Family Beef is our family and relationship advice column at HuffPost Family. Have a beef you want us to weigh in on? Submit it here.
Dear Family Beef,
My wife (43) and I (44) have been together for 11 years, married for three. We’ve always had a pretty consistent sex life, with a few slower or less active periods over the years: when our kids (6 and 9) were always sleeping in our bed, when my mother got sick, when my wife had a fracture. But they always felt like understandable circumstances where sex wasn’t the priority. I had my hand; it was fine. Outside that, we’ve stuck with once a week or more pretty consistently.
In this past year, we’ve had sex maybe four or five times. I am the one to initiate most of the time, and it feels like it wouldn’t happen if I didn’t. She says she’s tired or “isn’t feeling it” and asks for a rain check most of the time. I love my wife so much, and she’s my dream woman in every way and the best mother to our kids, but lately I feel like I’m annoying her by trying to show her how attracted I am to her.
I did some Googling and ended up finding a Reddit dedicated to “dead bedrooms,” and it made me feel sick with how familiar it all sounded. Reading more, I decided to have a conversation with her and tried to emphasize how important our relationship is without sex but that our sex life is also important to me and how I want to figure out how to get us back on track.
