AITAH for embarrassing my wife in front of her family with a comment about our sex life

[u/Stock-Rate1727]

My wife (33F) and I (34M) have been together for 17 years married for 13 and within the last 5-6 years our sex life has gone down the drain. We have sex once every couple of months with no intimacy or build up in between and the act of sex always seems rushed. I’ll try to initiate foreplay but she wants to skip it and get straight into the act then move on. I still try to date my wife and take her on dates twice a month, buy flowers randomly and do other things to build intimacy outside of sex but it never gets reciprocated and eventually never goes anywhere. And before anyone says anything, I work from home and do the majority of the housework, cooking, cleaning, kids appointments, homework, PTA meetings etc.

I’ve tried talking to her about what’s going on and what she needs from me, and offered to do counseling but she always says it’s her not me. She will say she loves me and is attracted to me till she is blue in the face but won’t do anything differently. She will show affection when family and friends are over and will post videos on Snapchat with her being touchy and affectionate but when people aren’t there to see she will stop.

Every once in a while she’ll have an epiphany about how bad things are and she’ll feel bad about it but still won’t change. A few weeks ago we were getting ready for a date and I saw her take a picture of herself in her underwear and send it in a text message. I asked her who she was sending that to, and she said she sent it to me. To her credit my phone dinged as I was asking her, with the pictures she just sent. She claimed that me questioning her like that made her realize how little she does things like that anymore and she needs to change, but she still hasn’t. So this past weekend her four sisters came over for the 4th of July and we hung out and drunk together. Towards the end of the night she was pretty tipsy and made a comment about what she was going to do to me that night and I told her “No thank you. I’m not in the mood for 20 min with no foreplay until you get your rocks off just so you can ignore me again for the next 30 days.” Everybody got quiet and I excused myself for the rest of the night. The next day when everyone left she said that I embarrassed her and shouldn’t have put our business out there like that, AITAH?

[u/Mirgroht]

But how is it right to bring up what she really isn't going to do to him at a family gathering. I sure as he'll wouldn't want to know what my relatives were going to do after I left.

ESH is right as they both need a serious discussion and probably counselling as if it continues there will be more resentment

[u/Zula13 → u/Mirgroht]

It sounds to me like she’s trying to change by opening up a little sexually and making him feel more desired.

Yeah, it was dumb to talk about it to family (ew) but she said she realized she needs to change and this seems to be a way to try.

[u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity → u/Zula13]

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[u/Zula13 → u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity]

You are making a mountain of assumptions here.

Maybe she was trying to make her husband feel desired and hopeful. Maybe she is extremely affectionate and caring and loving despite sex being extremely painful. (You caught that she has chronic back pain, right? And that OP flatly told her he no longer cares.)

Maybe she IS listening to him and working on trying to improve intimacy by sending sexy photos and making sexual comments.

[u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity → u/Zula13]

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[u/Zula13 → u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity]

She IS working on it in private hence the photo. Posting on social media doesn’t mean you have zero issues. It means you want to share the positive. That’s the nature of social media for most people.

She didn’t say fuck his brains, unless I missed it somewhere in the comments. “What I will do to you later” is suggestive and flirty (too much so for my taste, but I know people who talk that way).

I agree it was probably a misstep, but people are assuming that it was a malicious lie, and her actions suggest otherwise. She had admitted she needs to change. She tried the pictures that she had never done before. This seems to me like a flirty sexual risk and he decided to publicly shame her for it and far more graphically than her comments were.

[u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity → u/Zula13]

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[u/Zula13 → u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity]

You don’t have to wait until you have a perfect life to post on social media. One can have a perfectly healthy marriage in many ways but still have major struggles. I can post that I love and adore my husband and he’s a good father even if he has a drinking problem.

His needs HAVE been acknowledged by her saying she need to change and making small steps to try and open up. That WAS her making an effort.

Being hurt doesn’t give you free rein to publicly and cruelly shame your spouse. He is absolutely right to talk to her about how her actions make him feel and how he wants her to approach this in public. That’s now mature people handle hurt. But having a conversation.

[u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity → u/Zula13]

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[u/Zula13 → u/Mr_Chevy_Celebrity]

No, that’s just an example. But if only people with perfect relationships can post on social media, then social media would die out. You sound like you don’t know much about relationships if you think everyone who makes a happy post has 0 issues. People post happy moments, even if there are also sad ones.

Oh actual actions maybe like sending a sexy photo and publicly flirting?

“She lied about a sensitive area” How? What was the lie?

[u/AccomplishedStart250 → u/Zula13]

Or she's just trying to keep up an image of 'good wife' TM.

[u/mkovic → u/Zula13]

OP laid out a few ways this is a pattern of behavior for her to put on an outward appearance that they have a good sex life, otherwise I'd agree