Hi, my name is Ruby, and I'm Dr. Jennifer Finlays and Five's assistant, and you're listening to the Dr Finlays and 5 podcast Archive.

The podcast you'll be listening to today is entitled, LDS Female Sexuality Part 3, originally

produced and published by the Mormon Mental Health Podcast. Welcome and we

hope you enjoy this episode. Going back to this idea of women losing their desire,

especially when it's tied to duty,

I do get quite a bit of men, especially on my blog,

who talk about being in a sexless marriage where they're having sex

many times, less than 10 times a year, many times for years have gone without any sexual encounter and the frustration that goes along with that.

And I see this issue is complicated in a sense that because we are in a benevolent patriarchy, which is good in a sense,

better than a full-blown patriarchy, these men are not, you know, forcing themselves, of course,

they're not being coercive, they're not being manipulative they're not being manipulative they're

very much respecting their wife's desire not to have sex and yet they're

completely feeling basically abandoned you know in their in their sexual intimacy and it affects, of course, the rest of their

marriage as well.

So with this idea of, how do you help women kind of navigate this idea of compromise which can easily go down the slope of

duty to also realizing you know how do we meet both of the needs in this partnership?

Yeah, I don't think there's a lot of easy answers for this. I wish there were because it's such a heartbreaking problem.

I think that in the realm of a sexless marriage I would first say that accommodation

of that sexless stance is not, is often undertaken thinking that eventually she will see what a nice guy I am and how much I've tolerated her anxieties about sex and she will eventually turn to me, be more comfortable, feel more accepted, and you know, that we will eventually have this thing that she says she also wants but never gets around to wanting.

I do think that the more that the higher desire partner goes into a

stance of accommodation the less that things get mobilized or looked at or move you know move forward because part of the way that she's managing her anxiety is to

Keep the marriage sexless or to keep it very limited amount of sex and so she's not looking to really resolve it

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