Dreams

I love dreams. I have always had a very active and vivid dream life. My dreams are often a window to my inner self. That has certainly been the case this week. Last weekend I, again, came to the conclusion that no matter how much I love my wife, the relationship will not work. I have such a hard time letting go. My wife is a part of me. I have been with her most of my life. I do not think about, fantasize about or really desire other women. My head is constantly full of thoughts, desires and images of my wife. So the thought of ending this relationship is traumatic. I realize that I am not the first person to have gone through this, but it seems no less catastrophic because of that.

Naturally this has invaded my dream life. My wife has always been in a large percentage of my dreams and my dreams are usually erotic in nature. Or at least those are the ones that I remember. This week I have not been sleeping well and having several dreams a night. Interestingly I am not very present in these dreams. In most of them I am an unobserved observer. They have been quite erotic and along a wide spectrum on a continuum of my wife being engaged with other men. This has, for a long time, been my most vivid and exciting fantasy. While it is not unusual for the fantasy to invade my dreams it is of a different nature now. While these dreams still seem to be very erotic they also tend to evoke a good deal of sadness.

One of the first dreams I had this week, she was only partially in view. She was being fucked from behind but the person fucking her was obscured by a wall. She had on a necklace and I could just barely see an orange skirt bunched up around her waist. I could see her bra on the floor. The clothing created a strong sense of sadness because they indicated that she had been out for the kind of evening that she likes. It also made me sad that these were cloths that I did not recognize. She was obviously enjoying what was being done to her. Her eyes were shut and she was biting her bottom lip. She was beautiful. I never saw the man.

Last night she appeared in a very sheer green floral print blouse with a rounded yoke. The double material where the yoke hung over the blouse was not sheer but the yoke did not come down far enough to completely cover her breasts, which were erotically exposed. Obviously this was a very enticing sight and I felt hopeful. She did not interact with me but seemed annoyed by my presence. She went into the bathroom and came out with a very different and even sheerer blouse. This one was white linen. It too had a yoke but it was rectangular. This was not at all sexy, only because under the blouse she had put on one of the tee shirts that she runs in. The linen shirt was so sheer that the small writing on the tee shirt could easily be read. It occurred to me that these shirts had been intended for another man, she had put the tee shirt on because I was there.

One of the results of these restless nights has been that I wake up touching her. Normally I sleep well separated on my side of the bed. This is not the first time that I have come this point in our relationship and the same thing has happened in the past. The reason that we keep getting to this point is because I am unwilling to leave my children and I cannot stop craving her intimacy. So, each time I convince myself that there is hope, despite a complete lack of any evidence to the contrary. I know that I should sleep in another room but the fact is that I go to sleep hoping that I will touch her in my sleep. Unfortunately, despite our estrangement, this contact is nothing more than an annoyance to her. It is, after all, this level of detachment that has always been the problem.

This blog would be much more interesting if I could get her to respond here, but again she is way too detached to be able to do that. Sitting at the computer reading about emotions would be her definition of torture. The only thing that could be more grueling than that would be to have to reply. Several days ago I told her about the old story that I had posted that was basically a fantasy about her. She perfunctorily said, “I will read it tomorrow, when I’m not so tiered.” I had not told her about the story because I expected her to read it. But nonetheless this is exactly in the oh so repetitive pattern of things that drives me nuts. She said that she would do something that she knew full well that she would not, just to try to stop the conversation. I left the blog up on the lap top in bed for her the next couple of nights so that she could read it if she wanted to. Of course she did not. In my opinion this completely lacks integrity. Though I am the most frequent recipient of avoidance, I am not the only one. She does it to her mother all the time and even to her children on occasion, though they don’t let her get away with it. Few other people get close enough to warrant this level of avoidance. I may see if I can get some level of response out of her. In my life I have written hundreds, probably thousands, of pages pleading with her to connect emotionally and erotically to our relationship. The response has been very scarce.

