Could You Be Married…And Celibate for Life? – Relationship Revelation 25

We were about to have a serious argument. I mean a damned throw down! If I heard this man say one more freakin’ time, “she made me do it,” I was going to scream!  And then I was going to rip his head off and scream at it some more as I rolled it across the floor like a bowling ball!

My friend was in the beginning stages of a divorce, so he was deep into that venting phase where he would easily share all the messy details of an 18-year marriage gone terribly wrong. And then he did it again. He said it: “I’m just saying -- she made me do it.”

That cut it!!!

(Children under 18 years of age should stop reading right…about…HERE!)

I couldn’t take it anymore. It was time to get very real with my friend. “What did your wife have to do with you placing your penis into another woman’s vagina?” I asked, on the verge of launching an apocalyptic verbal assault on behalf of scorned women everywhere whose husbands had ever cheated on them.

“You made an independent decision to have sex outside your marriage!” I fired at him. “Now how is that your wife’s fault?”

As I waited for an answer, I kept thinking, “This had better be good.” And it was.

He said, “I just couldn’t be married to a woman I was still attracted to, that I wanted to make love to and had to sleep next to every night and be celibate for life. Could you?”

Oh snap! I was ready to obliterate my friend. Honey, I was about to launch a verbal tirade that would have made Richard Pryor, Sommore, Andrew Dice Clay and Adele Givens hit the “censor” button! I was ready to lay into this man and make him pay for every girl in the world whose man had ever gone astray. But I was stumped. He got me. I was cornered.

What the hell do you say in response to that?

Could I be married to the man I loved, with whom I’d once enjoyed a good sex life, still desired and had to lay next to every night, but never have sex again because HIS libido or desire for me had waned?  Damn.

Right about then, all I could hear in my head was André 3000 asking, “Forever? Forever-ever?? Forever-ever???”

The man wasn’t trying to make a case for cheating. He wasn’t saying, “If my wife won’t give it to me then someone else will.” He knew what he did was dead wrong. He never said it wasn’t. According to him, they stopped having regular sex less than five years into the marriage. At the time they were young, in their early 20s. So you know his sex drive was in high gear. She had already had one of their three kids. It’s not like they weren’t sexually active. But as he tells it, the sex slowly started to wane after their first child. She wasn’t really interested in it anymore and when asked why she didn’t want to have sex she would say “I don’t need it as much as you” or “I don’t know.” There wasn’t any medical reason for it, either. They explored that possibility, too. He said he’d begged her off and on for more than four years, getting it only occasionally.

But more than that, you should’ve seen him tell the story of when it actually happened. He sort of looked like Steve Brady telling his wife Miranda Hobbs he’d cheated on her in the first Sex and the City movie. My friend looked genuinely disgusted with himself as he relived the event. He described the way he felt the very moment it was over. He said he felt mortified immediately after the urge was satisfied -- he hadn’t even got up yet. He wasn’t proud of what he’d done, but his young 20-something self gave in to hormones and urges. Back then, when it was over, he had to come to grips with just how human and fallible he was. Today, more than a decade later, he accepts that about himself.

I can already hear some Relationship Revelations readers saying, “Yeah, but there’s two sides to every story.” And you’d be right.

Okay, so let’s play devil’s advocate and consider the wife’s point of view for a moment. What if she argued he wanted sex too much and was just plain worn out? Well, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. He would’ve had some sort of libido during their dating years. It’s not like they met one week and married the next week. She would have known that about him already. Or what if he’s lying about his wife’s dying libido and she was really breaking him off more than Heidi Fleiss was scheduling johns back in the day? What if he just cheated on her and he’s trying to put the onus on her back? Honestly, we’ll never know who’s telling the truth.

But what if everything he said was true? What if she really did lose her desire to have sex? What if he really was begging and pleading with his wife and she continued to shun him, secure in the fact that this was her husband and he wasn’t going to stray because their wedding vows said he would forsake all others? Sure, they took vows. They made a promise before God and man, family and friends. They signed papers recognized by the state. Him for her and her for him. All for one and one for all…right?

But the question still stands can YOU (the person reading this blog post) be married to someone you’re still sexually attracted to and be celibate for life? Is that scenario something you sign up for when you marry someone? Is that a part of “for better or for worse?” Because baby, if you enjoy sex…that’s the worst!

Then these other questions started creeping into my mind. Like, do spouses have a responsibility, a duty even, to be available to each other sexually? Some say yes, referring to the biblical passage of 1 Corinthians 7:3-5.

The New International Version reads like this: “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”

Look, I’m no preacher. I’m not trying to convince anyone that what my friend did as a young married man was right or justified. He was wrong. And I’m certainly not trying to provide a “the perfect excuse” for any other husband looking to justify having sex outside of his marriage. They'd be wrong, too.

All I’m saying is this: I’m not sure I could be married to the man I love and sexually desire…and be celibate for life. These days, I’m not so quick to judge.

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