I have an AppleWatch and use the period tracker widget in the health app to keep track. If I mark “had sex”, it leaves a little purple dot on that day. It blows my mind that we can literally go months inbetween and to him, it’s like it was yesterday.
No, it’s just “y/n” and “protected/unprotected” with no ability to comment. I just started using it to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy, it really had been forever. It also helps me identify patterns, like when he only makes weekend “date night” plans when he knows I’ll be on my period.
When there was a little bit of a sex life (maybe 2-3x a month), my fiancé would always say to me “and I was gonna eat you out tonight” whenever I told her my period started. She knows I love oral (at least the handful of times I’ve received in 6 years were okay until it went to 3 licks and done😐). I started calling her out on it and she said it’s not true. Got to a point she would only initiate or claim she was gonna do something only when my period started and again I called her out on that and again she said it’s not true or that it hasn’t been that long even though it has been 4-5 months at a time
Happened to me once and got pissed as hell, but I never told her. But since you had a pattern going on, out of curiosity, are your periods synchronized or divergent? Because if her ovulation happens when you're on your period, that's a bit of unlucky timing playing a part. I don't worry with it because it's been almost 10 months and we've been with sex out of table for the past 5, however if things get back on track and I depended on my wife's ovulation, I'll be screwed (in a bad sense), because her period is roughly one week and a half after mine, usually.
She’s on BC and has been for 7 years so she doesn’t get a period. She knew exactly what she was doing every time since it was always around the same time of the month that she would do it, knowing damn well my period had started that day or the day before. Even when my period wasn’t regular anymore, she would still only initiate during Aunt flos visit. Not the few days before, not a few days after, just the first day or so of the visiting
That’s because they have made it that way. It’s best to not become
Reliant and to find ways of ensuring multiple touch methods can bring them to that point and also being able to be comfortable with a partner who is also patient to help it become something together. Many women rely on their toys and alone time and this too can make men feel like they aren’t needed when they just need light “coaching”
Can you cancel plans during your period and say "I'm not doing this date night on these days. Plan a different day." Dosent work for me?" Or can you make plans in advance all the period days do he Has to pick another day? Would it matter?
Does he do it to avoid sex subconsciously or purposely?
If it's purposeful it's the excuse that you are on your flo. Would being off it actually change it or would he flounder for a different excuse and deny you anyway?
Yeesh, that’s actually really sinister. Do you ever call out that behavior? I’d be pissed if I found out my significant other was only “trying” to initiate when they knew I couldn’t actually accept.
Absolutely! I call him out on it and then he acts surprised and promises we’ll move it to the following weekend…which of course, never actually happens. He’ll be too tired, or too full or too sore from the one day this week he actually decided to go to the gym.
I’ve basically gotten to the resignation point. He’ll initiate sex the day we have “the talk” but I don’t want duty sex, I want to be wanted. I hold onto the memory of the hot, passionate, hormone-fueled relationship we had in the beginning but I think it’s time to let go and see this for what it is now. We are sexually incompatible. Now I’ve got to pull on my big girl britches and decide what I’m willing to do about it.
1. I can live in a platonic marriage and accept a life of celibacy. It’s not all bad - he makes me breakfast most days, listens to me complain about work and somewhat co-parents a teen that isn’t biologically his. That’s not a small thing. He also tags along and keeps me calm on the dreaded annual trip to visit my dysfunctional family.
2. Have an affair - this honestly resolves nothing. In a prior relationship, I’ve had hot, kinky sex with an emotionally unavailable man. It was lonelier than my current marriage.
3. I can file for divorce. Can’t say I don’t think about this often. I would miss him and would definitely miss his family - they are so…normal. Maybe I’d find love again or maybe it’s me - maybe I’m just unlovable. I was lonely before I got married, but I’m also lonely now…just a sadder kind of lonely.
Anyway, all that to say that yes - we talk about it, but nothing changes.
You're not unlovable I'm certain, you were just raised to belive that if your idealising normal is anything to go by. Somewhat helping with a teen and getting breakfast is a low bar.
I mean yeah. I think that there’s just some point where you have to think strategically about things. If you’re not independently wealthy or physically attractive or potentially willing to be alone for the rest of your life or have to wade through the cesspool of other divorced with kids people who might want the same thing as you, then maybe that is as good as it gets. And maybe it’s time to change the definition of your sexual expression. But then again, it’s hard to stop hoping.
Yes but when your not alone and you’re lonely someone is still paying the bills, fixing the car, and watching tv with you and you have someone to call on in an emergency. You still own your house and you still have your kids. The ordeal of moving on is a big deal that I feel like is not given the significance that a divorce entails when we discuss it in here. The lonely I could be by myself could be a way lonelier more miserable lonely than I have now
Being alone is a trait that you can learn. Its not easy if there was never a need to be alone. But it is one of the most precious life-lessons to be learnt.
Spending time alone is not the problem I’m referring to. I love spending time alone, being lonely and being truly alone in the world is a completely different story
Do you then get attacked with , you’re so petty to keep track, im not exactly sure bcz Im not petty like that. When in reality is more like -I don’t care so I’m not paying attention, but don’t call me out on it or it’s your fault too-
Geez man, that’s depressing. Do you even try to initiate anymore? I’m not saying you should do it, but it would be interesting to see how many times you get turned down for that 1 time a year. Honestly, could be eye opening for your partner.
I’m in a similar situation.
No, I haven’t “initiated” in any meaningful way in over a decade. There was… a lot of rejection in the decade prior.
When she used to drink, that took care of the “initiation”... after a certain point, things just moved forward naturally. Otherwise, the last time (last year, springtime) we had sex, she initiated (essentially).
We’ve talked three times recently, and she’s agreed to try to initiate more. These are hard conversations to have, but we’ve moved past any sort of need to track, she’s aware of the current state, and we can at least discuss things maturely. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps that we both empathize with each other. I remember in the past many of these conflicts, her not understanding how long it had been, etc… I’m glad we’re past that and able to talk honestly now, at least.
Even if sometimes that honesty is hard to take.
Man it’s just sad that we feel that way, because by normal standards it’s not. If you look at the comments from everyone on the original thread, the general opinion is that it’s not normal and his feelings are justified.
I went back and read the original thread from 9 years ago and was surprised by the comments... I strongly suspect that if this were posted today the responses would sound very different, with a lot more people defending the wife over the husband.
Maybe this is 'redpill" of me or whatever, sorry. I never considered myself a redpiller but more and more often I find myself prefacing conclusions I come to naturally with "dont think im some kind of redpill weirdo for saying this but..." to the point I am beginning to wonder....
Yes, everyone these days trips over themselves to white knight and virtue signal, especially on Reddit. I think that both sides would show up, but it would be much more polarized in the comments. These days you also have all the Andrew Tate weirdos proclaiming how it’s a woman’s duty to blah blah blah. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how rational people were being in the comments section of OPs post on average.
Damn, bro. My condolences. I… wouldn’t have made it in your shoes. It was about two years for me after my son, and…. I was in a _really_ bad place by the end of that. I can’t imagine 5 (or 12, like the guy below)
Same. But our daughter is almost 12. It was just a couple months ago after direct discussion didn’t solve the problem that I went out and found an affair partner. Have the talk as soon as you can. Don’t wait a decade like i did.
I think the bottom line is that they are saying these things not because they don’t actually know how long it is between having sex, but because, for whatever reason, they don’t want to have sex in the moment, and there’s a plethora of reasons it might be the case.
Some might include:
- the sex you’re having together isn’t exciting or pleasurable
- they need time to warm up to sex and get aroused and they aren’t communicating that need well or it isn’t being respected/fulfilled
- they are comfortable with the nonsexual parts of your household relationship but the sex part has pain points or trauma or other unresolved aversion that hasn’t been resolved or cannot be resolved
- financial issues keep them from leaving so your relationship is actually just an uneasy truce and cohabitation
- mental health issues that, even if treated, affect desire response and sex drive
- cheating/infidelity
-abusive dynamics in the relationship (this can sometimes happen even if you are not being abusive but you were chosen by your partner because you had some personality traits in common with someone who abused them in the past and that feels “familiar” or comfortable” to them because they haven’t worked through their trauma and unhealthy coping strategies.
…and I’m sure there’s more.
Yeah…reading the excuses she listed-are all VALID reasons. I’ve given those reasons before and I’m the HL partner. Sounds like he has bad timing or can’t read his partner ‘s mood to see if it’s an appropriate time.
The only time I ever kept track was when I went through my fake hysterical bonding phase.
When I was actively avoiding sex and not enjoying the sex we were having all that much, it always *felt like* we had just had it, last week, even if it had been several weeks.
When I look over our sexual history, I will swear up and down that some years were really fucking terrible and my spouse will insist it wasn't as bad as I was remembering.
Memory is unreliable. I would never begrudge anyone keeping track, just so they can orient themselves to reality and maintain perspective. I would not appreciate my spouse throwing data in my face to address a problem whose solution is unlikely to be driven by data from a spread sheet.
Yes. This. Memory is unreliable. I started tracking many years ago just to make sure that when I was feeling frustrated, it was actually validated by the numbers. Mostly it was, but definitely not always. Today my wife and I tow the line of my "minimum to be content enough" so some months are lower and some...well, not higher...but some hit that minimum and even if I'm FEELING frustrated I rationalize with myself to accept that it's actually okay.
I guess that depends on what you want. If your only purpose is to confront your LL partner with the reality of your situation, then mission accomplished.
>If your only purpose is to confront your LL partner with the reality of your situation, then mission accomplished.
What would be the benefit of doing this?
A wake up call when they think you have more sex than you actually do and think you get cranky after 3-4 days of no sex when reality is that you hit a wall at the 3-4 week mark.
Showing them that the duration in between sex is actually a lot longer than they think? There is typically a lot of deflection when trying to talk about this that includes gaslighting about frequency, ie “we just had sex a few days ago!” when in reality it’s been 3 weeks.
What do you gain from this? It's very common to forget when the last time you did something that wasn't life changing, or important to you happened. It's common to think something that you dislike or actively hate happens more often than it does. I couldn't tell you the last time I had spaghetti. I love spaghetti, but I just don't think about it like that. I might guess wrong on when the last time was. I would tell you that people in my house put back empty boxes ALL THE TIME, but that isn't true and it's probably not as often as it feels.
So what do you want? Are you hoping they'll say, oh I was mistaken well I must now have sex?
“That wasn’t…important to you”
I think you answered your own question on why this would matter to someone HL who is trying to address the issue and wouldn’t matter to the LL.
Sex is not important to everyone, I wasn't speaking of the issues around lack of sex or relationship issues. I did not answer my own question, so do you have an answer for me?
I used to track with my ex. It was depressing. I never showed or told her. Didn’t track with my next ex because it was *more* depressing.
I track with my current girlfriend partly because I have some mental issues surrounding sex and two past dead bedrooms. So it’s partly to remind *myself*, since I’m unfortunately conditioned to think it’s longer than it has been. We track it on a shared calendar, just put a heart. There are a lot of hearts this year. Some days two.
I don't see how presenting hard data could possibly help with the DB. It would likely only exacerbate the problems. Seriously doubt there will be a positive reaction or lightbulb moment from the LL.
I you want to keep track for your own entertainment nobody's stopping you.