Okay, I have to avoid obsessing on the pity party of my failed relationship. But I do want to let it provide some direction for this investigation into the impact of libido on relationship. I suspect that my wife's fear of intimacy went beyond just being an issue of low libido. Low libido creates a lack of desire but not necessarily fear or anxiety. But lets look at the other end of the spectrum for just a bit. I have been hanging out at a swingers site lately. I love the idea of free and open sexuality, but I have found that my ideas along these lines are different than most swingers. For swingers this seems not to be a decision based on ideas of freedom; It seems to be a drive. Often swingers have very conservative ideas about many aspects of personal and social freedom, but they do a great job of justifying sexual abandonment within the boundaries of the swinger's lifestyle. Specifically swingers are a high libido couple. It seems that there are lots of men who have libidos large enough to motivate them to abandon normal cultural conventions about open sexuality. Women seem to be the limiting factor here. In a recent study 33% of women reported being low libido. I'm not sure what percentage of women have high enough libidos to encourage them into a swinger's lifestyle but I think that those who do have that kind of libido end up going there.

While I would love to have had plurality in my marriage, I think that this was driven by ideology and not libido, which has a very different cognitive make up. Then again, I suspect that if my wife had had a high libido that I would have blended in just fine.

Another interesting aspect of the swinger lifestyle is that a preponderance of women who are bisexual. But very few swinger men report being bisexual. My guess is that if you could get men to report honestly that a higher % would qualify as bi. I base this on the fact that at this swinger's site there are separate groups that you can belong to. The majority of the men in the "couples with Bi men" group do not list themselves as bi. Across the board a very high percentage of swinger women report being bi. some time soon I will do a random sample of 20 women from this site and see howm many report being bisexual.

Again I think that this has a lot to do with libido. I have always be significantly hetero to the degree that I don't look at men sexually, I don't have sexual dreams about men, I can use thoughts of naked men as a means of ridding myself of an inappropriate hard on (not that I think that hard ons should ever be inappropriate.) But early in life I decided that I loved being attracted to women and wouldn't it be great if I could be attracted to men in that same way. In fact, I reasoned, it would be twice as good. So I was always open to the idea of being bisexual but could never really figure out how to illicit those feelings and finally gave up on it. Then unexpectedly a friend and I were seduced by his wife who drove us to an extreme state of arousal, and when put in the situation I was able to suck his cock. Then several years later I had an MFM relationship with a woman and her husband. There was never anything more than incidental contact between the men in this relationship until one night when we were all very excited she asked me to go down on her while her husband was fucking her. Though at first more than a little reluctant, this experience ended up being one of the most erotic encounters of my life.

When the libido gets supercharged, new and surprising things become possible. Some people have libidos that supercharge easily and frequently, others are not quite so easily there. I know that I have been surprised by my own ability to expand sexual horizons in times of extreme excitment. My hope had always been to get my wife to these points in an effort to allow the doors to open for her. But she had such a phobia that she would fight with all of her might to avoid these circumstances. The few times that she was in those situations, it appeared that her demeanor would change, she would become engaged, responsive and even initiating. She would later deny having such feelings or responses. While she would admit that a lack of desire for kissing, being touched, oral sex and the rest of the range of sexual appetite was a problem, she would not take responsibility for addressing the problem. If she had admitted to being aroused at times, she would have had to bring attention to those feelings which is exactly what terrified her. By denying ever having sexual feelings she could blame everything on being a low libido that she had no control over.

Can someone overcome a low libido by finding ways of more frequently and easily arousing themselves? This is basically what the whole sensate approach is about. In my opinion this is an inadequate approach in that it is only likely to illicit a predictably low level of arousal. What is needed for transformation are extreme levels of arousal. This would require sexual behaviors that go further beyond sexual norms than are likely to be acceptable within the highly regimented and controlled field of psychology. In the annals of sexual anecdotes it is not uncommon to read about women who were low, or at least lower, libido who, after having an extreme sexual experience, usually with someone that they are not already accustomed to, and often in the range of things that are more perverse than normal straight sex, and there after had heightened sexual appetites. I am not prepared to suggest that this is anything more than male sexual fantasy but it seems possible to have merit as a means of true sexual transformation.

