I wonder if someone may have some advice concerning a problem I have. First off, I have been married for many, many years to a lovely wife who I adore and whose body excites me almost more these days than when we first met.
However, a few years ago, my wife decided - out of the blue - that fellatio was off the menu. Her reasoning then was that the seepage of transparent fluid that came out of my penis before ejaculating contained hormones that contributed to the growth of hairs on her chin.
I felt pretty miserable not to have the prospect of her mouth around my penis anymore in my life, but I waited patiently, hoping she would reconsider.
She didn’t, so one day I asked why. It wasn’t easy to ask, as we didn't as a rule talk much about the details of sex. Her answer started off as the previously mentioned ‘hairs on chin’ reasoning, but then turned into something else.
Basically, it transpired that she thought the practice was ‘disgusting’ and ‘unnatural’; that she found it humiliating and degrading; that it left a ‘nasty’ taste in her mouth; that I was ‘perverse’ and ‘obsessed’ to be wanting oral sex; etc, etc.
From that day, she became increasingly unwilling to be at the receiving end of oral sex, too. When my wife first withheld fellatio, we continued with cunnilingus, and, on occasions, I got carried away, to the point where she felt I was acting 'voraciously'. She then decided she was being 'violated'; so, eventually, cunnilingus got banned, too.
Reciprocal oral sex had always been a part of our sexual repertoire since I had introduced cunnilingus on maybe the third occasion we slept together. My wife now says she was 'shocked' by this, but went along with it. However, not much later, she initiated fellatio, although she implies this was at my bidding. At any rate, she always gave every impression of enjoying both giving and receiving.
We usually treated oral sex as foreplay. I only ever ejaculated in her mouth once, when she physically prevented me withdrawing. It was in the early days of our relationship, and it was never repeated. When I reminded her of this, recently, she grimaced, mouthed, 'How disgusting!', and said she didn't believe it could have happened. She added that she couldn't believe she had ever engaged in oral sex at all, without me having got her drunk first. I didn't know how to respond to this, as we must have shared oral sex a thousand times, and she rarely drinks.
At around the time she commenced the oral veto, my wife was menopausal, with hot flushes, various degrees of arousability, desire, etc. She seems to be over the menopause now, and has a strong sexual appetite - but mostly for intercourse. Oral sex is absolutely forbidden; and her tolerance for manual foreplay, let alone foreplay that leads to orgasm without intercourse, has all but vanished.
My wife is a lapsed Catholic and I have found myself wondering how much of her recent inclination to view oral sex as humiliating and degrading has to do with her upbringing. When she saw a TV drama involving Catholic priests getting young children in their charge to suck them off, it affected her deeply - and I bore the brunt of it. I tried to point out that I was not a priest, she wasn't a child, and it was only a film; but it was as if the desire to want that sort of satisfaction was at fault, no matter the circumstances.
She also read a novel set in Afghanistan involving adult males being fellated by younger, often helpless kinfolk, which again struck her as the strong forcing the hand of the weak in unnatural ways. It proved useless to plead I was not trying to do, and had not already done, the same with her.
I once made the mistake of mentioning a snippet of information I had gleaned from a novel I had read by a South African about how many African females had two or three of their front teeth knocked out so that they could give more agreeable oral sex to their men. Anyway, this provided her with more ammunition for her theory that men have forced women over the centuries to follow an essentially unnatural practice for their own gratification; which she no longer wanted any part of.
We decided to visit a sex therapist, as we seemed incapable on our own of addressing this impasse. After four sessions, the therapist declared she could do nothing for us. She emphasised that as we appeared to be non dysfunctional, engaging regularly in enjoyable lovemaking, with me not having difficulty in getting and maintaining erections, and my wife not having difficulty in becoming aroused and reaching orgasm, we really didn’t have a problem she felt she could address.
She finished by saying she feared, if we failed to sort out the issue of oral sex satisfactorily, it could prove a danger to our marriage. As if that was not the reason we had come to see her in the first place!
We were both disappointed. At the least, we had imagined either my wife's abhorrence of, or my love of, oral sex, might have been investigated. I had secretly hoped the therapist might have had some sort of desensitization techniques up her sleeve for us to try, such as simply lying with heads on each others thighs, with our faces several inches from each other's genitals; and then gradually moving closer, seeing if we could expand the comfort zone a little. As it is, the area between knee and midriff is currently out of bounds to our lips and tongues, which, for me, is very dispiriting.
I suggested something along those lines to my wife, to see if we could find a version of oral sex that was acceptable to both of us, even if it was initially limited to our heads resting on each other's thighs, merely sniffing the adjacent air. My wife's response was, she would be happy with that, so long as we went no further. In other words, so long as I promised never to go beyond that initial comfort zone, she would agree. I then said that the point of the exercise was to stretch that comfort zone, even if only by a little. She responded by saying that what I really meant was that we would get closer and closer until she ended up sucking my penis.
It's usually at that stage that the tempo of our discussions starts rising. I say I'm not expecting her to suck my penis, and that I would be very happy if she simply lay her face alongside it; but I'm unable to deny that my ultimate 'goal' would be to have her take it in her mouth - but only if she wanted to. Equally, my ultimate goal would be for me to delve into her vagina with my mouth and tongue - but, again, only if she wanted me to.
The trouble is, it's enough for her that I have those ideas in my head. She's convinced that to lie with heads on thighs and mouths a foot away from genitals is the thin end of the wedge; and that I won't be truly satisfied until we're in the throes of a fully fledged soixante neuf (of which I have the fondest memories of us doing on many occasions ...). She may be right. I don't know.
It's now been nearly a year since visiting the therapist, and we're no further forward. I still yearn, daily, for oral sex, with, perhaps surprisingly, more and more of the emphasis on me as the giver rather than the receiver. Most of my sexual fantasies concern my wife and cunnilingus. Although this whole issue began with her stopping giving me oral, the fact that she has been unwilling for so long for me to give it to her is almost more painful. I use the word 'yearn' and it's an apt one. It's as if I'm in mourning for a lost past - even a lost person. My wife says, 'Get over it'; and all I can say in reply is that I don't want to get over my memory of her.
To sum up, my wife's view is that fellatio is disgusting, both for her to think about and for her to do; and that it is equally disgusting for me to want it. It is unnatural, perverse, degrading and humiliating for her, and my desire for it is something I should get over. Cunnilingus is equally disgusting for her to contemplate, gives her no pleasure to receive, and it is revolting, in her view, for me to want to do it. Both practices are, in her mind, irrelevant to a satisfactory sex life.
For me, things are the polar opposite. I love oral sex. I love giving it and I love receiving it. When my wife says she finds it unnatural and, for her, degrading and humiliating, I simply don't know how to reply. I find it the complete opposite: loving, intimate, delightful, supportive; such an extremely comforting thing to both do and receive. It's also highly erotic. It takes me to a place of pleasure I can't otherwise reach. I feel increasingly bereft without it. A voice in my head tells me this is infantile behaviour, and in a way, I think it is. Infants are incredibly oral creatures, and I think I have carried elements of this with me into adulthood.
I suspect, in Freudian terms, her id is just as keen on oral sex as I am - I have far too many memories of her in action to not believe that; but her superego has stepped in and forbidden it and her ego is now siding with her superego. My own id, ego and superego, meanwhile, seem to be of one mind.
Any suggestions? - Apart, that is, from "Get over it!"
Bouledoux
Posted: 06 Oct 22:25
