u/AffectionateStudy29

So, we flew from Colorado to Tennessee for our baby shower because that’s where my family and my husband’s friends are. We put the QR code for our registry that’s linked to our address on the back of the invites and asked people not to bring gifts to the event since we’d have to fly back with them. Almost all of the shower guests were my husbands friends (I sadly have zero friends 😢), like he invited about 30 of his friends and maybe 5 of those people got us a gift. His closest best friends didn’t even give us anything, as a matter of fact they got super drunk and even left the party at 7:30 (which ended at 5) to go get more liquor and came back and got even more wasted and then I had to tell them to leave at 9:30 because the party was in my parents guest house and I was ready to lay down and had nowhere to go. I feel selfish for being upset about not getting stuff, but I thought that was the whole point of a baby shower and his friends just used it as an excuse to hang out and get rowdy. I wasn’t expecting them to buy us anything crazy, no more than like a pack of diapers or something but they didn’t even do that. We ended up spending more money just traveling to Tennessee than what we got baby shower wise. It was super stressful traveling this pregnant and now I just wish I didn’t go through all of that just to be so overwhelmed. 😭

I feel like my whole social media feed is just flooded with videos of people giving birth and 9/10 of them are people screaming at the top of their lungs or just generally sound like they’re dying. Is this the norm?

Intimacy has been a huge issue in our marriage from the get go due to him being addicted to porn and masturbation. It eventually got to the point that I’d walked in on him jerking off so many times that I stopped getting ready in our master bathroom and just brought all my makeup downstairs so I could get ready in our half bath and not walk in on him every day (he was doing it after I got out of bed in the morning). It made him have no sex drive and when we did have sex he pretty much never finished because he got so used to porn and the whole “death grip” thing. I finally did some deep diving and once I found out that porn was causing our intimacy problems, I told him that it was either me or the porn. He swore he had no idea that the porn was the problem and stopped consuming it. Within a week of him quitting, we were having great sex AND he was finishing and even able to enjoy himself. I was even able to successfully give him head for the first time in his entire life (before, he thought he hated it because he could never get off) and our relationship was finally starting to feel like what I had wanted for so long.

Cut to last December, I got pregnant after just one month of trying. The first trimester was really rough on me due to lubrication problems and sensitivity and I couldn’t have sex without a lot of pain. I tried a handful of times and every time, I’d have to stop because I’d literally bleed. Around that time, he stopped really trying because he was trying to be the “good guy” and not pressure me to do something that hurts. As time went by, I bought lube and the situation seemed to get better but the new issue was our dog, who no longer has a baby gate and now has access to the whole house, would cry outside the door and distract us from having sex to the point that my husband would just get frustrated and give up.

Meanwhile, it has been 5 months of being pregnant and my husband has not been able to finish one single time. He doesn’t come on to me and we can literally be naked in bed with our arms and legs wrapped around each other and he will get up and leave the room to make coffee despite it being 3+ weeks since we had *tried* to be intimate. I brought it up to him and he got upset and said that it was my personality and that I’m just too much of a downer for him to be turned on by me. To me this just doesn’t add up, I’ve always been the same person as far as I can see although I am definitely exhausted and struggling on a daily basis from being pregnant. At this point I wish he would just say the generic thing all men say about “it’s weird that there’s a baby in there” but he doesn’t, he basically makes it my fault. This is exactly what he did when I initially brought up the porn issue before he agreed he had a problem, so this is a huge red flag for me at the moment.

I straight up told him the other day that I was very worried about getting pregnant and him going back to his old ways of watching porn because of my body changing and that our intimacy right now feels exactly how it did back when he was addicted, and he pretty much skirted the porn topic and said that I’m just being insecure and that it isn’t because he isn’t attracted to me, it’s because I’m not giving him the emotional connection he needs. He says that just simply “existing next to each other” isn’t enough and that we need to do more things together like dates and games for him to feel connected to me enough to want to have sex. It just seems like a cop out to me, considering we spend seemingly every second together that he isn’t working. I cook him breakfast lunch and dinner, make sure the house is nice and taken care of, run errands with him, and hang out with him before bed every night watching our show together and between the stuff I do around the house, walking the dog, and being pregnant, that’s basically all I have the energy for.

At this point I just assume sex is too much of a burden for him now and he’s jerking off in the bathroom to get his fix and get on with his life. I have told him many times that sex is important to me and that having a dead bedroom makes marriage feel incomplete to me, so I just don’t know what to do at this point. I would literally give anything in this world to feel wanted by him and I have a feeling this is only going to get worse as I get rounder and especially after our baby is here. I don’t know how to bring this up to him again without accusing him of watching porn and making him get all defensive. I loved the way our marriage was when intimacy was normal and right now I just feel so defeated. Honestly thinking about getting a therapist just for this issue alone.