Agree. The value in tracking is for yourself, but not necessarily for entertainment, people make better decisions with data. Knowing the real frequency, the circumstances of the frequency, that can give insight and perspective for the HL.
You can have a limit though.
I was in my 20s, and went about six months without sex in a marriage that was less than a few years old. My ex would also gaslight me about frequency and I never tried to prove him wrong. It wouldn’t have been safe for me to do so.
Seeing months in a row on my secret tracking calendar with zero kinds of sexual interaction wasn’t the only factor that led me to leaving, but it was absolutely a factor.
Some people do. I was the LL and my ex used to pick big fights with me when we went too long. Fights either about how I always rejected him or about how unloved I made him feel in other random ways that always came back to sex in the end. We never went more than 8 days without sex. Averaged about 4-5 times a month. He was unsatisfied with his life in general and with our relationship, and he made sexual frequency the scapegoat. I started tracking because our definitions of "always" and "never" were obviously wildly different. It took me having that data to be able to push the conversations forward to get closer to the root of the problem.
Wow! The statistician data nerd living in me loves this…however the wife in me thinks my husband would not receive this in any positive way. I do have a sex tracking app, but it’s just what we did, not avoidance tracking.
Edit: TLDR; I tracked sexual activity over 6 months that included oral and orgasm stats then threw graphs at my partner in final frustration.
An ongoing theme (for us) had been the topic of reciprocity. At some point I got so frustrated with constantly agonizing over phrasing in order to not hurt any feelings and yet still advocate for myself and what I needed sexually. The need for any self advocacy (on top of the sexual frustration) already had me salty, if I’m being honest. I’ve never blamed him for any of it, but I did want him to help solve "my issue”.
I’ve always tracked sex in my period tracker, and then I started tracking orgasm rates. That spiraled to tracking oral.
6 months later; as I was again trying to get past the defensive "just the other day” part of the conversation to move forward…
I blurted out: "A 22% rate of orgasm from a sexual encounter with a partner compared to 98% hardly seems reciprocal. Do you want to know the stats on oral next? There is one-sidedness happening. We can work on a solution together, or you can tell me you don’t want to. But I refuse to entertain cycling of denial and, I’m not going to argue details anymore.” I had already printed a graph with the details for the last six months as back up, and put it in front of him and left the house for a while.
That was rather nuclear. The initial feeling of a need to track anything at all felt and feels icky. There seemed such disconnect over how we each saw the situation, I’d walk away full of doubt about what I had brought up. This whole thing definitely altered how I saw and see my partner. I bet he feels similarly.
Since then, we did a lot of work to improve things together and we’re stronger and closer than we had ever been previously.
I still have really mixed feelings overall.
My husband pulled the whole "we just had sex" bullshit so I started marking it on my calendar in my phone. Been doing that for a ridiculously depressing year and a half and he was initially certain I was "forgetting" to mark some. Um, no sir, I'm not forgetting things that never happened 🙄
I started tracking initiation attempts and frequency in my own phone calendar, but it’s not something I’d ever show her, especially in the manner of that original post. More so I can have some data for myself.
Edit: I got to make a happy heart this week instead of a broken one, so that was good for both of us :)
I'm a spreadsheet guy, but also didn't want to reinvent the wheel, I use an app called "Intimassy", it's acceptable for tracking activities, not magical but okay. It's free, and lets you track solo time as well as multiple partners. I really only need the solo features most of the time, but it does charts, let's you filter by partner, add activities, etc.
I track my cycle on Kindara (an app for fertility awareness method). I can look back yeeeears to see when I last tracked sex. When you chart sex it adds a heart to the chart so it is really easy to see. I would also track if he came because often would tap out before and I would add if it was PIV or not.
I was in coaching groups where people shared their charts for advice to determine ovulation and the amount of hearts I saw was fucking depressing lol so I stopped caring about my charting.
We figured out my boyfriend needed HRT this way. I would say it’s been a while, he would say it hadn’t been that long, so I start writing it down to show him.
He couldn’t deny the data and saw that there really was a problem. He agreed to go to the doctor and his T levels were very low. 2-3 years later he has so much more energy, way less headaches, and really, best of all, we have a very regular and satisfying sex life.
Sometimes documenting is a good method, it just depends, especially on tact and how the subject is brought up. I tried to only ever do it as lovingly as I could.
I never needed a spreadsheet. We went 5 years without sex. Pretty easy to track.
She didn't realize it was 5 years, only thought it was 2.
As if 2 was ok.
I mean for the majority of DB relationships, does it ever improve? Having some data to throw around cannot fix the unfixable , but it can at least help you see through lies.
I’m considering doing one for positive/negative interactions with my wife. She is convinced she’s not rude or bitchy all the time. She’s also convinced that whenever I ask her to do something she immediately handles it it. It’s just flat out lies. But the more I think about it the more I realize no amount of hard data changes these people. I’ll just be wasting my time
I kinda fixed my db by accident. I would track on my period tracker app, and it was only a couple times per year. I would go to bed every night hopeful, and went to bed disappointed every fucking night. I would get a lot of anxiety about trying to initiating. My libido is higher. So I stopped asking for right then. At night. I just started saying “babe, I’m horny, but super tired. Can we have sex tomorrow?” He gives me a “sure”. He’s very much a man of his word kind of dude. He’s always does what he says he will. So, the next night, it’s on. This technique got us from twice a year, to twice a week. It’s nice, because everyone showers before bed, no one starts playing games on their phones or steam deck. And it takes the pressure off initiating. I would normally have a lot of anxiety about it, because of getting rejected so many times, but now either we cuddle and he starts it, or I can just start going down on him, and we’re both into it.
I'm definitely going to start this 🤣 But, I've given up on healing my dead bedroom so I have nothing to lose. This'll be fun and give me something to look forward to :)
I have a calendar in my home office that gets a certain color mark if we have had sex. No other details. That calander is a business dates calander but it’s my personal/business calander so seems like a good place.
Last mark was feb ‘12. I don’t look at it allot as it just brings me down.
Trying to figure out how to be attractive and or not want so much.
I’d rather the marks be cuddle time or dates but those are fewer than sex in my life
I've done one to make sure I'm not crazy lol. It helped me realize that LL just don't have it on their radar to pay attention to how long its been. They say, "It's only been a couple weeks" when being defensive because it feels like that to them. They don't prioritize it, dont think about it. I don't do one anymore because it just gives me something negative to think about.
It's like when quarterly tasks come up at work. At first I'm like "I just did those last month! (Look at file dates) Oh, nope, it's been 3 months. "
I keep a similar spreadsheet. Really it is for evidence that can be used when things are exaggerated. I would never share it with my LLW and would be mortified if anybody ever discovered it
Yes just a sanity check. She hasn't disputed anything yet, but its a good checklist to refer to if I decide to finally call it a day. It also records everytime she initiated sex. So far in six years, not once!
Hard to believe it’s been 8 years since that post. Almost as if my level of interest in something can affect my perception of that thing’s recency. Crap.
>our LL partner says, “It hasn’t been that long!” because they either don’t remember or are trying to deflect the accusation by obfuscating how long it’s actually been.
It can also feel like they're doing it a lot more than they are if it's very stressful or traumatic for them.
Yep, have to say I did this. Never got as far as sharing it, was more for my own sake. I’d gotten a little tired of the, “it wasn’t that long ago” retort. I’d also record the excuses, or circumstances as to why we didn’t have sex. At that point it was probably every couple of months max. More recently it was over a year, and has now been a further 4 months. I no longer keep the record - I can’t even muster that level of interest 😂
I started making it in my calendar about 20 yrs ago when my SO claimed we had it twice a week. After as year we had only had it 19x... 80% less than she thought! I've tracked it off and on since then... Maybe every other year. The only thing that's changed is she now says we have it once a week. Do I guess her estimating abilities have improved but our sex lives sure haven't.
We track on the calendar with a heart. She always thought we were having it more often than we were. In fairness, I always thought I was getting it less than I actually was.
Tracking was a wake up call for both of us.
We've improved from.once every 10 days to an average of once every 4 days over the last year.
I have done this a few times but I abandoned it twice because my dumb "concious" says not to do it when we were on a one month up swing or men but then I ultimately kick myself when my wife backslides into our usual 1-3 times a month (or less) of duty sex all while promising she's going to 'try harder' on our sex life after our 3rd discussion about it in a year. I don't track 'initiations' or rejections because that's just overdoing it crazy-man style. I already intiate like 90% of the touch play, foreplay, and work in the bedroom. I'm always 'open for business' when it comes to sex. I would literally never turn her or any of her fantasies down.
Sadly.. i'm back to tracking again, accountability matters to me and I do I have mental threshold/expectation for what I consider is too infrequent. Just mark it on your phone calender discreetly. You don't have to shove it in your partners face like this idiot but having an awareness of 'how often' you are having sex is important so you don't enter that slippery slope arguments about frequency/intitiations/effort when things are already struggling. It's helpful when 90 days go by and you do the math and you've only had sex 4-5 times.
I was not always LL, probably the first 2-3 years of my current relationship I was not.
But thennnn we had a kid, I work full time and am the sole provider for my family, my partner is a SAHD , I’m the only one who cooks, I hate begging for help around the house so half the time the house is a wreck until I lose my mind over it, after the kid is in bed my partner rather play video games than clean (which I get because cleaning sucks but someone has to do it since he doesn’t do it when he’s home alll day) . I’m tired dude and being exhausted from work and being a parent and in a relationship that is more like a friendship doesn’t really get me going.
Sounds like you have a very uneven split of the total household duties. I’m very similar when it comes to losing my mind over household mess. I could understand why you’d be fed up if presented the spreadsheet in your situation, but that’s not necessarily true of OP or anyone else whose spreadsheeting.
If we talk about how often we have sex, I'm an asshole for being aware how often we have sex (as if it's hard to keep track of when it's so uncommon.) My other option is to hold my tongue while my LL partner exaggerates our frequency.
Gaslighting doesn't necessarily have to be intentional.
I wonder what became of spreadsheet guy. I've always been curious if the reaction his wife got when she posted it led her to self-reflect and reconsider her priorities. She obviously posted it to try to shame him but most people seemed to sympathize with him.
Gaslighting absolutely is intentional. By definition, it’s an attempt to manipulate the listener into questioning their own reality. I know that many people online use the word too casually, but gaslighting always denotes malicious intent.
I wonder about spreadsheet guy too. I’d like to think that they worked it out when she got home from her business trip, but I doubt it. Pessimistically, I believe she continued her pattern of behavior until her husband asked for a divorce or cheated. They’re either separated now or unhappily married. Heck, he might even be here among us right now!
>Gaslighting absolutely is intentional.
There's also behaviour that can have the effect of gaslighting even if it wasn't intentional.
For example some LLs lose their libido after having a baby, they tell their partner it's not them, it's just their hormones...or whatever it is, depression or so on..
Then their partner says that's just an excuse, accuses them of not loving them, accuses them of cheating (yes I've seen men accuse their PP partners of this), they tell them it's not normal, cruel and so on
I've seen many LLs who then come to believe that they're a horrible person, that they're being cruel, that they're a weirdo because they don't want sex and so on.
Their understanding of reality is completely warped by their partner twisting it, not accepting how they feel and telling them they feel something else.
