Why I'm not sexy

Wife has recently been telling Boyfriend 5 that of course she cares about me, because after all we have been married for twenty-five years. It's just that she doesn't love me in a way that makes her want to fuck me.

I'm sure that's true, and there are several reasons why. In the first place, to restate the crashingly obvious, we have been married for twenty-five years. In that time, familiarity is bound to dampen the ardent passions of youth. (Anybody heard of the Coolidge effect?) In the second place, I am middle aged and greying by now, not to mention rather fatter than I was as a young man. None of these things makes a fellow sexier, in most people's eyes.

But that can't be the whole story. Everybody has heard tales of elderly grandparents who are still happily fucking like newlyweds. How is this possible, when to the rest of us they look all wizened and wrinkled? What can they possibly see in each other?

I thought about that this evening, while trying to figure out what I still see in Wife, and I think I have part of an answer. Understand that the years have not been terribly kind to Wife either. A variety of health conditions have combined to give her the exhausted demeanor and sagging skin of a woman half again Wife's age. It's just as well she found her most recent boyfriend on the Internet, because the brutal fact is that if she tried to trade on her purely physical assets, she wouldn't get much for them. On the Internet, however, she can flirt and play like a much younger woman; and flirtatious play has always been one of her strong suits. But I digress.

The point is that I am still capable of finding her very attractive anyway, even though (objectively speaking) there's not a lot there to provoke the attraction. Why, then? I think the answer is that when I look at her (especially when I look at her "with lust in my heart" as the saying goes), I'm not just seeing her as she is today. I still see her as she was twenty-five years ago: fifty pounds heavier, it is true, but with smooth skin and bright eyes and a bewitching smile ... and a charming style that made her an altogether enticing piece of ass. And I see her through the memory of all the years in between -- and while some of them were very painful there was a lot there to love as well. I think, in fact, that it helps significantly that I have not had another partner in all that time; because it means that all my sexual energy, all my erotic longings, all my fantasies of desire and fulfillment -- every last bit of it has focussed on Wife. And so when I look at the tired crone she has become today, I see her through a quarter century of erotic fog. And it helps. It is part of what makes her so much more attractive and enticing to me than she would be to any stranger examining her in a colder and more clinical light.

The punch line, I think, is that this can help explain why Wife doesn't feel the same way about me. After all, if I am right about what I wrote above, then my feelings grow (at least in part) out of my monogamy. This means that as much as I may have felt like a chump over the years for being too stupid or too timid or too boring and lifeless to clutch at the same opportunities she seized, the payoff now is that I can still long for Wife, lust after her, fantasize about her, and crave her. She, on the other hand, spread her erotic attention across enough people that she doesn't have the same kind of reserves built up; and even if (from a purely numerical perspective) she fucked me more often than she fucked anybody else over the years, nonetheless the availability of other people in her life will have meant that her mental energies, her fantasy life, her desires and longings, will have been spread across other people as well. And I have no doubt that there were plenty of times when she and I were fucking that she nonetheless fantasized it was somebody else instead. But this means that she doesn't have the same reserves of sexual energy focussed on me to draw on, now that I am dumpy and middle-aged. It means that she cannot summon up an erotic fog through which to gaze at me -- an erotic fog that could make me look even a little more handsome than I really do look in the cold light of day.

Which of us is luckier? She has had all those extra partners, but now she can't get excited by me. I missed out on the multiple partners, but I can still get excited by her. If I thought that we were still going to have a regular sex life for years into the future, I would affirm with confidence that I am in the better position. After all, I'll enjoy it more.

But what if she decides to run away with Boyfriend 5? Or if she decides that I am so repulsive she just can't bear the thought of any more sex with me? Am I still lucky to desire a woman who wants nothing to do with me? In that case I am not so sure ....