly we can add intimacy in. But not assuming anytime I touch the bed, then it’s go time.