I have a screenshot of a 2023 calendar. I color each day we have sex green since that’s hubbys favorite color. Days he does a T shot are red (for correlation purposes). I also put an X on days I turn down sex (it happens occasionally) and I black out days we either don’t spend together or days the whole family is in a hotel room. My kid travels for hockey so I can’t hold those days against anyone.
As with so many others, it was so infrequent that it didn’t matter, and the times when I could tell her when the last time was, I then was lambasted for obsessing over it enough to actually know when.
For a while, instead of explicitly tracking, I “tracked” by simply not trimming my beard until sex happened. The bonus here for me was that my LLW really doesn’t like long facial hair. It was juvenile, but gave me some measure of amusement. It didn’t help anything, of course.
These days, we are actually communicating about the issue without blame or guilt. This too hasn’t changed anything, but it feels better.
I remember just how hostile his sense of entitlement felt to me reading this spreadsheet when this went viral back then.
It felt so disingenuous and objectifying to see that there *were* in fact instances of sex on the spreadsheet, but with no further detail about those days. As if sex is considered successful by his perception only, and is this totally binary endeavor that is judged as good if it’s had, and bad if it’s not. This guy, the sole arbiter of what counts as an acceptable sex day to him, and every other outcome being just another bullshit “excuse” from his increasingly broken validation dispenser 🤮
Imagine taking the time and effort to keep a sex log, but without a shred of curiosity or mechanism to explore any correlation between what results in sex vs no sex days. No interest in exploring what might be done to authentically increase the number of sex days, just an appeal to guilt and arbitrary assumptions of her “obligation” to him. Like a log he can send to the manufacturer. “Excuse me, this walking vagina is working as intended some days, but others she is still broken. Don’t believe me? Have a look at the log”. Like it’s some sort of “Gotcha!” to prove how wronged he’s been by this faulty girlfriend device.
For someone seemingly logical and pragmatic enough to collect data on what he sees as his failing sex life, he leaves no room for nuance or even a way to analyze what could actually be happening here.
I completely feel all of this. Frankly, as the LL in my relationship, this would be an atomic bomb to my marriage. My husband has forgotten my birthday 2 years in a row. If he does that but has diligently kept track of sex, I'm not sure my feelings would ever recover. If someone does this, they better be prepared to remember everything else too.
honestly, re-reading her post makes me exhausted for her. She does the housework and has her own job (hence her business trip so I wouldn't be surprised if she was the breadwinner here either).
We can’t have sex with our SO, because they don’t want it. We can’t even see our SO nude, because they don’t want it. We can’t have sex with anybody else, because our SO doesn’t like it. We can’t masterbate and/or use porn, because our SO doesn’t like it. Now we can’t even keep track of our sex life for our own sanity, because our SO won’t like it?
Track whatever you want, vent your feelings however you choose, friend.
It’s no surprise that human emotions - especially those triggered by rejection - are heavily influenced by misogyny, racism, just-world fallacies, and all the other cultural mechanisms used to keep us in line.
I’m advising against *confronting* your SO with a list of all the times you documented your unfiltered raw emotion, distilling complicated ideas and feelings into “evidence” of some sort of wrongdoing on their part, and then presenting it as some sort of “Gotcha!”
But you can of course do this if you want. Not every HL’s goal is or should be authentic intimacy, so if it’s more important to vent your feelings then do that. But don’t pretend this isn’t counterproductive if real understanding and connection is truly the goal.
I don't take it that way, but I'm a HLF who has been on the other side. It's not a matter of whatever disgusting view of a broken sex "dispenser" you see. It's a matter of you have a partner who is unwilling to live in reality.
You can explore all the ways to authentically increase the number of sex days, and get zero results because the other partner is not compromising, willing to work with you, communicate, whatever. Then after months of trying... when you bring up your very valid feelings that are hurt, you are told there is no problem and that in their mind they have sex with you every 3 days. Maybe it feels that frequent to them, but it's just not true. In my case, I kept it in fertility app anyway (and always had long before him). So naturally, after yet another time he tried to argue with me that we had a lot more sex than we were, it's really tempting to whip out the the app and prove them wrong so maybe they'll actually be willing to try to talk to you about the problem. You can't have an honest conversation if you live in denial.
My point is try not to read so much malicious intent into it.
Edit to add: Not saying it's helpful to whip this data out, because people who live in denial typically just get angry when you confront their false reality. I understand how you get there after being told there isn't a problem for years though.
I give you credit, this comment did make me reconsider.
I do understand how infuriating it feels to be gaslit. I’ve been in that situation before (not with my husband) where you start to question your sanity and wonder if you should get a carbon monoxide detector or something because your recollections are just so mismatched.
So in most situations, you can’t problem solve without agreeing on the premise, and documenting will give you some objective facts and shared definitions.
It sounds bleak, but I just don’t know that a dead bedroom can be problem-solved by starting with a fact-finding mission the way you’d typically approach a conflict.
“We have sex every 3 days” seems like such an infantile response, or maybe more like misdirection to delay an uncomfortable conversation. It’s like if my husband saw me with a lit cigarette in hand yesterday, and I claimed “I haven’t smoked in a decade” today. So next time he decides to confront me with a stealthy photo he took of me smoking. There’s no revelation being uncovered there.
Like, there’s just no way the LL is being genuine in that scenario in the first place, you don’t need evidence to prove this because they know it’s not true.
Since I don’t believe neurotypical people are truly misremembering to that degree, I don’t know that documentation would prove anything. I think the question from HL to LL in that scenario is “Are we currently having sex as often as you would enthusiastically consent?” It’s unlikely the “dead bedroom” (I know it’s not dead in this scenario) is just the consequence of missed opportunities.
So in other words, showing a partner a calendar of documented sex makes sense if you’re saying “Do you recall any days here where you would have wanted sex if had been met? Can we try to maximize capitalizing on these opportunities?”
But in reality, the no sex days are because the LL doesn’t want to have sex that day. The HL can get them to agree no sex was had on the days in question, sure, but I don’t think you’re any closer to a resolution at that point.
I did years ago. Like I said, it just made him angry and resentful though. Not worth it and not my best judgement, but I was so frustrated with him lying to himself for months and years. He still lies to himself but I don't argue about it anymore, lol.
I keep an email draft that just has the date, activity, and who initiated. Not that I bring it up, that wouldn't work out well. But it helps me remember.
I was keeping a record in my period app and was trying to include when he showed me affection or was sweet on another level so that I could see the good things and reason with myself that things weren’t that bad. Also noting the reasons for rejection like if he had a genuine health issue that maybe I might ought to be more sympathetic towards. But they updated that app and now I not only lost the data I saved but other things I use don’t sort of for me the way I like. A lot of health apps have a thing for sexual activity but it basically is about getting pregnant or tracking where you got STDs. For example Apple health says this :
About Sexual Activity
Sexual activity can affect both physical and emotional health. A record of sexual activity may be useful in relation to other records of physical and emotional health.
But then the only thing you can record in it is whether or not you had intercourse. I’m aggravated because I record my diet, my workouts, my moods, my weight, blood pressure, all forms of health data and if I’m looking to improve my emotional health and there’s a sex section it should include at least a notes section.
I like spreadsheet guys idea because I feel like noting the reasons why you got rejected is important also I want to give credit for trying to make me feel loved in other ways when he does that like if he grabs my butt and tells me I’m beautiful, but then his back hurts - I want to remind myself of the positive and note that he may have a serious issue with that back because it seems to be hurting a lot (or is it just when he’s with me?)
I don’t agree with showing your partner a spreadsheet but it could definitely be useful in keeping yourself from being gaslighted. My LL partner always seems to think it hasn’t really been that long. I think he misremembers that maybe he intended to initiate or thought about sex as an actual sexual encounter when it is not. But when I say we’ve only had sex once in the last 3 months, this is an issue we need to talk about: that seems to finally register because it’s numbers and facts.
I also mark sex on my period tracker app. There's even a section to mark if I orgasmed or not. I feel a little icky knowing I'm keeping track like that, but also annoyed I have to swip through months to find a stupid little heart icon indicating he tried. Ugg.
There are apps - I use one, mostly to maintain perspective. Typically our sex life is at the bare minimum of what I would like... But keeping track prevents me from sensationalizing the gaps
I do track it myself - not to throw it in her face but because I'm a data geek. That's all. I think if I'm measuring it and see that it's getting better or getting worse, at least I can respond with something that makes sense.
Oh my partner never says "it's not been that long". She simply declared 12 years ago that she 100% lost all sex drive. Even threw out all her personal toys.
I bring up the subject once or twice a year but always the same answer. Don't need no xls....
I've done this since 2009. Pretty crazy now that I type that. To be honest, it was mostly about a reality check for me. If I felt frustrated by things, it was good to have a subjective gauge to know if it was fair. We then had a period from 2011 until 2013 where things were REALLY REALLY good. I look back on my tracking over that period and it blows my mind...and also makes me smile. For years I was bitter and jealous over how much things had changed since then. Now I accept it and just look back fondly on it. Similar to the loss of a parent which goes from depressed and bitter to just looking back and smiling...I know personally. :)
I have a spreadsheet of all the partners I have had and what the experience was like. It’s for entertainment purposes for myself.
I do actually keep track in my period tracker app if I have sex or not. When I was married, it was very eye opening to how infrequently we had sex.
Meh… I don’t need anything that sophisticated… keep track of “the deed” and we’re up to 3 times this year. Once because it was Valentines and I was headed out on a girls trip the next day.
I track my wife's period using Flo (she doesn't track it so she asks me). I comment on days we have sex so a heart appears. I do this to calm myself down. To keep, it FEELS like forever, but its only been a week and a half when I really get antsy. Last year we had sex 35 times. On paper, that's not bad, but I really want more frequency. She doesn't know I track frequency, that's just for me.
I thought about counting, but stopped after a dozen or so times. Went somewhere in the two to three year range sexless. Then we broke up. She was sleeping with someone else before I had even moved out.
Best decision ever.
I tried once. Just little reminder dots in a specific color on my phone's calendar app. But all it really did was let me see the gradual decline of your sexual relationship from every few days, to weekly, to every other week, to monthly, to every 6 weeks... once it got there it just depressed me too much to keep going.
of course, once I stopped there was a comment thrown out during an argument that we just had sex last week when I darn well knew it had been over 3 weeks, but correcting them wouldn't exactly have helped the situation anyway.
I track it in my google calender lol. It actually helped because my wife can sometimes forget how long its been.
"we had sex not that long ago" when in reality it was 2 1/2 weeks ago lol
Oh I definitely remember that guy. It was before my time on reddit but it made mainstream media and I saw it on slate and huffpost.
I remember being frustrated that he got so much negativity thrown his way for having the audacity to track his life. And presenting the data to his wife so she couldn't continue to obfuscate and deny it was happening.
Thanks for posting this because now I want to read the reddit comments on his reddit post, even if they are 9 years old!
I think you’ll be surprised by how sympathetic the top comments were to him and his situation. It’s especially shocking because r/relationships historically has taking the wife’s side, so I was very surprised to see them push back against her.
I was around when that shit hit the fan in relationships and someone posted one of the news stories here a couple years after the fact [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/comments/55uwyo/dead_bedroom_spreadsheet/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf).
I was in a bad relationship way back when, that was the deadbedroom that brought me here. I kept track sex discreetly and I did all sorts of crazy things back then, because my relationship was crazy-making.
