Who Is the Winner in the Marital Dance of Anger? The Sexual Side
For a while now I've been looking into why some couples get warm, cooperative responses from each other and others don't, especially once an argument starts. One pattern keeps coming up in what I've read: anger tends to work against you in a marital fight if you're the wife. For husbands, the math often runs the other way. When a woman shows anger toward her partner, she risks being labeled irrational or too emotional. Part of what drives that anger, I think, is fear. A lot of women sense that their security depends on the relationship, so a husband's disagreement can feel like a threat to the ground they're standing on.
Our culture has long nudged women toward meeting a man's needs, the idea being that if he comes to depend on her, she'll feel safer in the marriage. The trouble is where that leads. A wife can end up believing she has no way to meet her own needs when they happen to differ from her husband's. Sometimes it goes further than that: she can't even name her own needs anymore, having shelved them so many times that they've gone quiet.
Children raise the stakes. When there are kids in the house, mothers routinely rank the children's needs above their own, and they do it for the kids' sake. A newborn survives only if the basics are covered: feeding, shelter, warmth, protection, and, for a human baby, affection. Think about how much the first days have changed. Decades ago a new mother might spend ten days in the hospital while the baby stayed mostly in the nursery. Now it's one day in, next day out. Relatives and friends who are willing to pitch in during the first week or two can take a lot of that weight off.
Put enough of this together and a woman can run herself empty. She learns to serve her husband and children first, over and over, until there's little left for her. Layer on top of that the message so many women absorb early: satisfy your husband sexually or he'll find it somewhere else. That one cuts straight at her sense of safety. And for her own sexual needs to count, she first has to know what she actually wants out of sex and how to get there, which is its own problem.
Men, meanwhile, usually get plenty of practice figuring out their own satisfaction and very little practice learning what genuinely arouses a woman or brings her to climax. A lot of faking fills the gap, mostly on the woman's side. If the whole encounter revolves around his needs, she may simply stop trying for her own and tell him afterward that she finished, when she didn't, because she's tired, maybe bored, no longer interested. He, on the other hand, generally knows exactly what gets him to the finish and handles it.
A woman's arousal can be a completely different animal, and it's entirely possible that neither of them has figured out what makes her respond. The complication is that men often assume they've got sex fully understood when they're holding maybe half the picture, and women frequently let the misunderstanding stand rather than correct the assumption that a woman's experience of sex works the same way as a man's.