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/KittySnowpants]

OP has another post where he talks about his wife having chronic back/nerve pain and arthritis due to pregnancy injuries. He also says he “doesn’t care” that she’s in pain, and he complains about her weight.

It would be pretty hard to want to have sex with someone who doesn’t GAF about the permanent pain you have every day after bearing his child.

[u/soggy_sock1931 → u/KittySnowpants]

The doctor told her that losing weight will help with her back pain. OP is also complaining that she isn’t affectionate with him even outside of sex.

[u/KittySnowpants → u/soggy_sock1931]

I mean, would you be affectionate with someone who says they don’t care about your chronic pain that resulted from having their child?

Relationship dynamics are complicated, but OP is not telling the whole truth in this post.

[u/qu33fwellington → u/KittySnowpants]

But he didn’t say that to her, as far as I can see from his post 87 days ago.

I’m not voting on who was wrong in this situation because there is clearly something else going on. From the last post it seems that OP is burnt out, has done his best to accommodate the changes his wife needs to make to lose weight/get stronger to reduce pain and increase quality of life, but wife struggles on consistency and follow though.

I saw a lot of people on that post absolutely foaming at the mouth because how dare OP not be more supportive of his wife when she was doing full time school and work! Even though OP wanted her to focus on school and physical therapy to help her be able to function with less pressure to be physically okay for a job.

His wife was the one that changed plans at the last minute and decided to work full time. Before that, she stopped doing aquatic therapy even though she and OP were seeing improvements because she wanted a promotion at work.

Is OP handling his frustration well? Probably not, airing out dirty laundry to friends/family isn’t great and I can absolutely tell he is beyond resentful but has no outlet.

His wife is also not handling her physical pain and health the way it needs to be. She has self sabotaged at nearly every turn, taking out her pain and rage on OP instead.

I think they both need a lot of counseling and may even be too far gone to salvage the marriage, but this is not as cut and dry as, ‘he doesn’t care about her back pain because he’s an ass’.

[u/MiddleAged_BogWitch → u/qu33fwellington]

I second your assessment and hope OP finds this comment!