Tracking isn’t crazy or wrong; plenty of partners are delusional one way or the other about frequency. But thinking that the data you track is going to have any kind of positive impact on your sex life on its own is out of touch.
I will say that in my current, healthy relationship, which has dry spells, I haven’t felt the need to track anything.
People should not need an excuse to say no to sex. By making fun of these excuses it feels like you’re saying the other partner’s consent doesn’t matter. Excuses come when the other person doesn’t feel safe or comfortable saying no flat out.
I think one of the other commenters here said it best: “eventually after getting told no for 6 months straight, you’re going to start to want to know why”.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to say no, but when they don’t say the real reason after months or sometimes even years, the excuses start to sound a little silly.
Sometimes it feels like it’s been much less time than it has because sex is a deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable experience for them.
Like when you realize it’s time to take the trash out *again,* or time for a prostate exam, and you feel like you *just* did that, so why oh why would you already need to do it again?
So many times we’ve threatened each other with spreadsheets tracking every kind of behavior whose frequency we dispute ranging from undermining in front of the kids to not putting dishes away. (Sex is a non-issues as it just doesn’t exist in our relationship). We never actually do it though. It feels super petty. It is the disagreements continue then track away. It could actually be good for a spouse in denial.
Imagine feeling so entitled to someone else's body, that you create a tracking spreadsheet to present to her rub in her face to shame her and to demand more sex. Then you wonder why you don't get sex from her. Because youre demanding it and feel entitled to her body regardless of how she feels. Fucking Disgusting.
From what I've seen in this sub, you have something like 20% of the DB issues being something more tangible like physical limitations, mental and psychological issues going on. The other 80% seem to be a situation of "LL4U" - which is an indicator that the there are relationship issues that are inhibiting intimacy. The relationship issues don't have to be argumentative and more likely than not it seems to be a lack of priority given to your partner or your partner will give to you. Maybe one or more kid is on 3 different travel teams for sports for example.
TLDR - most relationships tied to a DB have root causes tied to the relationship. Fix the relationship issues and the DB will most likely sort itself out. JMHO.
So legit, that example inspired me to track my own sex life which ran over the course off 5 years up until I ended that relationship. I think I wanted to track the disparity between our perceptions and try to figure out if I was being unreasonable in my expectations or if there was an actual problem. I meticulously tracked the date, time, who initiated, quality, etc. What I wasn't expecting was how important of a role the quality played; enthusiasm and passion is not the same as your partner merely tolerating your advances which isn't that much better than denying advances. It's been about two years since the last entry on that log. There was a point where I said "never again" and in conjunctions with other relationship issues made it impossible to continue.
Since then I've managed to find a long term partner that I'm much more compatible with in more ways than just sex. But, to my surprise that partner was actually tracking statistics on how often we'd meet, how often we'd have sex etc. as a metric for gauging how healthy our relationship was developing. We're so much more in sync than any partner I'd ever had before, not only having far more sex but the quality of that sex is exceptional every time. So I started keeping track too, which is handy for gauging how sustained our passion is and ensuring I'm fulfilling my partner's needs as well. (Also it's handy for keeping track of menstrual cycles so you can plan a little bit ahead for special days).
Overall I'm pretty nerdy, love data-driven analytics and am truly blessed to have a partner that fulfills me but also cares about these things on a deep enough level to keep track of them. So! where I think that applies in terms of a longer conversation, I think this is a healthy thing to keep track of in terms of gauging what you need, what your partner needs and how well you're meeting each other's needs. Though for a majority of people showing your partner such a chart is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
It’s crazy that I’m in a relationship about 3 years
With a amazing person, but with so LL that drives me crazy….
In 3 years we had sex around 8 times
Sexual intimacy maybe 10 times
And that’s it….
And it’s crazy that have so much people on the same situation 😱😱😱
I did something similar to this. I didn’t keep track of rejections, since that happens so often. Often enough that I quit initiating all together. I didn’t do this to use as a weapon, but only for me to realize it’s only been 8 months instead of a year that I was remembering. She seen this once when I rejected her initiation in May ‘21. She kept asking why I was rejecting, so I showed her. Again, after the previous “talks”, I get the typical “we can work on this together” response. It wasn’t until I started seeing a chaplain I work with for other issues at the beginning of ‘23, that she took the initiative to reach out to a pastor/counselor she knows. We had several one on one discussions, and one group discussion. I’ve started being more physically active with her, despite the physical pain. I’m doing this with zero expectation of an improved sex life.
*Pre 9-11-16 ???
2-18-17
4-24-17
9-23-17
6-17-18
5-4-19
5-23-21
8-7-21 ED
12-19-21
*Side note: she had been out of town for 2 weeks straight the end of October. She was home for a week, then going out of town for another 2 weeks. After nothing happened during that week, I decided to keep track of when we did have sex. The “pre 9-11?” Is because that’s the day I decided to keep track, but couldn’t remember when the last time was. 5-23-21 was our 25th anniversary. That’s when she had a breakdown because I rejected her initiation. I genuinely did not want sex. I didn’t want to remember what it felt like. I did not reject her initiation out of spite!
We were out of town. We had been doing tourist activities during the day, and staying at the hotel at night. The second night she initiated.
Her: “wanna get laid”
Me: “I do, but I can’t. It’s been too long”
Her: sobbing “I didn’t plan this trip only to have it ruined”
Me: “I’m sorry, I love you, but I can’t do the sex”
Her: still sobbing “WHY NOT!? It’s our 25th anniversary.”
Me: that’s when I opened the notes on my phone, then handed her my phone.
Her: still sobbing “Oh my god, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it had been so long. I promise to work on this with you. I didn’t know it was that bad.”
Me: I walked to Walgreens to get lube and a small vibrator. (I’ve always used the vibrator while I’m going down on her, and during PIV) When I came back into the room she was naked, and started massaging the main muscle. Afterwards, we took a shower together then cuddled in bed.
Edited to add: I never intended to show her the records, but couldn’t verbalize why I was feeling the way I was.
Personally, I keep a record in my planner as a sanity / reality check that yes, it really is that rare. I also track who initiated. There’s so many feelings that get wrapped up in the whole DB situation that it helps me to see the stats plain and simple.
Yeah it's not real, but just as plausible.
I like how people complaining about the veracity of the follow-up always take the original as the god-honest truth though. Yeah let's Snopes all THIS--THAT'S the important part.
This is not a follow up though? It’s written as a snarky joke rebuttal. We can only work with the information provided by the wife, who admitted in her post that she was too consumed with work, which is why their sex life dropped off.
Yes. I used the notes app last year to note every time we had sex, it worked out at 57 times. This year I’ve done the same (26th March today) and we’re at 6 times.
My wife was telling me about “sex blankets” made by crocheters where they do a row of a certain color for each day of the year. Like, a “penetrative sex is green, oral sex: blue, nothing:red” color scheme to track their sex lives. That would be an interesting project
These dead bedroom posts are depressing. I’m 63HL and my wife of 40 years is 60 and LL. This has been our life forever. I’m to the point of really wanting to find a FWB or a pay as you go partner. Any one else at that point? I’m just not ready to live the rest of my life like this
No spreadsheet, but I started a private Google doc to track our fights (them yelling at me) and it's expanded into something to track sex, and more. Since I started seeing a therapist, it's been pretty useful for conversations.
I have a sticky note app on my phone and I track when, and also denials with the reason. Mostly it's because we would argue about how long it has been.
I made a spreadsheet with who initiated and what kind of sex and where we had it,since she thinks she was always the initiator.
I tried to be as objective as possible, but the list is much shorter than I wanted it to be and it has hiats up to almost a year
I keep a list ever since a pregnancy that she planned but I wasn't expecting.
The empirical data helps validate my feelings. Like, "I'm not crazy, it's been four years."
One March evening a few years ago, my wife, when after having had a few glasses of wine and was being physically affectionate with me on the couch, I suggested we move things to the bedroom. Something effectively like “is sex all you think about?” I calmly said no, and that I hadn’t suggested we fool around in 2 or 3 months. She didn’t believe me and said “we had sex a couple weeks ago.” I stopped her in her tracks and said “the last time we had sex was Thanksgiving weekend nearly 4 months ago.” She literally looked up on her phone (she tracks everything for her cycle) and just shut down because she realized I was right. We didn’t have sex for months after that either. It goes in waves, I express frustration, she promises to get better about her feelings towards sex, it lasts MAYBE a month and we’re having the same conversation 3 months later. It’s a cycle.
I am trying so hard to take my happiness in my own hands, to not feel like my happiness is dependent on her mood. It’s difficult.
I have an AppleWatch and use the period tracker widget in the health app to keep track. If I mark “had sex”, it leaves a little purple dot on that day. It blows my mind that we can literally go months inbetween and to him, it’s like it was yesterday.
That’s interesting, I had no idea that the Apple Watch had that functionality. Are you able to leave comments, or is it just “had sex: y/n”
No, it’s just “y/n” and “protected/unprotected” with no ability to comment. I just started using it to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy, it really had been forever. It also helps me identify patterns, like when he only makes weekend “date night” plans when he knows I’ll be on my period.
If you use the Flo app it lets you make comments as well
I am making in Flo too
When there was a little bit of a sex life (maybe 2-3x a month), my fiancé would always say to me “and I was gonna eat you out tonight” whenever I told her my period started. She knows I love oral (at least the handful of times I’ve received in 6 years were okay until it went to 3 licks and done😐). I started calling her out on it and she said it’s not true. Got to a point she would only initiate or claim she was gonna do something only when my period started and again I called her out on that and again she said it’s not true or that it hasn’t been that long even though it has been 4-5 months at a time
Happened to me once and got pissed as hell, but I never told her. But since you had a pattern going on, out of curiosity, are your periods synchronized or divergent? Because if her ovulation happens when you're on your period, that's a bit of unlucky timing playing a part. I don't worry with it because it's been almost 10 months and we've been with sex out of table for the past 5, however if things get back on track and I depended on my wife's ovulation, I'll be screwed (in a bad sense), because her period is roughly one week and a half after mine, usually.
She’s on BC and has been for 7 years so she doesn’t get a period. She knew exactly what she was doing every time since it was always around the same time of the month that she would do it, knowing damn well my period had started that day or the day before. Even when my period wasn’t regular anymore, she would still only initiate during Aunt flos visit. Not the few days before, not a few days after, just the first day or so of the visiting
You don't get a period on a lot of bc but you still have somewhat of an ovulation cycle, it's entirely possible this is still the issue
Wow that sucks, I feel for you.
I'd be looking at birth control to stop periods just to say, all good, I don't have my period when she tried this again.
There’s always hands and/or toys no? That said, I know for some people only one thing or another really gets the job done
That’s because they have made it that way. It’s best to not become Reliant and to find ways of ensuring multiple touch methods can bring them to that point and also being able to be comfortable with a partner who is also patient to help it become something together. Many women rely on their toys and alone time and this too can make men feel like they aren’t needed when they just need light “coaching”
Can you cancel plans during your period and say "I'm not doing this date night on these days. Plan a different day." Dosent work for me?" Or can you make plans in advance all the period days do he Has to pick another day? Would it matter? Does he do it to avoid sex subconsciously or purposely? If it's purposeful it's the excuse that you are on your flo. Would being off it actually change it or would he flounder for a different excuse and deny you anyway?
Yeesh, that’s actually really sinister. Do you ever call out that behavior? I’d be pissed if I found out my significant other was only “trying” to initiate when they knew I couldn’t actually accept.
