When you find out that your spouse’s idea of sex is one hundred eighty degrees different from yours, it is certainly a shock. Especially when he has been portraying himself as a committed husband.

When you choose a man to marry in full willingness to dedicate your time and body to him and you discover his idea of time spent and sex engaged in do not include exclusivity or commitment, your world shatters like a crystal goblet on concrete.

The universe feels suddenly hollow as if the substance you relied upon was not real. The stuff of your character and beliefs are not his.Your ‘marriage’ is hollow.

To be willing to engage sexually with a woman outside of marriage, your husband has behaved in a way that says ‘sex is undertaken with a willing partner, someone convenient, agreeable, and or duped.’ Given the opportunity, your husband has sex. This is bathed in entitlement, misogyny and, because done in secret, deceit.It is diametrically opposed to the marriage vows he freely undertook with you. Your expectations were to be treated as special and sacred where the bedroom is concerned. Your marriage bed was meant to be between you and him.

And you probably lived a life believing he actually lived up to those vows. You probably thought you were indeed special and sacred to him. That you and your body would be looked upon as exclusive and protected from all assault. That you were the apple of his eye. That he would go to great lengths to protect the sanctity of you and your special exclusive relationship.

So when he decides to obtain erectile help in the form of prescription without talking to you about it, you might well think he is still on the path of opportunity, should it present itself. Or that he may be planning on grooming opportunity with another. Or, given the best benefit of the doubt, he is living in make-believe that your marital relationship is something it no longer is—safe, full of trust and bearing the fruits of emotional intimacy. He is living yet again in the fantasy of believing that because you once upon a time made vows of exclusivity, that they remain intact despite his obvious dereliction of them and you. That you are willing to undertake the most personal of activities a woman can offer a man…full access to her body.

It communicates that you are in the place of being okay with sex without a committed, emotionally vulnerable and trusting relationship. That his sexual menu was then, and seems now, to still be one of convenience and opportunity, not of commitment and emotional intimacy. In other words—sex is a fantasy world to pretend you have a commitment and a meaningful relational intimacy when you don’t, with the goal of sexual release and ‘high’/ false intimacy.

What level of hypocrisy and abuse does this rise to?

“What are you thinking?” is the sentence that comes immediately to mind.

Evidently there is very little thinking involved. There is knee jerk impulsivity to assume you are willing and available to engage in a sacred exclusive act for what?? ‘fun’? Sexual release? a good time? To what level of assumption does this rise? Has your moral compass somehow shifted to be his? What??

I am at a loss of words to convey the depravity of this thinking/this assumption.

In what universe do we live that we are expected to dance to the fantasies of our spouse? Are we objects to control and to which he has access? We certainly are not the stuff of sacred, protected and beloved.

Oh hollow universe that has placed us in the path of such a delusional man.

May we continue to fill our universe to the brim by following our own integrity, our character intact, living in self care– even if our heart has been shattered on the rocks of disappointment.