It seems that self confidence can play a role in this too. Women, regardless of looks or intelligence who have a high level of sexual self confidence tend to have higher libidos. This could be because they have more means of arousing their libidos. Through such means as flirting or exhibitionism some women can engage in a process that allows them to raise their level of excitement. My wife, in addition to being brought up with very sex negative values had a traumatic pubescent period that may have scared her sexual self confidence and resulted in circumventing these processes from developing. Interestingly she always showed signs of exhibitionism being a possibility for her. Sexy clothing was one of the few things that i could get her to engage in. It was more like something that she tolerated than something that she enjoyed herself. But given the range of things that she would not even tolerate and the ease with which she would wear very sheer clothing, I believe that this was a crack in the thick brick wall around her erotic nature. A couple of times that she was in situations in which she was with other men and clearly excited she was much more bold in her nakedness. Unfortunately she would never acknowledge the feelings. Though she could not deny the behaviors, as I was there she would remain silent when asked about them. That door was shut tight and locked.

Onward Through the Blog

I hope to devote more time to this blog, though I’m not sure where that time will come from. Among other things I am interested in the impact of libido and sexuality on the mechanics of relationships. While I have always had this interest, it is heightened by the failing of my marriage. Though the anecdotal information from my marriage may drive some of this inquiry, one thing that I have become aware of is the wide range of experiences that all couples and partners have in this regard. Even within the narrowest of ranges, this is not a single variable. It is at least two variable, for we are talking about the intersection of at least two libidos. And of course libido is itself a complex of variables much more so than a single variable. So basically we are taking about chaos.

I realize that this approach is neither tantalizingly sexual nor academically objective. I am sliding into the void between those distant domains. Though spacious, this void is not likely to draw many readers. I will content myself with my own mental masturbation and the occasional visitor, who I hope will say hello.

I am also interested in many aspects of social arrangements. As attempts at intimacy in my marriage ends, the relationship does not. For one thing, I have no intention of leaving the home that my children live in until they are off to college. So I have another five years in which to live with my wife. Does this mean that I will not be able to embark on other relationships? It seems that this forced celibacy only serves to drive parents away from their children. If I were to become involved in another relationship this would be viewed as adultery. Open marriages are easier when they only involve secondary relationships, which are much easier to be kept covert. There are those who would suggest an abandonment of convention. But as much as I may disagree with many of societies silly rules, I am not willing to embrace the isolation of complete independence.

Because I deeply love my wife and crave her body and intimacy with her, trying to live in this situation is a turmoil of anxiety and frustration. Nonetheless, she does not share these components of a relationship, which is the reason for the divide. I can no longer convince myself that the door to intimacy and desire can be opened for her. From my perspective this is largely because she is unwilling to admit that it should be opened. She has a sort of intimacy Atticism that makes her afraid of, and numb to, adult intimacy. This intimacy Atticism is manifested in behaviors like displeasure in kissing, touching her even close to her clitoris brings her knees together, and she cannot talk about any level of feelings. When such topics are brought up she has a hard time providing even single syllable responses and immediately changes the subject. Discussions of fantasies and erotic desires are like science fiction to her. She just cannot relate to such things. Though she can have an orgasm with a vibrator, that skill came late in life and it happens very mechanically with not mental or imaginative connection. She seems to need to clear her head of such distractions before her body can respond to the impact of the vibrator.

Under the assumption that this wasthe result of conditioning from a sex negative catholic upbringing, I have tried everything to draw her out. While there have been times that my hopes have been raised, this was always false hope. It is gut-wrenching to give up on this relationship but, at this point, I have to admit that there are physical impediments to her ability to express or enjoy intimacy. Unfortunately there are also physical impediments to my ability to live without intimacy.

Sadly there are significant resentments that are unavoidable. For my part, I resent that she never took the responsibility to communicate to me that this would never be possible. But of course it is that exact inability to communicate on that level that is the source of the problem. But I cannot help but feel that she had to recognize that my anxiety and sadness were being fueled by false hopes that she was feeding.

Right now I am trying to figure out how to negotiate my feelings. For example last night she woke me up because I was lying snuggled up next to her. This is not something that I normally do, but I guess that my loneliness must have invaded my sleep consciousness. This is difficult because while I would totally rejoice if she had physical desire for me, even if only in her sleep, to her this was an annoyance.

After years of this level of rejection, I am ready to move on. Pathetically, despite my idealistic believe in expanded intimacy and plural love, I am basically a rather profound monogamist, at least to the extent that I fit snuggly into a primary relationship. All of my sexual fantasies and desires center on her. I crave nothing some much as to crave someone other than her.