Lived Experience Forum

[suzanne]

Hi @Appleblossom, I do so hope there is a Mr or Ms Right (enough) out there for you!  Is the baggage your referring to yours or theirs?  The combination of the two has got to be one of the most challenging aspects of relationships in our more 'mature' years.

[Mazarita]

The relationship with my partner has been going for about 13 years. After the first ecstatic few months of sexual connection, (with the associated romance chemicals surging through us both), our sex life basically went downhill over some years. It got to the point where I felt like I was being abused in our sexual life. What a terrible thing to feel with the person you love the most in the whole world. It's too complicated to explain the intricacies of these feelings. Some of it may have been based on a basic level of incompatability in sexual styles and approaches between my partner and I. But for me, after some sexual abuse issues in the past, sex between us became traumatic. Subsequently, it became traumatic for my partner to engage with sex for me too and we stopped sleeping in the same bed about 5 years ago. This has improved our general relations with each other as it has taken the pressure off. To compensate, we are very affectionate with each other, hugging a lot and being generally very loving towards each other in our everyday lives. Over the past six months or so we attempted to reintroduce one night a week of close connection together on the bed. This did mostly lead to much more satisfactory sexual experiences, but still very tentative. Recently however even this one night has become a pressure that neither of us was able to maintain. So, at the moment, we are back to no sex but lots of hugging and affection again. I too am going through menopause, which may be complicating things further. Amazingly, we are both committed to our relationship and see ourselves together for a long time with or without sex. But I know it would be better if we could find some truly effective strategies to meet again on this level. Sorry for the long rave, it's hard to discuss this without specific details and I've kept this very general compared to how complicated the feelings and issues seem to be.

[suzanne]

I'm not sure that this is what you want to hear @mrkotter, but there is something very sweet about your humility.  It's just not very useful for you now.  Great to hear that you feel well enough to even contemplate a new relationship.  Scary but hopefully fun times ahead.

Eye contact is a great gauge.  Someone who likes you will usually engage in lots of eye contact.  They are the ones to bust out your best moves on 🙂  What's your psychologists advice?

[Aonaran]

Hi @suzanne, never said it was self-talk.  It's not;  it's part of the baggage @Appleblossom (hiya ab!) made reference to.  Most time, like ab, I find it just too much to grapple with.  Hence, aloneness, and chronic loneliness that sits with the chronic depression like matching bookends on the shelf of my life.

[notmyrealname]

I have immense difficulty talking, even thinking, about sexuality, especially my own.  I'm kind of lurking around here hoping that some answer to someone else's question will be helpful, because I'm totally blanking when I try to think of what I might myself want to ask.

Which I guess leads me to ask for suggestions towards developing comfort in thinking/talking about sexuality (other than just trying, again and again, and hoping it eventually gets easier, which I'm already doing)

[NikNik]

@Mazarita - I so appreciate your openness. I know many others who have a similar 'sleep in different beds' arrangements too - for a variety of reasons... including snoring  But they also have to keep the lines of communication open because they have to make a conscious effort to keep the intimacy there.

To be honest, while the sitution isn't ideal for you, the way you're managing it and how open you are with your partner has put you ahead many others. It's quite rare.

[mrkotter]

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@suzanne wrote:

Eye contact is a great gauge.  Someone who likes you will usually engage in lots of eye contact.  They are the ones to bust out your best moves on 🙂  What's your psychologists advice?

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@suzanne Um, funnily enough pretty much that. Could have just came here and saved some money. Jokes aside I've had some pretty rough experiences being bipolar, both up and down (sometimes paranoid when down) which has made it hard for me to believe that hey, this person might actually think you're ok.

This is to the point where someone (she) has pretty much laid it out on the table and I still didn't want to believe it, which is a shame - it would have been good to see where it went. Not much I can do now about it. 

It's just a slow process for me. 

[suzanne]

Thanks @Mazarita.  Like almost all aspects of recovery and wellness, it's not a linear experience.  More like a dance that we (hopefully) gradually get better at.  But occasionally have to sit out.  What I love most about your experience is that you've maintained physical affection.  That can be one of the first thing that goes when a partner's desire starts to wane.  There is concern that any touching will be misleading and then they will have to rebuff their partner.  This is such a shame.  You've done very well to maintain that and it may be part of the reason that your relationship is strong in other areas.  Casual touch within a relationship is very affirming.

[Mazarita]

@NikNik, as it happens, a secondary factor in the separate beds arrangement is my snoring, hehe. I think that may be related to medications I'm taking as it was not the case before I started them. Also my sleeping patterns have been so erratic for so long that it's been hard for partners with sleeping with me on that level too. The separate beds arrangement doesn't need to change at all in our opinion. We both like it a lot on the level of being able to 'starfish' and get a better night's sleep. But even talking about the subject of sex openly between us does raise the stress levels pretty high. It's as though it's the iceberg we have to negotiate around in our relationship. Thanks for your kind encouragement of how we do deal with it though. It is reassuring to feel that there are some things we are handling well.

@suzanne, thanks for the good thought about the non-linear nature of 'recovering' from situations like this. Yes, we are lucky that we have managed to salvage the physical affection even if the conventional act of sexual intimacy is absent for the time being (and for the past many years). I think there may be something a little more difficult to deal with here though than just waning desire. I really do think we are both traumatised by our sexual experiences with each other, which is painful in an ongoing way and not easy to heal from at all.

[NikNik]

Hi @Aonaran
Great to see you! We haven't crossed paths in a while.

Can you give us an example of a scenario of your experience?