My husband only feels loved through sex- help

I'm in marriage therapy, and my therapist has pointed me to Marriage Builders. Now I know you are not married but much of it would apply anyway.

MB talks about a love bank, and that we each have different things that will fill or deplete our love bank. That is, your partner can DO an act out of love for you and designed to show you love but if it's not the kind of act that fills your love bank then you just aren't going to feel the love. Alternately, the things that fill your partner's love bank could be things that just really, really deplete yours. They are sacrifices for you that don't make you feel good.

When both partners are getting their love banks filled, then sacrificing for each other doesn't feel as much like sacrifice, it tends to feel more like loving each other.

So the question is - is your love bank filled? Are you getting the intimacy and support and the services of love that you need? Because if you are not, it's no wonder that you would feel disinterested in sex. And his job, to help fix it, is to have a talk with you about what fills your love bank so that both partners can feel they can both be working in the relationship to meet each others needs but also be having their needs met.

Now, you may just have a mismatch of libido and such. I'm trying to tread really carefully around that because you are always flat out entitled to say NO and being guilted into sex sucks. On the other hand, your partner's need for sex and his libido is legitimate to.

You can't force him to accept love that's not the kind of love he wants; just like he can't force you to have sex be the kind of love you want. But what you can do is figure out what kinds of different things fill each others love banks and do a lot of those things. Because if sex fills his love bank a lot but something else fills it a little, maybe you can do a lot of the other thing and as much sex as you are comfortable with. If he knows what fills your love bank and is doing a lot of it, you may build intimacy that makes you more interested in sex.

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