Feelings Following Actions

Back in February, Dr. Laura posted a letter from a listener that was titled "Change Your Actions And Your Feelings Will Follow". This is the kind of change so many husbands crave. The writer has been married for twenty years and has three children. Reading Dr. Laura's The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands sparked the change.

I'm 43, my sex drive isn't what it used to be, and I can pretty much take it or leave it.

Women (and men, for that matter) have natural hormonal changes, and if someone is married, they need to accept that in their partner. But a lowered libido need not necessitate a loss of lovemaking. (How's that for alliteration?)

I knew sex was very important to a man - Madison Avenue doesn't use it as their primary marketing tool for nothing. What I didn't realize was how deeply PERSONAL sex is to a man. I thought sex was a need for physical release, driven by hormones. Something that could be satisfied with me or with the Swimsuit Edition of Sports Illustrated. I had no clue that my husband is fed emotionally and spiritually by making love with me, his wife.

Yes, sex is a physical thing for us, but yes, marital lovemaking is also an emotional, recreational, and spiritual experience that continually renews a husband's bond to his wife. We are able to reduce sex to a mere physical act, but it isn't the same if we do that.

The point you make in your book that denying my husband sex is the equivalent of him not speaking to me, broke my heart.

Yes. This seems to be a good analogy. A wife sexually rejecting her husband is like the husband rejecting conversation with his wife.

Armed with this new information, I was determined to do a 180 on our sex life.

Attitude makes such a difference.

I researched how to spice up married sex, made up a questionnaire asking him what he liked, where and how he liked it and what he didn't like.

That's a very good idea. Maybe I should make a list of suggested questions to put on such a questionnaire? Someone has to have put something like this online already.

I started fixing myself up more, and making sexy phone calls to him at work.

Both of those are great.

Two of my kids (ages 7 and 9) had a habit of climbing into bed with us in the middle of the night. I told them that if they woke up in the night, to climb into bed with another kid, that mommy and daddy's bed was off limits unless they had a nightmare.

That should definitely help.

I came onto him at least once a day, sometimes twice, and by the end of the first week, after another enthusiastic session he said to me, "You're wearing me out! Who are you, and what have you done with my wife?"

He probably couldn’t stop smiling.

I told him about your book, that I was sincerely sorry I had unknowingly hurt him, and promised he would never feel sexually deprived again.

After all of that, you could parade the contestants from Miss Universe in front of him, nude, and have them hit on him, and he’d still reserve it for his wife.

I want to emphasize that I didn't feel like having sex everyday, but I do love my husband and wanted to show him in a way that was meaningful TO HIM. All these years I had been trying to show him my love in ways that were meaningful to me. Invoking the "fake it 'til you make it" philosophy, over time, my own sexual feelings began to rev up, and I am proof that if you change your actions, your feelings will follow.

Good for her.