8.
“It wasn’t JUST the bedroom, of course. It’s never that simple. I made a promise that we would be married forever and I took that very seriously, but the lack of intimacy was devastating. We were together for 14 years. The warning signs were so obvious now that I look back but didn’t pay attention. I met him when I was 18. I had never slept with anyone before. I had a boyfriend in high school that I slept with all the time before, but we never had sex. My ex was fun and adventurous, but he was my age, so when this sexual experience was more reserved, I chalked it up to being more mature/less childish.”
“After we’d been sleeping together for two weeks, my older, more mature boyfriend told me we needed to talk and sat me down to explain that he thought we were having too much sex and that I was ‘getting out of control’. I felt humiliated and completely devastated. We started only having sex when he wanted me to so that wouldn’t happen. Fourteen years later, we were having sex on average twice a year, maybe less. He no longer sat next to me. The final straw was when the same ex from all those years ago contacted me again. I told my then-husband about it as a joke.
That night, feeling confident from the ego boost my ex’s call gave me, I walked into our bathroom, stripped completely naked, did my hair and makeup, walked over to where he was sitting, climbed onto his lap, and shyly said, “Do you like my makeup?” in an obvious attempt to seduce him. He looked at me and said, “Yeah, but what are you going to do with your hair?” and gently pulled me off his lap. Six months later, we divorced, and a few years after that, I married that same ex from high school. The sex is still amazing, but more importantly, the connection is, too.
—Alabama, 38