Intimacy Problems, self-efficacy, "the-one-who-got-away" and p*rn of course

Me (25 M) and my partner (25 F) are in a two-year relationship and for me this is the first proper adult relationship I have been in. Our relationship has really good communication and emotional intimacy, we have similar outlooks on life, we have been supporting each other through each other's problems and have been living together successfully for a couple of months. I am in love with her and she is in love with me and I am committed to making this relationship work. Due to a situation with “the-one-who-got-away” I had this week I have been thinking about the biggest flaw in our relationship. We never had enough sex for her taste. It has been especially bad lately going from once a week to once every four to six weeks. I have conflicting feelings about this. I’ll try to explain in this post. I know that sexual ruts are something that all long-term relationships face and you can work through, but I would like to know how and wonder if there might be some more fundamental problems that cause this situation.

I have been watching a lot HealthyGamer videos, but this is my first time in the subreddit. I hope this is appropriate. I don’t really go into any graphic details, so I think it should be sfw.

Sex in and outside of relationships

I feel like a love my girlfriend’s body, and we touch each other all the time and cuddle a lot, but for me there is an emotional blockade when it comes to sex, even when I feel horny. Sex in a relationship feels very different than from when I was single. Almost like a chore. You go through the same old motions, make each other cum and that's it. For me it is less emotional labor, to simply watch porn, jack off and go on with my day. Somehow really caring for my partner makes it more difficult to have sex, not less.

Sex with a person I don’t know as well feels performative in a good way to me. We are just having fun, with no consequences and put on a little show for each other and it is really exiting to find out what another person likes and dislikes etc. The need to perform creates certain pressure to be exploratory and keeps it exciting and new. In our relationship I feel a kind of pressure, I can’t really put my finger on. I know that it definitely feels like there are higher stakes involved, which is true on some level, but it’s not like there was ever a situation that would warrant me being worried about having sex with her and ruining anything. I have some fear of “getting stuck” in a bad relationship, since this how I see my parents’ marriage and my first relationship as a teenager felt like that for quite some time. I thought I had overcome this feeling, but now I’m not so sure anymore.

In the beginning of our relationship, I was quite clear that I would want an open relationship and my girlfriend was ideologically open to this idea but felt a lot of jealousy (without ever being controlling with me), which is why we never went through with it. Since she was always unhappy with how little sex we had, I dropped the issue. It would be quite hurtful to express, that I wanted to have sex with other people, when she was feeling unsatisfied. Nonetheless this was sometimes what I felt, and I did tell her once or twice, but I don’t mention it anymore. I never hit the clubs much, but I miss the chaos of unexpectedly hooking up with someone at a birthday party or after a night at the bar or something and to me this feels completely different than having a romantic relationship. Of course I wouldn’t have any problems with her having casual sex with different people or us having some experiences with others. Her dating experiences before me had been quite bad, so much so, that she had given up dating at some point. I’m not quite sure if this is the only reason, but she told me she doesn’t want to get with other guys at all since we are together. So, there is some kind of misalignment there.

Our relationship is more important to me than these sexual experiences and as long as we haven’t fixed our sex life there is no basis for opening up our relationship. While this is how I truly feel there is an aspect of “Puer Aeternus” in this. An inability to commit fully to one person; something I would describe as a kind of Fantasy/Dreaminess divorcing real messy intimacy, constant effort for one partner, and emotion from sex and trying to replace it with the fictional sexuality of pornography. Somehow I feel like jacking of to pornography can be a replacement for having sex with my partner, which shouldn’t be possible right? (Now that I think about it, neurologically it might be possible. I think Dr. K talked about your brain not being able to tell the difference once, but I could be misremembering.) I’m quite sure that sometimes feeling more attraction to someone else, than to your partner or missing an old fling is normal, but when does it become a problem? Or rather is it maybe a symptom of different things? And a very specific question, but I have been worried about this: is it normal to fantasize basically about everyone you ever had Sex with, but your partner?

Negative Emotions

I never have physical problems in the sense of ED, when we have sex, or have to look at porn in order to cum. So I’m fairly certain this is mainly an emotional problem. That being said: I was diagnosed with ADHD last year and am struggling with getting my life together. I’m getting out of a depressive episode, that lasted for four months, right now and my mood is still quite volatile. This meant using video games and pornography to suppress my emotions, stopping playing sports and sleeping irregularly. So, it’s not that weird, that we had even less sex lately. What I’m wondering is: What kind of negative emotions interfere with your intimacy with your partner specifically and in what cases should you see a therapist specifically for your sexual problems?

When I was seeing a therapist a few years ago, she told me that there probably is generational trauma within my family, that instills the fear of hurting or creeping out women in me, which was then confirmed to me without me bringing it up directly. This is somewhat removed from me however and my family is very healthy in many other regards. This has made it difficult for me to hit on women, but there were also the usual Self-esteem issues, a little social awkwardness and the pandemic during the time you would learn flirting. If a woman made it really clear, that she was interested in me, this was generally not problem anymore. In conversations with my girlfriend, she expected me to see a therapist because of this specifically, but I’m not really convinced this is the issue. In general I also didn’t see it as a priority to work on this issue, since there are other more immediate mental health problems.

What I have been wondering is if a feeling of guilt about how our relationship is going is causing this sexual blockade in me. I feel like our relationship has always been somewhat asymmetrical. She developed a crush on me, when we were dating, I was ready for a relationship and we got along really well (also sexually in the beginning) so I went for it, without having the same level of emotional investment, which I have been open about. We both had bad mental health moments and supported each other, but I feel like she has supported me more than I have her. She has shown more initiative to work on our relationship than I have. She has more material means than I have (which I could have done something about) and she has contributed more in that sense. On a rational level I think that I'm just at a phase in my life in which I'm trying to get my shit together and not always succeeding, while she is a few steps ahead of me and I’ll be able to repay her eventually, but there are still some feelings of guilt and indebtedness there.