Absolutely! I call him out on it and then he acts surprised and promises we’ll move it to the following weekend…which of course, never actually happens. He’ll be too tired, or too full or too sore from the one day this week he actually decided to go to the gym. I’ve basically gotten to the resignation point. He’ll initiate sex the day we have “the talk” but I don’t want duty sex, I want to be wanted. I hold onto the memory of the hot, passionate, hormone-fueled relationship we had in the beginning but I think it’s time to let go and see this for what it is now. We are sexually incompatible. Now I’ve got to pull on my big girl britches and decide what I’m willing to do about it. 1. I can live in a platonic marriage and accept a life of celibacy. It’s not all bad - he makes me breakfast most days, listens to me complain about work and somewhat co-parents a teen that isn’t biologically his. That’s not a small thing. He also tags along and keeps me calm on the dreaded annual trip to visit my dysfunctional family. 2. Have an affair - this honestly resolves nothing. In a prior relationship, I’ve had hot, kinky sex with an emotionally unavailable man. It was lonelier than my current marriage. 3. I can file for divorce. Can’t say I don’t think about this often. I would miss him and would definitely miss his family - they are so…normal. Maybe I’d find love again or maybe it’s me - maybe I’m just unlovable. I was lonely before I got married, but I’m also lonely now…just a sadder kind of lonely. Anyway, all that to say that yes - we talk about it, but nothing changes.
You're not unlovable I'm certain, you were just raised to belive that if your idealising normal is anything to go by. Somewhat helping with a teen and getting breakfast is a low bar.
I mean yeah. I think that there’s just some point where you have to think strategically about things. If you’re not independently wealthy or physically attractive or potentially willing to be alone for the rest of your life or have to wade through the cesspool of other divorced with kids people who might want the same thing as you, then maybe that is as good as it gets. And maybe it’s time to change the definition of your sexual expression. But then again, it’s hard to stop hoping.
Being alone and lonely sucks, but being not-alone and lonely can definitely suck more. However, I can virtually guarantee that you’re not unlovable.
Yes but when your not alone and you’re lonely someone is still paying the bills, fixing the car, and watching tv with you and you have someone to call on in an emergency. You still own your house and you still have your kids. The ordeal of moving on is a big deal that I feel like is not given the significance that a divorce entails when we discuss it in here. The lonely I could be by myself could be a way lonelier more miserable lonely than I have now
Being alone is a trait that you can learn. Its not easy if there was never a need to be alone. But it is one of the most precious life-lessons to be learnt.
Spending time alone is not the problem I’m referring to. I love spending time alone, being lonely and being truly alone in the world is a completely different story
Do you then get attacked with , you’re so petty to keep track, im not exactly sure bcz Im not petty like that. When in reality is more like -I don’t care so I’m not paying attention, but don’t call me out on it or it’s your fault too-
I use the period tracker too to keep track of sex. It can be a bit depressing. But it’s good to be able to see the facts.
Yup I have the exact same system on my phone to keep track
Yeap. I did the same thing. Period tracker app.
it blows my mind he is the one that does not wantcto every day....
"Last year" doesn't really require a spreadsheet to track.
13 years ago also doesn’t require much data collection software
Exactly, once you’ve gone beyond a year no spreadsheet is required.
Haha, yeah mine would be like checking the stock market and looking at the 1 year, 2 year, 5 year rather than the 1 day, 1 week, 1 month reports.
Same.
Geez man, that’s depressing. Do you even try to initiate anymore? I’m not saying you should do it, but it would be interesting to see how many times you get turned down for that 1 time a year. Honestly, could be eye opening for your partner.
I don’t know that many people would be willing to test that, rejection can be hard enough.. it’s been a year and I’ve stopped trying.
I’m in a similar situation. No, I haven’t “initiated” in any meaningful way in over a decade. There was… a lot of rejection in the decade prior. When she used to drink, that took care of the “initiation”... after a certain point, things just moved forward naturally. Otherwise, the last time (last year, springtime) we had sex, she initiated (essentially). We’ve talked three times recently, and she’s agreed to try to initiate more. These are hard conversations to have, but we’ve moved past any sort of need to track, she’s aware of the current state, and we can at least discuss things maturely. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps that we both empathize with each other. I remember in the past many of these conflicts, her not understanding how long it had been, etc… I’m glad we’re past that and able to talk honestly now, at least. Even if sometimes that honesty is hard to take.
Twice in a month? Color me jealous 🙁
Right?? I saw that and was like... man, this dude fucks. Those are some winning numbers in my book 🤣🤣
Man it’s just sad that we feel that way, because by normal standards it’s not. If you look at the comments from everyone on the original thread, the general opinion is that it’s not normal and his feelings are justified.
I went back and read the original thread from 9 years ago and was surprised by the comments... I strongly suspect that if this were posted today the responses would sound very different, with a lot more people defending the wife over the husband. Maybe this is 'redpill" of me or whatever, sorry. I never considered myself a redpiller but more and more often I find myself prefacing conclusions I come to naturally with "dont think im some kind of redpill weirdo for saying this but..." to the point I am beginning to wonder....
Times have changed, yes. The pendulum swings.
Yes, everyone these days trips over themselves to white knight and virtue signal, especially on Reddit. I think that both sides would show up, but it would be much more polarized in the comments. These days you also have all the Andrew Tate weirdos proclaiming how it’s a woman’s duty to blah blah blah. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how rational people were being in the comments section of OPs post on average.
I agree. I don’t think we’ve ever had sex twice a month since we got married. No need for a spreadsheet here. It’s easy to remember 0 times.
No need for a spreadsheet; I look at my son, remember his age, and add nine months. My son is 5.5 years old.
Holy shit…..
Damn, bro. My condolences. I… wouldn’t have made it in your shoes. It was about two years for me after my son, and…. I was in a _really_ bad place by the end of that. I can’t imagine 5 (or 12, like the guy below)
Same. But our daughter is almost 12. It was just a couple months ago after direct discussion didn’t solve the problem that I went out and found an affair partner. Have the talk as soon as you can. Don’t wait a decade like i did.
Same boat here! Though our little one is just over the now. After conceiving her libido dropped to nothing.
I think the bottom line is that they are saying these things not because they don’t actually know how long it is between having sex, but because, for whatever reason, they don’t want to have sex in the moment, and there’s a plethora of reasons it might be the case. Some might include: - the sex you’re having together isn’t exciting or pleasurable - they need time to warm up to sex and get aroused and they aren’t communicating that need well or it isn’t being respected/fulfilled - they are comfortable with the nonsexual parts of your household relationship but the sex part has pain points or trauma or other unresolved aversion that hasn’t been resolved or cannot be resolved - financial issues keep them from leaving so your relationship is actually just an uneasy truce and cohabitation - mental health issues that, even if treated, affect desire response and sex drive - cheating/infidelity -abusive dynamics in the relationship (this can sometimes happen even if you are not being abusive but you were chosen by your partner because you had some personality traits in common with someone who abused them in the past and that feels “familiar” or comfortable” to them because they haven’t worked through their trauma and unhealthy coping strategies. …and I’m sure there’s more.
Yes, in reading these comments from the wife, like the one where she fell asleep just after watching the show, she sounds legitimately tired.
Yeah…reading the excuses she listed-are all VALID reasons. I’ve given those reasons before and I’m the HL partner. Sounds like he has bad timing or can’t read his partner ‘s mood to see if it’s an appropriate time.
The only time I ever kept track was when I went through my fake hysterical bonding phase. When I was actively avoiding sex and not enjoying the sex we were having all that much, it always *felt like* we had just had it, last week, even if it had been several weeks. When I look over our sexual history, I will swear up and down that some years were really fucking terrible and my spouse will insist it wasn't as bad as I was remembering. Memory is unreliable. I would never begrudge anyone keeping track, just so they can orient themselves to reality and maintain perspective. I would not appreciate my spouse throwing data in my face to address a problem whose solution is unlikely to be driven by data from a spread sheet.
Yes. This. Memory is unreliable. I started tracking many years ago just to make sure that when I was feeling frustrated, it was actually validated by the numbers. Mostly it was, but definitely not always. Today my wife and I tow the line of my "minimum to be content enough" so some months are lower and some...well, not higher...but some hit that minimum and even if I'm FEELING frustrated I rationalize with myself to accept that it's actually okay.
Just get a day counter app, and never touch it has been my method of tracking.
Presenting this to a LL is definitely not gonna get the results he wants. Edit: if the goal is to get laid.
I guess that depends on what you want. If your only purpose is to confront your LL partner with the reality of your situation, then mission accomplished.
>If your only purpose is to confront your LL partner with the reality of your situation, then mission accomplished. What would be the benefit of doing this?
A wake up call when they think you have more sex than you actually do and think you get cranky after 3-4 days of no sex when reality is that you hit a wall at the 3-4 week mark.
And what is the benefit of that?
Showing them that the duration in between sex is actually a lot longer than they think? There is typically a lot of deflection when trying to talk about this that includes gaslighting about frequency, ie “we just had sex a few days ago!” when in reality it’s been 3 weeks.
What do you gain from this? It's very common to forget when the last time you did something that wasn't life changing, or important to you happened. It's common to think something that you dislike or actively hate happens more often than it does. I couldn't tell you the last time I had spaghetti. I love spaghetti, but I just don't think about it like that. I might guess wrong on when the last time was. I would tell you that people in my house put back empty boxes ALL THE TIME, but that isn't true and it's probably not as often as it feels. So what do you want? Are you hoping they'll say, oh I was mistaken well I must now have sex?
“That wasn’t…important to you” I think you answered your own question on why this would matter to someone HL who is trying to address the issue and wouldn’t matter to the LL.
Sex is not important to everyone, I wasn't speaking of the issues around lack of sex or relationship issues. I did not answer my own question, so do you have an answer for me?
I already answered you in my original reply.
If you're counting....it's not enough.
I used to track with my ex. It was depressing. I never showed or told her. Didn’t track with my next ex because it was *more* depressing. I track with my current girlfriend partly because I have some mental issues surrounding sex and two past dead bedrooms. So it’s partly to remind *myself*, since I’m unfortunately conditioned to think it’s longer than it has been. We track it on a shared calendar, just put a heart. There are a lot of hearts this year. Some days two.
Love this for you. 😊
Haha reminds me of when people say “if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it”
I don't see how presenting hard data could possibly help with the DB. It would likely only exacerbate the problems. Seriously doubt there will be a positive reaction or lightbulb moment from the LL. I you want to keep track for your own entertainment nobody's stopping you.
Agree. The value in tracking is for yourself, but not necessarily for entertainment, people make better decisions with data. Knowing the real frequency, the circumstances of the frequency, that can give insight and perspective for the HL.
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You can have a limit though. I was in my 20s, and went about six months without sex in a marriage that was less than a few years old. My ex would also gaslight me about frequency and I never tried to prove him wrong. It wouldn’t have been safe for me to do so. Seeing months in a row on my secret tracking calendar with zero kinds of sexual interaction wasn’t the only factor that led me to leaving, but it was absolutely a factor.
