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Selfishness is a tricky thing. Lori and I have had spouses complain about their spouse being selfish when what we see is a person unwilling to be essentially a slave. Good, reasonable boundaries are sometimes attacked as being selfish. This is particularly true when someone who has been allowing too much tries to become balanced and healthy.
In marriage, both spouses have needs and desires, and often these are in conflict. She needs to talk, and he is mentally exhausted from a long day of difficult discussions at work. It’s been a week since they have had sex, and he legitimately needs to make love. But she is “touched out” from caring for a colicky baby, and the idea of more touch makes her want to scream.
One thing that makes all this especially messy is that we don’t value emotional needs as we should. We respect a broken leg or being sick. We tend to dismiss being emotionally exhausted, sad, depressed, or feeling distant. We wouldn’t ask a spouse with a broken leg to run a marathon, yet we often expect an emotionally broken spouse to “power through”. When we devalue our spouse’s emotional needs and issues, we balance their and our own needs in a selfish way. When we devalue our own emotional needs and issues, we either give when we should not or feel selfish for not giving when, in fact, we should hold back.
Fear of being selfish can be a horrible thing. If someone labelled you as selfish in the past, that may linger in your mind. Some folks use claims of selfishness as a bludgeon to get what they want. As in any statement that starts with “If you really loved me…”
If you have been abused in that way, you may not be able to accurately judge yourself. Another cause of this problem can be wrong teachings about Christianity. Yes, we are called to be less selfish than the world, but we are still supposed to set limits and engage in self-care. Loving our neighbour as ourself presupposes self-love and care.
There is a healthy form of self-interest, and self-preservation is important. If you don’t know what that looks like, you’re in trouble. If you struggle with this, you need someone you can trust to help you see clearly and find a good balance.
~ This is Paul, reminding you that Doing Marriage Well looks different for every couple.
The bed is neutral territory.
Behave, or you leave!
Image Credit: © Paul H Byerly created with ideogram.ai & Paul Byerly
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Would have loved to know a better way to balance this. They say that a good compromise leaves both parties feeling slightly dissatisfied. When there were small children in the mix, compromise left us both feeling very dissatisfied. That touched our feeling can go on indefinitely and the wife feels that you are being selfish for asking her to be intimate, even when it has been a really long time. You may understand her feeling touched out but feel like she is being selfish by asking you to be celibate indefinitely. It can leave you both absolutely miserable. That was our experience. Even now with two of our kids adults and one almost there, we still struggle some with this.
That healthy compromise can be very difficult to find and can still really hurt. Or maybe that’s just us.
@Pa’dam – Compromise is an iffy thing much of the time. I think in many cases it would be better for one to just go with the other. But often we are too broken or selfish to do that. This is especially true when both are exhausted, as you outlined.
The bigger issue is that often the compromise is necessary because one or both spouses are broken. Healing would end the need for compromise.
To clarify, I am the high drive spouse and my wife pretty much never wanted/wants sex. The compromise was us having sex infrequently. She was miserable because she doesn’t want sex except in the moment and sees it as taking too much to be worth it. I was miserable because sex wasn’t happening nearly as often as I wanted or as was necessary to keep me from walking around in discomfort.
Healing and perhaps age have helped me be a bit less miserable with little sex. I still get pretty uncomfortable before we finally come together again but I am at a place where I can deal with it now without being absolutely miserable.
She is healing, too, but she still isn’t to a place where she is happy or really content that sex is still happening.
I’m going to say that most other things we can work through together. This is just one area in which we both had/have real struggles
What I have found true (ok granted, not in ALL cases) about this in terms of sex is often a double standard. It’s all well and good for the woman to justify her decision to say ‘No’ to sex for various reasons. But you let the man do it, and she’ll wonder what’s wrong with him, because men are supposed to want sex all the time, right? Or in other cases, she’ll think he’s getting it from somewhere else just because he doesn’t turn on like a light switch.
@James – True. Such a man gets accused of all manner of sins. This is the danger of generalisations and caricatures: the many who don’t fit are judged by them anyway.