My Husband Prefers Masturbation to Having Sex With Me (My Husband Plays With Himself All The Time)

One of the perennial staples of relationship advice columns is the topic of why married men masturbate, with that advice typically triggered by a letter from a woman reader who has discovered that her husband still masturbates.

That seems to greatly trouble the wife in question. After all, hubby could have her (an actual woman), but he instead chose the "do it yourself" option. And isn't masturbation what guys are forced to settle for in high school when they can't get a girl into bed?

A great many married women do the same thing, of course (battery-powered vibrators shaped for that purpose are extremely commonplace), but it still troubles women to find hubby taking matters into his own hands.

It would be like hubby turning down a cushy perk-laden desk job paying $150,000 per year in order to instead take a minimum-wage job at a fast-food outlet. It all seems so counter-intuitive.

But is it? Not if you understand the underlying dynamics and logic.

Having been married a couple of times myself and having had many buddies over the years who were married, I understand from both personal and anecdotal experience many of the reasons why married men might still masturbate.

It would take a couple of dozen pages to cover the topic fully, so let's narrow the focus to one specific aspect of sexual relationships. Sex has many aspects but one of the biggest (from a male perspective) is the topic of "control".

Women who have been raised on feminist sloganeering about it being "a man's world" (when most of the evidence nowadays suggests the opposite) will likely assume that "control" here means "women being controlled by the patriarchy".

Not so. The odds of her husband ranking high enough up in the national power structure to be even remotely considered "patriarchy" are almost certainly zero. After all, guys who are that high up are not likely to masturbate when married. Instead, they're likely to have mistresses. And they're also prone to getting a new (younger) wife now and then. They have good options.

Truth be told, the average husband is just a cog in the corporate wheel. He has no real power in the economic world. And he has no real power at home either, especially when it comes to sex.

Women control access to sex. Guys need sex. And that enables women (if they wish) to exploit the men in their lives. And a great many women wish to, based on all I've seen over the years.

As a result, the typical married guy will sometimes (or even frequently) have to grovel for sex. His wife will occasionally use sex as a weapon. She'll use it as a reward. She'll use it as a bargaining chip.

And she'll dole it out more sparingly than the frequency he might like best. Why do that? It's a way to make him easier for her to motivate.

In my university days, the Psychology department maintained a large "rat laboratory" to be used for running learning experiments. And standard research protocol there would be to first starve the rats down to only 85% of their normal body weight before doing an experiment with them. That way, the rats would be highly motivated to earn the nibbles of food that would be used as rewards by the experimenter.

Why not cut them down to, say, 50%? Because they'd be too weak to perform at all and there'd be a chance they'd die. The goal was to keep them in "the sweet spot" ... hungry enough to be extremely focused on getting food but not so hungry that they ceased to function altogether.

This has direct implications for passive-aggressive relationships.

Wives subconsciously follow similar logic when they dole out sex to their husbands. By keeping him in a state of "scarcity" regarding sex, she can manipulate him more easily.

And there also, there's "a sweet spot". After all, if she cuts him back too drastically, she raises the risk that he'll be motivated to get a mistress and perhaps a divorce as well.

Why do women do this? Because it works. That is, it works in the short term. And that's the time frame that nervous systems were designed to focus on.

Now let's shift over to a male perspective: hubby needs sex at a certain rate but the wife is doling it out more slowly. What's the guy to do?

If he hadn't married, he could send her packing and look for a more accommodating girl friend. But since he is married, he's signed away his most important legal right: the right to walk away without incurring heavy financial penalties. And that's especially true if he and his wife have children already.

So hubby is likely to do what people have done from time immemorial when caught up in a dominance hierarchy in which they can't rebel openly without severe consequences:

They become passive-aggressive.

Masturbation is partly the solution for a married man to "make up the shortfall" when a wife is doling sex out less frequently than he'd like it. But it also can serve as a form of passive-aggression. It provides both benefits simultaneously.

Let's use an example to illustrate: suppose that hubby's ideal rate would be to have sex every other day but that his wife will have sex with him no more often than every third or fourth day. Naturally he'll become sexually frustrated. And depending on how much he ends up having to grovel in an effort to get her to be more accommodating, he'll also be resentful about having had to grovel. He'll feel powerless because he is powerless.

He can't do anything about it directly (as she holds the cards, sexually and legally) but he won't like it. And his resentment will grow over time as the situation repeats itself. It will eat at him. He won't be able to solve the problem but he'll express his resentments indirectly.

If it keeps up for long, he'll turn to masturbation..."If she won't do it, I'll do it myself!"

That takes the edge off physically. It reduces his feelings of powerlessness. And if he lets her "discover" that he masturbates, he can also "get even" at some level. She makes him feel inadequate as a man (by not wanting to sleep with him very often) so he returns the favor by making her feel inadequate as a woman (for being even less desirable than "no woman at all").

If he solves the problem by having an affair on the side, that carries risks. It's cheating and for the rest of their time together (assuming she doesn't divorce him immediately) she'll never let him forget that he cheated on her.

But masturbation is a "victimless crime" here. It isn't actually cheating (since no one else is involved) so it's not technically prohibited. But it's still a way to convey displeasure and at the same time feign innocence.

That's a prime dynamic: when it comes to why married men masturbate, there's a good chance that she's rationing sex in an effort to control him and he's resisting the leash.

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