Man Explains How He Relieved His Wife From Feeling Pressured To Sleep With Him
Partners shouldn't feel pressured out of 'obligation'.
@dougweaverart / TikTok A man on TikTok named Doug Weaver recently uploaded a video in which he talked about his wife and their relationship with intimacy. The uploaded video was actually in response to a comment on another video talking about intimacy.
The comment read, “When you’re to once a month come and say that again,” likely referring to the frequency at which he’s sleeping with his wife — but he had something to say to prove to this man that he’s wrong.
The man doesn’t believe in pressuring your spouse to sleep with you.
“I’ve stated so many times that I don’t believe in pressuring your spouse to have intercourse with you when they don’t want to,” Weaver started his nearly-4-minute video. “If you ask them to have intercourse with you and they say no, it is not appropriate to throw a fit.”
Weaver means that spouses should not be whining, complaining, or moping around the house. All of these things will purposefully make your partner feel bad and add pressure that will make them feel like they’re not fulfilling their “duty” to sleep with you.
He claims that people will frequently say things to their spouses like “why did we even get married if we’re not going to be having sex?” or call them a bad spouse — and doing so is wrong.
“The common response that I get is ‘Well, that’s easy for you to say because your wife wants to do stuff with you. Come talk to me when it’s been a month, three months, a year,’” he said, before opening up and being honest about his marriage.
Weaver has been married for over 15 years, and asks viewers if they really think, in all of those 15 years of marriage, there hasn’t been at least one time that they weren’t having intercourse — and the question really put things into perspective.
“Just because we haven’t done something in a while doesn’t mean I’m going to apply more pressure,” he said. “That pressure is probably why we haven’t done it in the first place.”
Photo: TikTok / @dougweaverart
He believes that other people feel like they are on a ‘time schedule’ or there’s a ‘clock’ for when couples should be intimate.
“Oh no, it’s been 14 days. It’s been three weeks. If I don’t have intercourse with them now, they’re going to resent me, they’re going to hate me. It’s going to destroy our marriage,” he added, and this is from the perspective of the person who is saying no to having sex.
He believes that those partners feel a pressure to just “push through” one moment of intimacy in order to “start the clock over” because, otherwise, their relationship will go poorly. “I’ve never pressured my wife in that way,” Weaver admitted, “but the pressure that society puts on us, the way we are trained — she came with that pressure.”
She felt like there was some kind of obligation from her to be willing to have sex with him, despite there being no pressure coming from him — and it’s societal. “It took a long time and a lot of communication for us to really establish that there is no clock,” he said. “There is no more obligation to have intercourse after one month than there is after one day.”
Frequency doesn’t matter, he claimed, nor should it. Weaver revealed something that was very helpful for him and his wife: they simply stopped counting the days.
Photo: TikTok / @dougweaverart
The frequency also isn’t as important as the quality. “If my wife is having intercourse with me just because she feels like she needs to — to be a good wife or whatever — she’s not going to have a good time. It’s not going to be good,” he said.
New York State Licensed Psychotherapist, Nicole Matusow, suggested the same thing, writing, “When you begin to associate sex with pressure, desire is quashed and performance is compromised. Sex will then likely become awkward, rushed, or anti-climactic.”
Then, the quality of that sex will turn you off from future encounters and result in a negative feedback loop, much like Weaver suggests.
The most important thing to remember is that you should never go into having sex while feeling pressured to — no matter where the pressure is coming from, spousal or societal.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor for YourTango who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.