Q My wife and I click on just about every level—parenting, money, religion, politics, etc—except for sex. After our last child was born, my advances were increasingly rejected. In an attempt to avoid pressuring her, I stopped initiating. One week passed, nothing. A month passed, nothing. A year passed, nothing. Depression and anger set in. But I was committed to being the “perfect husband,” so I still didn’t pressure her, hoping her libido would return. It didn’t. Our “happy” life continued, and if you were a friend or neighbor, you’d have no idea this was going on. After two years, I finally lost it and confronted her. I expected that an open dialogue would improve the situation, but a month passed and she never brought it back up.
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I realize I’m lucky to be happy and fulfilled in just about every area of my life, but I’ve become fidgety, short-tempered, and hypersensitive. I don’t want to have an affair, and I don’t want a divorce. I love my wife and our children, but I’m at a loss as to what to do. Knowing there are women out there in the world who actually enjoy sex is devastating (it kills me to listen to you field a call from a sexually confident woman on your podcast). I am mourning the loss of intimacy and connection with another person. —Please Advise Troubled Husband
MTV, a cable channel that has been broadcasting music videos in a continuous loop since the summer of 1981, has elected to speed the moral collapse of the United States by putting me on television. My upcoming sex-advice program is tentatively titled Savage U. (My preferred title for the show—Dan Savage’s Alaska—was rejected by the program’s co–executive producer, Piper Palin.) This news has upset not only my son, who’s been in the MTV stage of his development for roughly three years, but also Maggie Gallagher, the head of the National Organization for Marriage, who has been stuck in the raving-bigot stage of her development for nearly three decades.
I may not know what women taste like—I’ve never gone down on one—but I do know what women are like. My mother was a woman, my sister is a woman, my favorite bartender is a woman, my first sex partners were women, and many of my friends, neighbors, and coworkers are women. And as someone who is attracted to men and is in a long-term relationship with a man, I know what straight women have to put up with.
Openness and honesty don’t automatically translate into everyone gets everything everyone wants. Not all needs can be met. But sometimes just having the sacrifices we’ve made for the good of our marriages acknowledged—getting a receipt after paying the price of admission—is good enough. Getting some credit for going without anal, along with the green light to jerk off to anal porn now and then, can make going without anal easier. Indeed, it can make going without anal virtuous, something that speaks well of the going-without-anal partner’s character and priorities.
