Copyright© 2004

To my Dark Lady of the internet.
What we had was good.
Where it went, I don't know.
Will it ever return?

If you're looking for a piece of sex fiction, go away. This isn't fiction. It's what it says in the title. Don't believe me? Then maybe you're the one I've written it for. I'd given up expecting to get laid, too. This is about me and my wife. Though it would work just as well with a girlfriend, of course. The recipe isn't that precise.

The whole thing is true. Only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent.

And parts have been left out, to protect the guilty. Because let's face it, we need a lot more protection than the innocent do.

Ok. Let's stop rambling, and get on with it. I'm going to tell you a sad story, with a happy ending. You're clearly up for reading about sex, otherwise you wouldn't be visiting this site, so I can be more open than I would be in polite company. And I need guinea-pigs. Where better to find a group of sexually-frustrated males than here, he?

Of course, if you're thick as pigshit, drunk, drugged, stink like an outhouse, or have a dick the size of my little finger, none of this is going to help you get laid. Or if you suffer from any or all of the above, but are rich as Croesus, then you don't need help. When money talks, the ladies listen! Some of them, anyway.

So, here goes. Sad story time.

For most of my marriage, the sex was bad. Infrequent - maybe once or twice a month - and not particularly loving, or even exciting. Babs occasionally decided to 'take care of my needs', either as a whim or, more usually, because she wanted something from me. Apart from that, she was a friendly girl who liked to see me happy. In bed, she saw my frustration, but she didn't want to give me what I needed. I was always very puzzled by this. Why would she do it? A few minutes of her time, a few minutes with her body, that's all I wanted. Longer would have been better, of course, but the physical pressure can be released very quickly. Without that release, sleep was almost impossible. I spent many hours awake, frustrated, with the means of release snoring peacefully only a few inches away. It tortured me, and made me both angry and sad.

Anything sound familiar so far?

For years, the questions ran through my head. Why did she do it? It wasn't that she hated sex. She often enjoyed it, she said, and her bodily reactions told the same story. So if she liked it, why didn't she want to do it the next day? Or the day after? Or the day after that... ? I knew that it was a general problem, not just for me. The bitter jokes of other men told me so. And yet some men seemed to have a lot of success - not just with their wives, but with many women. A friend of mine was one such. He wasn't particularly good-looking. He wasn't rich. He wasn't clever, or well-spoken. I studied him, but couldn't see why he was so successful with the ladies. I asked him about it. He didn't know. I asked Babs. She told me that yes, she found him attractive, but she couldn't explain why.

Over the years, I tried everything I could think of, with no result. I asked Babs, of course, but she didn't want to think about it, let alone talk about it. I read books. I tried different positions. Babs seemed too enjoy many of them, but never asked for a repeat. I washed extra-carefully, in case she was picking up offputting scents. I tried not washing, to give the pheromones a chance. I tried going down on my knees and begging, to try to make her understand how much pressure she was putting me under... When that didn't work, I tried NOT asking for sex, in case my constant nagging was putting her off. She didn't even notice... for SIX MONTHS!!!

Nothing worked. Nothing at all. My sleep patterns changed. Rather than going to bed and lying awake, I sat up reading, only going to bed when I felt that I was about to go under. Often, I misjudged and dozed off in the chair, waking up a few hours later fully rested and ready for another day. My body had trained itself to manage on less sleep, and I was glad of it. Babs wasn't happy, though. She didn't want me in her bed for sex, but she did like to cuddle up to me. This led to me staying out of her bed even more, to punish her for her treatment of me. She wouldn't give me what I needed, so why should I give in to her? We both began to sulk, to nag each other, and the marriage became cold.

I like chatting on the internet, finding out the many different ways people think and behave. And my new sleep pattern gave me a lot of spare online time. Some of it I spent reading porn stories. We take our release where we can... Now and again I meet someone online who becomes a good friend. One of those people, Mary from Canada, did me a huge favour, by showing me what was wrong with my marriage. We started swapping mails at the end of 2003. I'm not sure what made me dump all my problems on to her. Certainly I had no thoughts that she could give me any answers - I'd given up believing that they existed. It was just good to be able to talk it through with someone, especially someone on the other side. The marriage was just trudging along in an uncaring rut. I had no thoughts of getting out, but no expectation of it getting better, either. I felt I'd been cheated. I wanted excitement. I wanted romance. I wanted sex. None of those things had happened for me, for a lot of years, and all I could see was more of the same until they finally screwed the lid down on me.

We talked my problems back and forth, and something amazing happened. Mary gave me something that my wife never had. Answers. Simply that. She gave me an insight into a woman's mind and motivations. Like having a spy in the enemy camp, at last I was getting some real info. It wasn't easy, though. Mary couldn't see the answers, any more than I could. But she could FEEL the answers, and once I'd learned to understand the meanings behind the words, and the emotions behind the meanings, I finally started to realise what Babs needed me to do.

We talked about the difference between men and women, and what they look for in a relationship. We looked at why the human animal behaves the way it does. We decided that we are driven by some very primitive urges. A man's drives are simple - to spread his seed as widely as possible, to leave as many children as he can. So all he wants is a fuck - simply that. The more often, the better.

A woman's drives are much more complex. To give her genes the best chance of survival through the generations, she can't follow the male pattern of simply having as many children as possible. Instead, she has to find a way of supporting her children, to give them the best chance. In most of human history, that meant finding a strong man to support her and the children, and binding him closely to her. So that's what her drives are telling her. It doesn't matter as much now - women can bring up kids without a man nowadays - but those prehistoric drives are still ticking away inside her head, whether she knows it or not. And those drives are what switch her libido on and off.

Remember those words. Strong. Binding. They're important.

Mary sent me this list of attributes that an ideal man should possess:

> intelligent and possessing an inner strength; necessary for a woman to respect him. Caring, tender and considerate; necessary for a woman to love him. A keen sexual drive; necessary for a woman to want him.

I replied:

> I see what you mean. It's not a case of 'two out of three's not bad'. Two out of three is very bad indeed from the woman's point of view: you get a mental or physical inadequate, a rapist, or a celibate. And those three ingredients map to our original thought that really a woman is looking for someone to provide for her children: the first indicates ability to provide; the second, willingness to provide; and without the third there aren't any children to provide for. Putting the three attributes together, as you've done, shows how any man missing one of them is unlikely to be able to form much of a relationship with a woman. Not one she'd welcome, anyway.