Does she think I'm good enough?

OK, since nobody has written in to ask for advice, I have to get this thing started on my own.

I've mentioned that I participate in online discussion forums about relationships and sex. A few weeks ago I offered advice to a man who was concerned that he wasn't turning his wife on enough. Since I don't have his permission I won't copy his post here, but I'll try to give you a summary of his concerns.

Our poster, we'll call him Jim, hadn't had much sexual experience. His first marriage was to a woman who was quite frigid, but had had lots of sexual experience before their marriage, and the marriage ended because she decided to start having affairs with ex-boyfriends. She was his first and only sexual experience. During their marriage she would put out, but wasn't really into it, wouldn't tolerate foreplay, and really was just doing it as a "wifely duty" for Jim. All of this combined to give Jim quite a low opinion of his own sexual prowess.

Now he's married to his second wife and, although they do have sex and she appears to be into it and they enjoy a lot of foreplay and she tells him that everything is fine, he's concerned because she never seems to need him. He's read on forums of women who are sometimes quite aggressive toward their men, because they have a desperate need for them. He's worried that the fact that she's never grabbed him as soon as he walks in the door and dragged him off to the bedroom, that that means she's just not that into him.

Jim says she rarely initiates sex (although he admits that she will sometimes surprise him with lingerie, which I think is initiating), but never turns him down, and it seems that foreplay is often a fairly drawn out affair, sometimes meaning that a sexual encounter from start to finish lasts for hours (he mentions an hour of workup before actually getting down to business, and foreplay lasting 30-90 minutes before actual sex). He had gotten the impression from reading on forums that it was "normal" for a woman to at least occasionally be quite aggressive and have an uncontrollable desire to have sex with her man. He concludes that he wants to know that he really rocks her world, and he wants that to bring him confidence in his own abilities.

Here is my response to Jim:

Some people just aren't like a walking porn movie. I've never grabbed my husband as he walked in the door and dragged him off to another room for a quickie. There have been periods of months where I never initiated. We went through some periods where my libido was so low that if he didn't initiate we wouldn't have had sex for more than 2 years. And there have been times when my initiating consisted only of snuggling extra close to him when we went to bed.

None of that has anything to do with my husband's skill as a lover and everything to do with me, my hormones, and my emotional issues. I've never experienced uncontrollable lust, and frankly would find it pretty frightening if I did. I could never be the kind of woman you seem to want your wife to be, and if my husband was so insecure that he needed me to be like that to reassure him of his abilities, I'd promptly find him the name and phone number of a good therapist so that he could work out his own insecurity issues.

Everybody is different.....and over the years even the same person will be different.....I'm very different now from what I was when my husband and I first got together over 10 years ago. Even from one week to the next I'm different....I have days where I might get very aggressive, and other days when I wouldn't feel comfortable even gently suggesting sex.

I think the most important thing for you to understand is that your wife is an individual person, and "normal" doesn't mean anything. She is who she is, not who I am, not who lots of women on the internet are, she's just herself. Therefore it doesn't do you any good to go looking for what's normal, the only thing that will benefit your marriage is for you to get to know your wife better and accept her for who she is. Because face it, if she's not sexually aggressive, then it doesn't matter if every single other woman in the world is...if she isn't that is all that matters.

Jim thanked me for my response and said that I definitely gave him some things to think about, that my comments helped him to understand that there is a much broader range of "normal" when it comes to womens' desires than he had previously thought.

I hope Jim is able to find some confidence within himself, and is able to stop comparing his wife to "a bunch of women on the internet" and treat her as the beautifully unique person she is.

Until next time, keep on lovin' each other!
Judi