The fact that you do not want to have sex with your spouse does not mean that you do not feel like having sex at all. It is for this reason Jasmine came to the Sexology Clinic. She was sexually starved and was getting attracted to her workmates and having dreams of getting entangled with them.
“At this point if my colleague George makes advance, I will run for it,” Jasmine said, “the fantasies and dreams are overwhelming.”
Jasmine was 39 and had been married for 13 years. She had two children. Her husband, David, was 42 and a successful businessman running all manner of enterprises – a bakery, fleet of buses, hardware and a poultry farm. Jasmine, on the other hand, was a researcher.
“We are so engraved in our professions that we rarely get time to connect,” Jasmine lamented, “actually life is all the same for me whether I am alone in the field collecting data or at home because we rarely talk about our lives and spend quality time.”
“What you mean is that you two are busy people sharing a house but not sharing your lives?” I asked to which Jasmine nodded.
And so basically the two had become strangers. They were living separate lives. Like happens in such cases, they were sharing their emotional lives with colleagues at work. As it has been said before, people in dysfunctional marriages tend to have work spouses; a situation where one gets connected emotionally to a colleague. This is marked by spending time, sharing secrets and problems with this work wife/husband. If not checked, the relation can develop into physical intimacy.
“George has been quite supportive whenever I was going through difficult times,” Jasmine says, “he meant well for me, I don’t think he has ever had ill motives.”
I interrogated Jasmine further on what she meant by not feeling like having sex with her husband. For one, their frequency of sex was averagely once in two months. Even when it happened, Jasmine did it as a duty to avoid problems with her husband.
“Actually, many times it feels like rape,” she explained, “I just do not feel like being intimate with him.”
I nodded with understanding. The truth is that for women, sex is more emotional than physical. When there is emotional disconnection, sex loses meaning for a woman. The man who was once sexually appealing starts to appear like a brother, or at the very worst a stranger and even an enemy.
“And, please, note that I value my marital relationship,” Jasmine says looking rather disturbed, “my husband provides; he pays school fees for the children and buys us food; he has bought us a house, it is just the sex which is not working.”
But this view, in essence, begs to the question of what marriage is really about. How much emphasis should be laid on emotional connection, intimacy and sex versus other benefits that come with the marital relationship? From experience, emotional connection is the pivot that holds a marriage in place and on which any other benefits are kept in balance. Changing the equation so that the survival of a marriage is pegged on benefits beyond the emotional connection is many times the beginning of the end of any marriage.
The big question, however is how to nurture and grow the emotional connection. For one, only agree to marry if the connection exists. Be aware however that many marriages start with a good connection but this is progressively lost over time. The number one cause of loss of connection is inability to spend quality time together. In ideal situations, a couple should spare at least an hour each day just to talk and catch up with each other. Most couples do this at bed time which means that they go to bed together, put their mobile gadgets aside and just talk.
“In our case we are both busy,” Jasmine said, “he comes home late when I am already asleep and I do not like my sleep getting interrupted.”
I asked Jasmine to bring her husband along. We needed to salvage the situation before things ran out of hand. The couple however failed to appear in the clinic as agreed. Seven months passed then I got a call from Jasmine.
“He was too busy and so we couldn’t make it to the clinic” she said, “however not to worry, I ended up getting intimate with my colleague and I have learnt to manage the situation so I do not see any need of pushing for a different solution,” she assured. BY DAILY NATION