Newlywed Med spouse struggling with intimacy + constant arguing
My husband is an IM resident, and we’re both in our late 20s. I know residency is exhausting and I’ve genuinely tried to lower my expectations in a lot of ways because I understand the stress and fatigue that come with it. But lately I’ve been struggling with feeling really unwanted physically.
For weeks I had been trying to communicate that I missed having sex and wanted more intimacy. I brought it up directly multiple times, flirted throughout the day, tried initiating more, etc. He is always just so tired and ends up falling asleep on the couch.
We finally were intimate one night this past week, and honestly I was excited because I thought maybe things were improving. The next day I even went and bought some new toys because I thought it would be fun and something he’d find hot since that’s already something we use together. Instead, that somehow turned into a huge argument.
What hurt the most honestly wasn’t even the rejection, it was the way the conversation went afterward. He questioned why I felt the need to go to an adult store without him and immediately commented on how expensive one of the things I bought was, even though financially it truly was not an issue for us. I had made a comment that my libido had been really high lately and that I thought he might find the effort attractive or exciting.
Instead, the conversation spiraled into an argument. My husband has a tendency to argue things into the ground and focus on being “right,” and I left the conversation feeling completely crazy and emotionally exhausted. He insisted I had “never told him” I wanted more intimacy, despite me feeling like I had been communicating it for weeks in multiple ways. At one point he literally told me that just because something was “my experience” didn’t mean it was “the truth.”
That comment really stuck with me because it felt so dismissive. I wasn’t saying he intentionally ignored me, I was saying that from my perspective, I had been trying over and over to communicate my needs. Being told that my experience basically wasn’t reality felt incredibly hurtful and invalidating.
He has apologized since then, but I still feel unsettled by the whole thing. I can handle hard seasons and stress, but I don’t know how to navigate feeling emotionally invalidated every time we have conflict. It stops feeling like a disagreement and starts feeling like I’m being argued out of my own reality.
I guess I’m wondering if other med spouses have dealt with this kind of communication dynamic during residency. How do you address intimacy and emotional needs when every conversation turns into a debate over facts, wording, or who is “correct” instead of addressing the actual hurt?