the wife looks at him sternly and says "not tonight", simply blows my mind.

Okay, that somewhat resembles my situation. My question is, how do you avoid this situation? Lets say you weren't thinking about setting it up, and then bed time comes and you realize you want sex. What do you do? I've never asked my girl for sex. I just start kissing/touching her, and sometimes she'll go dead-fish and then eventually says she's tired or w/e and rolls over. How can you avoid or cope with that situation without losing frame? As you can see, my current solution is to implement dread/freeze out when she does this. This dread game will hopefully be bad enough that she thinks twice before rejecting me again, but that's not really me end goal (my end goal is for her to want to have sex as often as I do, for her sake and mine).

As far as setting things up, I guess I should just use body language, sexual jokes/teasing, and kino (maybe even flirt a little with other girls in public)? What if you do all this shit and she's not turned on? Do you still make an advance knowing that she's likely to reject it? Or is this the time to implement dread (again? ugh... trying to manage fucked up relationships is exhausting).

Few questions about kino with a LTR:

• Is more always better? In the past I've had the idea (without any noticeable success) that denying her kino might make her crave it. But when I think about that, maybe it's more of a female-on-male play that wouldn't work for a guy (unless you're doing dread/freeze out obviously). Usually it just seems to backfire and I get the "I feel like you're being weird towards me" question. Which I never fucking know how to respond to. If anyone could give me a clue for answering the "why are you acting cold/weird" question it would be amazing.
• Is more sexual always better than less sexual? We've been dating for a long time. I can touch her wherever I want whenever I want and I won't be rebuffed. But is that a good idea? Or should I still go from less sexual to more sexual, e.g. start with the elbow and knee and work my way to the upper thigh?
• How important is location to kino? Is it more effective in public because it's a little more "scandalous" or does that not matter?

Sorry, I know that's a lot of questions. I feel like most of the stuff in RP are things that I've already been trying to do forever, but my execution has been totally wrong and I need some help with how to handle certain situations. Any advice is always greatly appreciated.