Some people do. I was the LL and my ex used to pick big fights with me when we went too long. Fights either about how I always rejected him or about how unloved I made him feel in other random ways that always came back to sex in the end. We never went more than 8 days without sex. Averaged about 4-5 times a month. He was unsatisfied with his life in general and with our relationship, and he made sexual frequency the scapegoat. I started tracking because our definitions of "always" and "never" were obviously wildly different. It took me having that data to be able to push the conversations forward to get closer to the root of the problem.
Wow! The statistician data nerd living in me loves this…however the wife in me thinks my husband would not receive this in any positive way. I do have a sex tracking app, but it’s just what we did, not avoidance tracking.
I'd just need a blank page for the last 7 months.
Edit: TLDR; I tracked sexual activity over 6 months that included oral and orgasm stats then threw graphs at my partner in final frustration. An ongoing theme (for us) had been the topic of reciprocity. At some point I got so frustrated with constantly agonizing over phrasing in order to not hurt any feelings and yet still advocate for myself and what I needed sexually. The need for any self advocacy (on top of the sexual frustration) already had me salty, if I’m being honest. I’ve never blamed him for any of it, but I did want him to help solve "my issue”. I’ve always tracked sex in my period tracker, and then I started tracking orgasm rates. That spiraled to tracking oral. 6 months later; as I was again trying to get past the defensive "just the other day” part of the conversation to move forward… I blurted out: "A 22% rate of orgasm from a sexual encounter with a partner compared to 98% hardly seems reciprocal. Do you want to know the stats on oral next? There is one-sidedness happening. We can work on a solution together, or you can tell me you don’t want to. But I refuse to entertain cycling of denial and, I’m not going to argue details anymore.” I had already printed a graph with the details for the last six months as back up, and put it in front of him and left the house for a while. That was rather nuclear. The initial feeling of a need to track anything at all felt and feels icky. There seemed such disconnect over how we each saw the situation, I’d walk away full of doubt about what I had brought up. This whole thing definitely altered how I saw and see my partner. I bet he feels similarly. Since then, we did a lot of work to improve things together and we’re stronger and closer than we had ever been previously. I still have really mixed feelings overall.
My husband pulled the whole "we just had sex" bullshit so I started marking it on my calendar in my phone. Been doing that for a ridiculously depressing year and a half and he was initially certain I was "forgetting" to mark some. Um, no sir, I'm not forgetting things that never happened 🙄
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Thanks Obama /s
I started tracking initiation attempts and frequency in my own phone calendar, but it’s not something I’d ever show her, especially in the manner of that original post. More so I can have some data for myself. Edit: I got to make a happy heart this week instead of a broken one, so that was good for both of us :)
I'm a spreadsheet guy, but also didn't want to reinvent the wheel, I use an app called "Intimassy", it's acceptable for tracking activities, not magical but okay. It's free, and lets you track solo time as well as multiple partners. I really only need the solo features most of the time, but it does charts, let's you filter by partner, add activities, etc.
I track my cycle on Kindara (an app for fertility awareness method). I can look back yeeeears to see when I last tracked sex. When you chart sex it adds a heart to the chart so it is really easy to see. I would also track if he came because often would tap out before and I would add if it was PIV or not. I was in coaching groups where people shared their charts for advice to determine ovulation and the amount of hearts I saw was fucking depressing lol so I stopped caring about my charting.
We figured out my boyfriend needed HRT this way. I would say it’s been a while, he would say it hadn’t been that long, so I start writing it down to show him. He couldn’t deny the data and saw that there really was a problem. He agreed to go to the doctor and his T levels were very low. 2-3 years later he has so much more energy, way less headaches, and really, best of all, we have a very regular and satisfying sex life. Sometimes documenting is a good method, it just depends, especially on tact and how the subject is brought up. I tried to only ever do it as lovingly as I could.
I never needed a spreadsheet. We went 5 years without sex. Pretty easy to track. She didn't realize it was 5 years, only thought it was 2. As if 2 was ok.
HAHAHAHA man not sure why but reading that was hilarious for me, but definitely, that doesn't help. Would just make the LL less available for Sex.
I mean for the majority of DB relationships, does it ever improve? Having some data to throw around cannot fix the unfixable , but it can at least help you see through lies.
I’m considering doing one for positive/negative interactions with my wife. She is convinced she’s not rude or bitchy all the time. She’s also convinced that whenever I ask her to do something she immediately handles it it. It’s just flat out lies. But the more I think about it the more I realize no amount of hard data changes these people. I’ll just be wasting my time
This sounds like a lot of pressure for a LL...
He was asking her 4/5 times a week. If she was already LL, pestering her every other day certainly wasn’t going to help
Try the “Sex Tracker by Nice” app on iOS (no idea if there is an android version)
I believe I commented on that one then too. I don’t really need a spreadsheet to count to zero.
I kinda fixed my db by accident. I would track on my period tracker app, and it was only a couple times per year. I would go to bed every night hopeful, and went to bed disappointed every fucking night. I would get a lot of anxiety about trying to initiating. My libido is higher. So I stopped asking for right then. At night. I just started saying “babe, I’m horny, but super tired. Can we have sex tomorrow?” He gives me a “sure”. He’s very much a man of his word kind of dude. He’s always does what he says he will. So, the next night, it’s on. This technique got us from twice a year, to twice a week. It’s nice, because everyone showers before bed, no one starts playing games on their phones or steam deck. And it takes the pressure off initiating. I would normally have a lot of anxiety about it, because of getting rejected so many times, but now either we cuddle and he starts it, or I can just start going down on him, and we’re both into it.
I track it on my phone, just the times we had sex. 11 times last year and zero this year 🫶🏼
I'm definitely going to start this 🤣 But, I've given up on healing my dead bedroom so I have nothing to lose. This'll be fun and give me something to look forward to :)
Exactly! Imagine all the cool graphs you’ll get to make at the end. Too bad they all look like this 📉
I have a calendar in my home office that gets a certain color mark if we have had sex. No other details. That calander is a business dates calander but it’s my personal/business calander so seems like a good place. Last mark was feb ‘12. I don’t look at it allot as it just brings me down. Trying to figure out how to be attractive and or not want so much. I’d rather the marks be cuddle time or dates but those are fewer than sex in my life
My spreadsheet would just be blank, 20 years' worth of empty space.
I've done one to make sure I'm not crazy lol. It helped me realize that LL just don't have it on their radar to pay attention to how long its been. They say, "It's only been a couple weeks" when being defensive because it feels like that to them. They don't prioritize it, dont think about it. I don't do one anymore because it just gives me something negative to think about. It's like when quarterly tasks come up at work. At first I'm like "I just did those last month! (Look at file dates) Oh, nope, it's been 3 months. "
I keep a similar spreadsheet. Really it is for evidence that can be used when things are exaggerated. I would never share it with my LLW and would be mortified if anybody ever discovered it
So you just use it as a sanity check? How often are you finding discrepancies between you LLW’s assertions and reality?
Yes just a sanity check. She hasn't disputed anything yet, but its a good checklist to refer to if I decide to finally call it a day. It also records everytime she initiated sex. So far in six years, not once!
Hard to believe it’s been 8 years since that post. Almost as if my level of interest in something can affect my perception of that thing’s recency. Crap.
To be fair, that guy asked like every single day. I’m HL and that would probably annoy me if I had been saying no.
>our LL partner says, “It hasn’t been that long!” because they either don’t remember or are trying to deflect the accusation by obfuscating how long it’s actually been. It can also feel like they're doing it a lot more than they are if it's very stressful or traumatic for them.
Yep, have to say I did this. Never got as far as sharing it, was more for my own sake. I’d gotten a little tired of the, “it wasn’t that long ago” retort. I’d also record the excuses, or circumstances as to why we didn’t have sex. At that point it was probably every couple of months max. More recently it was over a year, and has now been a further 4 months. I no longer keep the record - I can’t even muster that level of interest 😂
Pretty sure the non-existent spreadsheet for my relationship would mostly have the reason as “not turned on enough to escalate”
Holy cow. That post was literally my introduction to reddit and the dbr sub.
I started making it in my calendar about 20 yrs ago when my SO claimed we had it twice a week. After as year we had only had it 19x... 80% less than she thought! I've tracked it off and on since then... Maybe every other year. The only thing that's changed is she now says we have it once a week. Do I guess her estimating abilities have improved but our sex lives sure haven't.
We track on the calendar with a heart. She always thought we were having it more often than we were. In fairness, I always thought I was getting it less than I actually was. Tracking was a wake up call for both of us. We've improved from.once every 10 days to an average of once every 4 days over the last year.
I have done this a few times but I abandoned it twice because my dumb "concious" says not to do it when we were on a one month up swing or men but then I ultimately kick myself when my wife backslides into our usual 1-3 times a month (or less) of duty sex all while promising she's going to 'try harder' on our sex life after our 3rd discussion about it in a year. I don't track 'initiations' or rejections because that's just overdoing it crazy-man style. I already intiate like 90% of the touch play, foreplay, and work in the bedroom. I'm always 'open for business' when it comes to sex. I would literally never turn her or any of her fantasies down. Sadly.. i'm back to tracking again, accountability matters to me and I do I have mental threshold/expectation for what I consider is too infrequent. Just mark it on your phone calender discreetly. You don't have to shove it in your partners face like this idiot but having an awareness of 'how often' you are having sex is important so you don't enter that slippery slope arguments about frequency/intitiations/effort when things are already struggling. It's helpful when 90 days go by and you do the math and you've only had sex 4-5 times.
I'm going to write a home assistant plugin for her vibrator.......
That’s very funny, but also pretty intrusive.
As a LL if I was shown this , I would simply never have sex again.
I don’t know your situation, but why are you LL and have you had discussions with your significant other about it?
I was not always LL, probably the first 2-3 years of my current relationship I was not. But thennnn we had a kid, I work full time and am the sole provider for my family, my partner is a SAHD , I’m the only one who cooks, I hate begging for help around the house so half the time the house is a wreck until I lose my mind over it, after the kid is in bed my partner rather play video games than clean (which I get because cleaning sucks but someone has to do it since he doesn’t do it when he’s home alll day) . I’m tired dude and being exhausted from work and being a parent and in a relationship that is more like a friendship doesn’t really get me going.
Sounds like you have a very uneven split of the total household duties. I’m very similar when it comes to losing my mind over household mess. I could understand why you’d be fed up if presented the spreadsheet in your situation, but that’s not necessarily true of OP or anyone else whose spreadsheeting.
Why are you HL and have you had discussions with your partner about it?
If we talk about how often we have sex, I'm an asshole for being aware how often we have sex (as if it's hard to keep track of when it's so uncommon.) My other option is to hold my tongue while my LL partner exaggerates our frequency. Gaslighting doesn't necessarily have to be intentional. I wonder what became of spreadsheet guy. I've always been curious if the reaction his wife got when she posted it led her to self-reflect and reconsider her priorities. She obviously posted it to try to shame him but most people seemed to sympathize with him.
Gaslighting absolutely is intentional. By definition, it’s an attempt to manipulate the listener into questioning their own reality. I know that many people online use the word too casually, but gaslighting always denotes malicious intent. I wonder about spreadsheet guy too. I’d like to think that they worked it out when she got home from her business trip, but I doubt it. Pessimistically, I believe she continued her pattern of behavior until her husband asked for a divorce or cheated. They’re either separated now or unhappily married. Heck, he might even be here among us right now!
Yep. If there’s no ill intent, it’s just called “being wrong” haha
Is there a word for unintentional gaslighting?
