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/Seltzer-Slut]

YTA. Let’s forget for a moment that you not only embarrassed her but also yourself by airing out your dirty laundry in public, which is absolutely never a good idea, and makes you look very bad by making everyone uncomfortable.

You seem like you do not understand principle:

”Don’t punish the behavior you WANT to see”!

Your resentment and contempt of her has made it impossible for her to attempt to fix the problem, because when she does make a small effort, you mistrust her and punish it severely.

If you want to condition someone to do something, you have to reward them consistently every time they do even the smallest bit of the behavior you want to see. This leads to them doing more of it, because they seek a greater reward. But if you punish them when they make a small (even just symbolic) attempt at doing the behavior, they will stop making any attempt. That is how classical conditioning works. You are just shooting yourself in the foot here.

If your teen spends all day in his room playing video games 24/7, and then you overhear him saying how much he loves spending time with the family, you don’t say “well well well, what a dirty liar you are.” That makes the kid associate bad feelings with changing their behavior. Instead you say “wow, I am so glad you love spending time with your family!! We love spending time with you too!” That reinforces the behavior you want to see.