SHE DOESN'T WANT TO BE YOUR MOTHER AND THEN FUCK YOU AT BEDTIME

She's spent the day reminding him about the dentist, finding his passport, buying his mother's birthday present, asking whether he called the plumber and explaining for the third time that the wet towel does not possess the independent motor skills required to reach the bloody laundry basket. Then they get into bed. He rolls towards her. Apparently it's mating season. Maaate ... She's been managing you since breakfast. You can't spend all day being another item on her fucking to do list and then be disappointed you're not the item she wants to do. I've been reading hundreds of women's comments recently, and underneath the menopause, the resentment, the loneliness and the disappearing sex, the same sentence keeps appearing in different clothes ... I feel like his mother. And that's a serious fucking problem. Because mothers can love deeply. They can care. Nurture. Organise. Forgive. Clean up after you. Remind you to take your medication. Know where your clean undies are. But it's probably not the role you want your wife psychologically rehearsing all day if you're hoping she'll look across the bedroom that night and think ... Fuck me, I want that. Yet some of us seem determined to test the boundaries of human sexuality. We say: "Just tell me what needs doing." Which sounds wonderfully cooperative. Except what we've actually said is ... You continue noticing everything. I'll wait for my work order. Then we complain she's bossy. That's quite an achievement ... First you make her management. Then you resent the management. Then you wonder why management doesn't want to sit on your face. Corporate structures are complicated. And no, this isn't really about dishes. A man can unload every dishwasher in the northern hemisphere and still be an emotionally constipated prick. It's about what happens when one person becomes responsible for the functioning of the other. She stops leaning on him because she's too busy holding him up. Try feeling weak at the knees with lust for a man you're currently propping upright. And I'm not talking about caring for someone who genuinely needs you. That's different. Bodies fail. People get sick. Life occasionally kicks the door in. I've needed caring for myself. There's vulnerability in allowing someone to care for you. There can even be intimacy in it. But being cared for because you can't carry something is very different from expecting someone to carry what you simply can't be fucked carrying yourself. One is partnership. The other is outsourcing adulthood. And somewhere in that arrangement something can quietly disappear. Not love. ...That's what makes this difficult ... Desire. She may still love him enormously. She may sit beside him in hospital. Care for him when he's ill. Defend him to her friends. Know exactly how he likes his tea ... And feel absolutely no desire to climb into bed and lick him like a fucking Cornetto. Love and lust are related. They're not fucking twins. I think some men sometimes struggle with that distinction. We say: "But she loves me." ... Yes. So does your Labradoodle. We're discussing something else. Sexual desire is unreasonable, feral, entirely unbothered by your five-year plan. It doesn't respond to obligation, resentment, or feeling like you're supervising the person currently attempting to seduce you. Desire isn't a compliance issue. You can't manage your way into somebody's knickers with a to do list ... I've checked. And menopause can expose the whole arrangement beautifully. Because suddenly her body may already be negotiating its own industrial dispute. A good nights sleep has buggered off. Hormones are moving the furniture. Sex may hurt. Desire may change. Her internal thermostat is being operated by Satan, and Satan does not take requests. And the tolerance that once allowed her to compensate for everybody else may have left the building along with the oestrogen. So he says: "Menopause killed our sex life." ... Maybe. But I'd be careful with that sentence. Because sometimes menopause didn't kill the desire. It stopped her overriding all the reasons she wasn't feeling it. That's a much less comfortable possibility. I've had to look at some of this in myself. Sam and I have been together long enough for me to know there's a world of difference between being loved by a woman and being a man she can still experience as desirable. You don't get the second automatically because you've secured the first. Marriage isn't a lifetime sexual subscription, , and there's no loyalty tier where the bins earn you a blowjob. Desire doesn't care that you're basically a good bloke. It notices how someone feels in your presence. Does she feel met? ... Or managed? Can she lean on you? ... Or is she constantly compensating for you? Can she relax around you? ... Or does being with you mean there's always one more thing to remember? And there's another part men don't particularly enjoy hearing. Sometimes when she finally says, "I don't want sex," he hears: I'm not attractive anymore. So now she has another job ... Reassure him. Explain it's not him. Cuddle him correctly. Talk him gently off the ledge of his own ego. Perhaps eventually have sex she didn't particularly want so the evening doesn't become a three-hour parliamentary inquiry into whether she still fancies him. And then we wonder why sex starts feeling like work. We've put her on another fucking shift. Because affection can't become a debt. A cuddle can't become a deposit. And kindness isn't foreplay unless both people fucking want it to be. And if every kiss eventually wanders south, she'll eventually start avoiding the kiss. Then he'll complain, "she doesn't even let me touch her anymore." Maybe because touch stopped being touch. It became the opening bid in a negotiation nobody agreed to enter. And that's how both people end up starving.He misses being desired. She misses wanting to desire him. He feels rejected. She feels pursued. He reaches harder. She retreats further. And eventually they're lying twelve inches apart in a bed large enough to contain the fucking Atlantic, both of them insisting they have no idea how they got there. That's the tragedy. Not simply that she stopped wanting sex ... She may miss the woman who used to want it too. So if you're a man wondering why the woman beside you no longer seems to want you, don't immediately ask , "How do I get more sex?" ... That's the wrong question. Ask something considerably more frightening ... "When did being with me start feeling like another job?" Then shut the fuck up.... Because the answer may hurt. It may involve things you don't agree with. Things you didn't intend. Things you thought you'd already explained. Don't explain them again. Listen. Because maybe the question isn't how you become the man she'll fuck again. Maybe it's how the two of you become lovers again instead of manager and managed. And that begins long before anybody gets into bed. You can't spend all day asking a woman to carry you ... then climb into bed and wonder why she doesn't want you on top of her too. So perhaps stop trying to become the man she'll fuck. Become the man she doesn't have to carry. Not because doing so guarantees sex. Nothing does. But because if you want to be her lover, stop giving her a fucking child to raise. © Zen Prem 2026