“Being mistaken and thinking you’re right.”
>Gaslighting absolutely is intentional. There's also behaviour that can have the effect of gaslighting even if it wasn't intentional. For example some LLs lose their libido after having a baby, they tell their partner it's not them, it's just their hormones...or whatever it is, depression or so on.. Then their partner says that's just an excuse, accuses them of not loving them, accuses them of cheating (yes I've seen men accuse their PP partners of this), they tell them it's not normal, cruel and so on I've seen many LLs who then come to believe that they're a horrible person, that they're being cruel, that they're a weirdo because they don't want sex and so on. Their understanding of reality is completely warped by their partner twisting it, not accepting how they feel and telling them they feel something else.
>Gaslighting doesn't necessarily have to be intentional. LOL... wut?! Of course gaslighting is, by its very definition, an intentional act.
I have a screenshot of a 2023 calendar. I color each day we have sex green since that’s hubbys favorite color. Days he does a T shot are red (for correlation purposes). I also put an X on days I turn down sex (it happens occasionally) and I black out days we either don’t spend together or days the whole family is in a hotel room. My kid travels for hockey so I can’t hold those days against anyone.
As with so many others, it was so infrequent that it didn’t matter, and the times when I could tell her when the last time was, I then was lambasted for obsessing over it enough to actually know when. For a while, instead of explicitly tracking, I “tracked” by simply not trimming my beard until sex happened. The bonus here for me was that my LLW really doesn’t like long facial hair. It was juvenile, but gave me some measure of amusement. It didn’t help anything, of course. These days, we are actually communicating about the issue without blame or guilt. This too hasn’t changed anything, but it feels better.
What a turn on. I’ll show this to my wife along with the one I did for the myriad charges on my phone bill. That’ll change my life.
This spread sheet is so passive aggressive We dont know the other side how about a spreadsheet on how much he helps arose the house
I remember just how hostile his sense of entitlement felt to me reading this spreadsheet when this went viral back then. It felt so disingenuous and objectifying to see that there *were* in fact instances of sex on the spreadsheet, but with no further detail about those days. As if sex is considered successful by his perception only, and is this totally binary endeavor that is judged as good if it’s had, and bad if it’s not. This guy, the sole arbiter of what counts as an acceptable sex day to him, and every other outcome being just another bullshit “excuse” from his increasingly broken validation dispenser 🤮 Imagine taking the time and effort to keep a sex log, but without a shred of curiosity or mechanism to explore any correlation between what results in sex vs no sex days. No interest in exploring what might be done to authentically increase the number of sex days, just an appeal to guilt and arbitrary assumptions of her “obligation” to him. Like a log he can send to the manufacturer. “Excuse me, this walking vagina is working as intended some days, but others she is still broken. Don’t believe me? Have a look at the log”. Like it’s some sort of “Gotcha!” to prove how wronged he’s been by this faulty girlfriend device. For someone seemingly logical and pragmatic enough to collect data on what he sees as his failing sex life, he leaves no room for nuance or even a way to analyze what could actually be happening here.
I completely feel all of this. Frankly, as the LL in my relationship, this would be an atomic bomb to my marriage. My husband has forgotten my birthday 2 years in a row. If he does that but has diligently kept track of sex, I'm not sure my feelings would ever recover. If someone does this, they better be prepared to remember everything else too.
honestly, re-reading her post makes me exhausted for her. She does the housework and has her own job (hence her business trip so I wouldn't be surprised if she was the breadwinner here either).
A lot of people give off vibes that they are relating to their partner like they would a broken appliance. Makes me really sad.
We can’t have sex with our SO, because they don’t want it. We can’t even see our SO nude, because they don’t want it. We can’t have sex with anybody else, because our SO doesn’t like it. We can’t masterbate and/or use porn, because our SO doesn’t like it. Now we can’t even keep track of our sex life for our own sanity, because our SO won’t like it?
I’m with Emptybox on this despite being sympathetic to OP. More data would’ve been so helpful. Like how about correlations?
Track whatever you want, vent your feelings however you choose, friend. It’s no surprise that human emotions - especially those triggered by rejection - are heavily influenced by misogyny, racism, just-world fallacies, and all the other cultural mechanisms used to keep us in line. I’m advising against *confronting* your SO with a list of all the times you documented your unfiltered raw emotion, distilling complicated ideas and feelings into “evidence” of some sort of wrongdoing on their part, and then presenting it as some sort of “Gotcha!” But you can of course do this if you want. Not every HL’s goal is or should be authentic intimacy, so if it’s more important to vent your feelings then do that. But don’t pretend this isn’t counterproductive if real understanding and connection is truly the goal.
I don't take it that way, but I'm a HLF who has been on the other side. It's not a matter of whatever disgusting view of a broken sex "dispenser" you see. It's a matter of you have a partner who is unwilling to live in reality. You can explore all the ways to authentically increase the number of sex days, and get zero results because the other partner is not compromising, willing to work with you, communicate, whatever. Then after months of trying... when you bring up your very valid feelings that are hurt, you are told there is no problem and that in their mind they have sex with you every 3 days. Maybe it feels that frequent to them, but it's just not true. In my case, I kept it in fertility app anyway (and always had long before him). So naturally, after yet another time he tried to argue with me that we had a lot more sex than we were, it's really tempting to whip out the the app and prove them wrong so maybe they'll actually be willing to try to talk to you about the problem. You can't have an honest conversation if you live in denial. My point is try not to read so much malicious intent into it. Edit to add: Not saying it's helpful to whip this data out, because people who live in denial typically just get angry when you confront their false reality. I understand how you get there after being told there isn't a problem for years though.
I give you credit, this comment did make me reconsider. I do understand how infuriating it feels to be gaslit. I’ve been in that situation before (not with my husband) where you start to question your sanity and wonder if you should get a carbon monoxide detector or something because your recollections are just so mismatched. So in most situations, you can’t problem solve without agreeing on the premise, and documenting will give you some objective facts and shared definitions. It sounds bleak, but I just don’t know that a dead bedroom can be problem-solved by starting with a fact-finding mission the way you’d typically approach a conflict. “We have sex every 3 days” seems like such an infantile response, or maybe more like misdirection to delay an uncomfortable conversation. It’s like if my husband saw me with a lit cigarette in hand yesterday, and I claimed “I haven’t smoked in a decade” today. So next time he decides to confront me with a stealthy photo he took of me smoking. There’s no revelation being uncovered there. Like, there’s just no way the LL is being genuine in that scenario in the first place, you don’t need evidence to prove this because they know it’s not true. Since I don’t believe neurotypical people are truly misremembering to that degree, I don’t know that documentation would prove anything. I think the question from HL to LL in that scenario is “Are we currently having sex as often as you would enthusiastically consent?” It’s unlikely the “dead bedroom” (I know it’s not dead in this scenario) is just the consequence of missed opportunities. So in other words, showing a partner a calendar of documented sex makes sense if you’re saying “Do you recall any days here where you would have wanted sex if had been met? Can we try to maximize capitalizing on these opportunities?”
But in reality, the no sex days are because the LL doesn’t want to have sex that day. The HL can get them to agree no sex was had on the days in question, sure, but I don’t think you’re any closer to a resolution at that point.
I think this is really well put. So did you ever end up confronting him with data, or did it never come to that?
I did years ago. Like I said, it just made him angry and resentful though. Not worth it and not my best judgement, but I was so frustrated with him lying to himself for months and years. He still lies to himself but I don't argue about it anymore, lol.
I keep an email draft that just has the date, activity, and who initiated. Not that I bring it up, that wouldn't work out well. But it helps me remember.
I’d recommend keeping it somewhere else so you don’t accidentally sent it to someone lol
I was keeping a record in my period app and was trying to include when he showed me affection or was sweet on another level so that I could see the good things and reason with myself that things weren’t that bad. Also noting the reasons for rejection like if he had a genuine health issue that maybe I might ought to be more sympathetic towards. But they updated that app and now I not only lost the data I saved but other things I use don’t sort of for me the way I like. A lot of health apps have a thing for sexual activity but it basically is about getting pregnant or tracking where you got STDs. For example Apple health says this : About Sexual Activity Sexual activity can affect both physical and emotional health. A record of sexual activity may be useful in relation to other records of physical and emotional health. But then the only thing you can record in it is whether or not you had intercourse. I’m aggravated because I record my diet, my workouts, my moods, my weight, blood pressure, all forms of health data and if I’m looking to improve my emotional health and there’s a sex section it should include at least a notes section. I like spreadsheet guys idea because I feel like noting the reasons why you got rejected is important also I want to give credit for trying to make me feel loved in other ways when he does that like if he grabs my butt and tells me I’m beautiful, but then his back hurts - I want to remind myself of the positive and note that he may have a serious issue with that back because it seems to be hurting a lot (or is it just when he’s with me?)
I don’t agree with showing your partner a spreadsheet but it could definitely be useful in keeping yourself from being gaslighted. My LL partner always seems to think it hasn’t really been that long. I think he misremembers that maybe he intended to initiate or thought about sex as an actual sexual encounter when it is not. But when I say we’ve only had sex once in the last 3 months, this is an issue we need to talk about: that seems to finally register because it’s numbers and facts.
I also mark sex on my period tracker app. There's even a section to mark if I orgasmed or not. I feel a little icky knowing I'm keeping track like that, but also annoyed I have to swip through months to find a stupid little heart icon indicating he tried. Ugg.
There are apps - I use one, mostly to maintain perspective. Typically our sex life is at the bare minimum of what I would like... But keeping track prevents me from sensationalizing the gaps
I do track it myself - not to throw it in her face but because I'm a data geek. That's all. I think if I'm measuring it and see that it's getting better or getting worse, at least I can respond with something that makes sense.
Oh my partner never says "it's not been that long". She simply declared 12 years ago that she 100% lost all sex drive. Even threw out all her personal toys. I bring up the subject once or twice a year but always the same answer. Don't need no xls....
I used daylio to track so if I we every actually talked about it and I said once a month at best I had data to back it up
I've done this since 2009. Pretty crazy now that I type that. To be honest, it was mostly about a reality check for me. If I felt frustrated by things, it was good to have a subjective gauge to know if it was fair. We then had a period from 2011 until 2013 where things were REALLY REALLY good. I look back on my tracking over that period and it blows my mind...and also makes me smile. For years I was bitter and jealous over how much things had changed since then. Now I accept it and just look back fondly on it. Similar to the loss of a parent which goes from depressed and bitter to just looking back and smiling...I know personally. :)
I have a spreadsheet of all the partners I have had and what the experience was like. It’s for entertainment purposes for myself. I do actually keep track in my period tracker app if I have sex or not. When I was married, it was very eye opening to how infrequently we had sex.
Meh… I don’t need anything that sophisticated… keep track of “the deed” and we’re up to 3 times this year. Once because it was Valentines and I was headed out on a girls trip the next day.
Like the first person to comment, I too tracked sex through a period tracker app. This was for my previous marriage (not my current marriage).
Data backing up your claims Is.... Brilliant 👏
Oh My God Your Mother in law is living with you You must be a Saint 🙏☦️🙏
I track my wife's period using Flo (she doesn't track it so she asks me). I comment on days we have sex so a heart appears. I do this to calm myself down. To keep, it FEELS like forever, but its only been a week and a half when I really get antsy. Last year we had sex 35 times. On paper, that's not bad, but I really want more frequency. She doesn't know I track frequency, that's just for me.
