My Fight to Avoid Withholding

I can’t remember now when I first heard the term “withholding” but I do remember feeling, “Wait, really? Women do that?” And then came the self-righteous vow never to hurt a man in that way myself. Chin to the air, I’d declare for years to come that I was not one of those abusive wives who withheld sex.

It didn’t take long with my husband sexually coercing me to feel the drain in that declaration. Imagine a runner at the start of a race full of energy and ready to go, but this runner hasn’t taken the time to eat right, warm up, and take the right pace, and shortly in, he’s about to collapse. This was me. I was weary of the “running” and needed to stop, but to do so would be to abuse my husband.

So I kept running. Until I collapsed.

Over the years I had heard whispers of bitter, nagging, “withholding wives” sentencing their husbands to a “sexless marriage” and sucked up my headache to make sure I wasn’t one of them. But over the years, as my body was engagin…