She says often that she is very happy in our relationship and as I understand her, she feels very supported, because she can be open to me about all her emotions, including problems she has with me (mostly little annoyances of living together). I validate her feelings; we talk about these things and work them out. But there is this self-doubt I have, that I just look good in comparison, because in her experience with guys and her family, there wasn't much room for her to express her negative emotions freely, which I think of as a bare minimum in relationships.

I’m not 100% that this is it, but I feel like this is my prime suspect at the moment. I wonder how I would combat these feelings. The first step is probably talking with her about it. I think in this case we haven’t and I’m a little afraid. She has complained about me not organizing as many dates as she has and I know that it was a problem for her when she was buying almost all the groceries (Right now it is working out, but I’ll have to get a better job soon, because our living situation is changing). The only way is for me to change my behavior, but this is easier said than done.

Self-efficacy in Dating

In general, I have a problem with self-efficacy/subjectivity. I often feel like I’m not in control of my life and don’t bother to go for the things I want, which is also a mechanism to avoid hard work and/or responsibility, which is why I mention “Puer Aeternus”. Me entering this relationship was an important step in this regard. I didn’t stumble into it by accident, but took a deliberate decision, facing my fear of commitment and taking a chance by trying to put in the work of making a serious relationship work even though I really wasn’t sure if it was the right decision.

As I said I had a lot of trouble approaching women. I basically only got laid because I’m quite handsome and there were literally multiple situations where women would go: “What the fuck bro? Are we going to fuck now or what?”. My school friends were more socially awkward and had less self-esteem than I and we didn’t know any girls. So I was the one-eyed man of our blind group (I’m also the only one who went into the humanities later, where you actually meet women). I feel like I have this “Nerd-Socialization” (kind of incel-y, but my friends and I never blamed women for not getting laid.) in which sex is something rare and very difficult. Even though in Uni everyone was/is hooking up, it is easy for me to fall into an attitude of: not fucking is the natural state of affairs and I don’t have any responsibility to investigate that, even though my girlfriend is unhappy and I am too, if I really think about it. I always understood myself as a sexual person and it was always my goal to be adventurous with other people not through weird porn. Sometimes I thought that I’m just getting older and my body is changing, but I’m 25 for god’s sake.

The Situation

So now “the-one-who-got-away” has reentered my life. I had this classmate with whom I had a very romantic evening once. I regret to this day that I didn't ask to kiss her. We hooked up once and saw each other from time to time, and she made it clear that she was into me and wouldn't mind hooking up again sometime. I wanted to try to get something more going, but didn't really go for it, because I was too insecure. Because I’ve never really asked, I have no idea how she felt about me. We finished our bachelor’s program, I got together with my girlfriend and didn’t really think any more of it.

Then me and that girl started our master's program together and we are taking a lot of the same classes and hanging out with the same people on campus sometimes. It was kind of weird to me at first, because I have the feeling that there is some kind of unfinished business there, but this simply was my weird hang-up. I told a friend that I felt kind of weird, noticed that I had a kind of shitty instinct of not mentioning my girlfriend when she was around and told myself: “What the fuck are you doing?  You are in a happy relationship. Act like it!”. So, this is what I did.

Now the thing is: I'm not sure, if you know that feeling of someone standing next to you, you catching their smell and your hormones going crazy. I feel like this sounds kind of creepy, but I hope people know what I'm talking about. When I think about it, I don't think I ever really had that with my girlfriend even though she has it with me. When we were dating I just wasn't really getting laid otherwise, so it wasn't really a problem for me, to have good sex every time we saw each other. As long as it was new and exciting.

So, the central point I have been wondering about is this: For both of us, sexuality is an important part of our relationship. I don’t feel like I have low libido, since you know: masturbation. Why was there never a time where we were fucking like rabbits. I feel like there is a kind “base carnal attraction” missing on my side, that I had with other people, but maybe there is no such thing, and this is just a very temporary fleeting moment of horniness, that wouldn’t last more than a few seconds with anyone. Me and my girlfriend are not sexually incompatible, since we had good and exciting sex from time to time, but it became difficult very fast. Since most long-term couples face these problems, you might be able to build a satisfying sex life regardless of “base carnal instincts”, but how do you actively work on this? Maybe it also is all just about me kicking my porn habit. It certainly isn’t helping, but I feel like there is more to it. People’s sexuality is very different, but it would help to know, what is “normal” in these situations.

I have been thinking about this stuff for a while, but as I said, there is an aspect to it, that is just daydreaming: Some day your problems might be magically fixed, and you could have all kinds of sexual experiences in an open relationship or daydreaming about past experiences I had. This week I had two situations where I felt like said classmate, wasn’t really flirting per se, but might still be attracted to me, which wouldn’t really be that weird (I seriously doubt she thinks about it as much as I do though). As I said I can’t flirt for shit and I could be misreading it completely, but it actually doesn’t really matter. It kind of changed my attitude, because this is suddenly not something that is just happening in my head. This is not about some pipedream about “the-one-who-got-away” two-and-a-half years ago. This person is standing right in front of me. I really have more important issues in my life, but I’m not an innocent bystander in the state of my relationship even when it comes to sexuality. This is not simply biology.

“I could never hurt my girlfriend by cheating or breaking up with her”, is something I thought in these situations, but it’s not true. Of course I could. I don’t want to. This relationship is an extremely valuable part of my life, and I cherish it. It is a decision I make. This also alleviates the fear of “being stuck”. Maybe this is just something I feel because I refuse to take responsibility for my life. This is the reason for me writing this down and it feels good to put it into words. Maybe you guys can help me a little.