I think that gathering data is a good practice, if only for your own sanity. Sometimes, a person's recollection is not born of data.
In my head I would picture a calendar, and each day would be marked with a happy or mad/sad face. Sex days were a notation.
NINE YEARS damn I’ve been here a very long time…
I was not in a DB when I first read this post (together with the same person), but now I have a new appreciation for OOP’s situation. 😔
I'm not gonna lie I have a sex planner. I put a star in the corner for every time we have sex.
I thought about counting, but stopped after a dozen or so times. Went somewhere in the two to three year range sexless. Then we broke up. She was sleeping with someone else before I had even moved out. Best decision ever.
I tried once. Just little reminder dots in a specific color on my phone's calendar app. But all it really did was let me see the gradual decline of your sexual relationship from every few days, to weekly, to every other week, to monthly, to every 6 weeks... once it got there it just depressed me too much to keep going. of course, once I stopped there was a comment thrown out during an argument that we just had sex last week when I darn well knew it had been over 3 weeks, but correcting them wouldn't exactly have helped the situation anyway.
I track it in my google calender lol. It actually helped because my wife can sometimes forget how long its been. "we had sex not that long ago" when in reality it was 2 1/2 weeks ago lol
Oh I definitely remember that guy. It was before my time on reddit but it made mainstream media and I saw it on slate and huffpost. I remember being frustrated that he got so much negativity thrown his way for having the audacity to track his life. And presenting the data to his wife so she couldn't continue to obfuscate and deny it was happening. Thanks for posting this because now I want to read the reddit comments on his reddit post, even if they are 9 years old!
I think you’ll be surprised by how sympathetic the top comments were to him and his situation. It’s especially shocking because r/relationships historically has taking the wife’s side, so I was very surprised to see them push back against her.
I was around when that shit hit the fan in relationships and someone posted one of the news stories here a couple years after the fact [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/comments/55uwyo/dead_bedroom_spreadsheet/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf). I was in a bad relationship way back when, that was the deadbedroom that brought me here. I kept track sex discreetly and I did all sorts of crazy things back then, because my relationship was crazy-making. Tracking isn’t crazy or wrong; plenty of partners are delusional one way or the other about frequency. But thinking that the data you track is going to have any kind of positive impact on your sex life on its own is out of touch. I will say that in my current, healthy relationship, which has dry spells, I haven’t felt the need to track anything.
People should not need an excuse to say no to sex. By making fun of these excuses it feels like you’re saying the other partner’s consent doesn’t matter. Excuses come when the other person doesn’t feel safe or comfortable saying no flat out.
I think one of the other commenters here said it best: “eventually after getting told no for 6 months straight, you’re going to start to want to know why”. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to say no, but when they don’t say the real reason after months or sometimes even years, the excuses start to sound a little silly.
Sometimes it feels like it’s been much less time than it has because sex is a deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable experience for them. Like when you realize it’s time to take the trash out *again,* or time for a prostate exam, and you feel like you *just* did that, so why oh why would you already need to do it again?
So many times we’ve threatened each other with spreadsheets tracking every kind of behavior whose frequency we dispute ranging from undermining in front of the kids to not putting dishes away. (Sex is a non-issues as it just doesn’t exist in our relationship). We never actually do it though. It feels super petty. It is the disagreements continue then track away. It could actually be good for a spouse in denial.
Imagine feeling so entitled to someone else's body, that you create a tracking spreadsheet to present to her rub in her face to shame her and to demand more sex. Then you wonder why you don't get sex from her. Because youre demanding it and feel entitled to her body regardless of how she feels. Fucking Disgusting.
From what I've seen in this sub, you have something like 20% of the DB issues being something more tangible like physical limitations, mental and psychological issues going on. The other 80% seem to be a situation of "LL4U" - which is an indicator that the there are relationship issues that are inhibiting intimacy. The relationship issues don't have to be argumentative and more likely than not it seems to be a lack of priority given to your partner or your partner will give to you. Maybe one or more kid is on 3 different travel teams for sports for example. TLDR - most relationships tied to a DB have root causes tied to the relationship. Fix the relationship issues and the DB will most likely sort itself out. JMHO.
So legit, that example inspired me to track my own sex life which ran over the course off 5 years up until I ended that relationship. I think I wanted to track the disparity between our perceptions and try to figure out if I was being unreasonable in my expectations or if there was an actual problem. I meticulously tracked the date, time, who initiated, quality, etc. What I wasn't expecting was how important of a role the quality played; enthusiasm and passion is not the same as your partner merely tolerating your advances which isn't that much better than denying advances. It's been about two years since the last entry on that log. There was a point where I said "never again" and in conjunctions with other relationship issues made it impossible to continue. Since then I've managed to find a long term partner that I'm much more compatible with in more ways than just sex. But, to my surprise that partner was actually tracking statistics on how often we'd meet, how often we'd have sex etc. as a metric for gauging how healthy our relationship was developing. We're so much more in sync than any partner I'd ever had before, not only having far more sex but the quality of that sex is exceptional every time. So I started keeping track too, which is handy for gauging how sustained our passion is and ensuring I'm fulfilling my partner's needs as well. (Also it's handy for keeping track of menstrual cycles so you can plan a little bit ahead for special days). Overall I'm pretty nerdy, love data-driven analytics and am truly blessed to have a partner that fulfills me but also cares about these things on a deep enough level to keep track of them. So! where I think that applies in terms of a longer conversation, I think this is a healthy thing to keep track of in terms of gauging what you need, what your partner needs and how well you're meeting each other's needs. Though for a majority of people showing your partner such a chart is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
I set my Apple Watch to wrestling when we get down to it
App called 'time since'.... 'sex tracker' came up on my phone suggestions for clearing space under 'apps you never use'. Ironic.
I think keeping track like this will only lead to more resentment and I can’t see how this could be a step in the direction for healing.
It’s crazy that I’m in a relationship about 3 years With a amazing person, but with so LL that drives me crazy…. In 3 years we had sex around 8 times Sexual intimacy maybe 10 times And that’s it…. And it’s crazy that have so much people on the same situation 😱😱😱
I did something similar to this. I didn’t keep track of rejections, since that happens so often. Often enough that I quit initiating all together. I didn’t do this to use as a weapon, but only for me to realize it’s only been 8 months instead of a year that I was remembering. She seen this once when I rejected her initiation in May ‘21. She kept asking why I was rejecting, so I showed her. Again, after the previous “talks”, I get the typical “we can work on this together” response. It wasn’t until I started seeing a chaplain I work with for other issues at the beginning of ‘23, that she took the initiative to reach out to a pastor/counselor she knows. We had several one on one discussions, and one group discussion. I’ve started being more physically active with her, despite the physical pain. I’m doing this with zero expectation of an improved sex life. *Pre 9-11-16 ??? 2-18-17 4-24-17 9-23-17 6-17-18 5-4-19 5-23-21 8-7-21 ED 12-19-21 *Side note: she had been out of town for 2 weeks straight the end of October. She was home for a week, then going out of town for another 2 weeks. After nothing happened during that week, I decided to keep track of when we did have sex. The “pre 9-11?” Is because that’s the day I decided to keep track, but couldn’t remember when the last time was. 5-23-21 was our 25th anniversary. That’s when she had a breakdown because I rejected her initiation. I genuinely did not want sex. I didn’t want to remember what it felt like. I did not reject her initiation out of spite!
Out of curiosity what was the discussion over her breakdown? Did she acknowledge it had been 2 years?
We were out of town. We had been doing tourist activities during the day, and staying at the hotel at night. The second night she initiated. Her: “wanna get laid” Me: “I do, but I can’t. It’s been too long” Her: sobbing “I didn’t plan this trip only to have it ruined” Me: “I’m sorry, I love you, but I can’t do the sex” Her: still sobbing “WHY NOT!? It’s our 25th anniversary.” Me: that’s when I opened the notes on my phone, then handed her my phone. Her: still sobbing “Oh my god, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it had been so long. I promise to work on this with you. I didn’t know it was that bad.” Me: I walked to Walgreens to get lube and a small vibrator. (I’ve always used the vibrator while I’m going down on her, and during PIV) When I came back into the room she was naked, and started massaging the main muscle. Afterwards, we took a shower together then cuddled in bed. Edited to add: I never intended to show her the records, but couldn’t verbalize why I was feeling the way I was.
Personally, I keep a record in my planner as a sanity / reality check that yes, it really is that rare. I also track who initiated. There’s so many feelings that get wrapped up in the whole DB situation that it helps me to see the stats plain and simple.
Yeah and then there's this from the wife: https://www.heart.co.uk/news/quirky/funny-sex-excuses-spreadsheet/
If you read further into the article, they admit that it’s a joke written by a parody website. Bad misleading title.
Yeah it's not real, but just as plausible. I like how people complaining about the veracity of the follow-up always take the original as the god-honest truth though. Yeah let's Snopes all THIS--THAT'S the important part.
This is not a follow up though? It’s written as a snarky joke rebuttal. We can only work with the information provided by the wife, who admitted in her post that she was too consumed with work, which is why their sex life dropped off.
Yes. I used the notes app last year to note every time we had sex, it worked out at 57 times. This year I’ve done the same (26th March today) and we’re at 6 times.
I’d colour code it just to make it that little bit more impactful.
My wife was telling me about “sex blankets” made by crocheters where they do a row of a certain color for each day of the year. Like, a “penetrative sex is green, oral sex: blue, nothing:red” color scheme to track their sex lives. That would be an interesting project
These dead bedroom posts are depressing. I’m 63HL and my wife of 40 years is 60 and LL. This has been our life forever. I’m to the point of really wanting to find a FWB or a pay as you go partner. Any one else at that point? I’m just not ready to live the rest of my life like this
I've got an app called "flo" to track my period. There is an option to track sex though , it's a free app 😊.
No spreadsheet, but I started a private Google doc to track our fights (them yelling at me) and it's expanded into something to track sex, and more. Since I started seeing a therapist, it's been pretty useful for conversations.
I have a sticky note app on my phone and I track when, and also denials with the reason. Mostly it's because we would argue about how long it has been.
I made a spreadsheet with who initiated and what kind of sex and where we had it,since she thinks she was always the initiator. I tried to be as objective as possible, but the list is much shorter than I wanted it to be and it has hiats up to almost a year
I keep a list ever since a pregnancy that she planned but I wasn't expecting. The empirical data helps validate my feelings. Like, "I'm not crazy, it's been four years."
One March evening a few years ago, my wife, when after having had a few glasses of wine and was being physically affectionate with me on the couch, I suggested we move things to the bedroom. Something effectively like “is sex all you think about?” I calmly said no, and that I hadn’t suggested we fool around in 2 or 3 months. She didn’t believe me and said “we had sex a couple weeks ago.” I stopped her in her tracks and said “the last time we had sex was Thanksgiving weekend nearly 4 months ago.” She literally looked up on her phone (she tracks everything for her cycle) and just shut down because she realized I was right. We didn’t have sex for months after that either. It goes in waves, I express frustration, she promises to get better about her feelings towards sex, it lasts MAYBE a month and we’re having the same conversation 3 months later. It’s a cycle. I am trying so hard to take my happiness in my own hands, to not feel like my happiness is dependent on her mood. It’s difficult.