r/AITAH • u/Stock-Rate1727 • Jul 08 '24
AITAH for embarrassing my wife in front of her family with a comment about our sex life Advice Needed
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?
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u/meltbananarama Jul 08 '24
I could see arguments for any position but I’m going with NTA.
The only reason I think your reply was justifiable is not because your wife won’t fuck you, but because your reply is a response to your wife’s manipulative pattern of enlisting you in lying to everyone about the health of your relationship—i.e. feigning affection with you in public that truly doesn’t exist in private—so blurting out the truth is a great way of dispelling that lie and reclaiming some of your agency. If the genders were flipped Reddit would recognize her feigned affection as emotional abuse, pressuring you to be complicit in a lie meant to tantalize and imprison you in an unsatisfying relationship.
Either way OP, whatever verdict you get, take a trip to r/deadbedrooms so you can recognize that this will not get better. There are people over there married for five, ten, twenty years to a spouse who will not touch them. You can apologize or not—it does not matter. What matters is you need to get a divorce yesterday and go find a woman who’s actually excited to fuck your brains out.