Funny excuses husband give to avoid intimacy with their wives

Most married men will tell you sex is overrated. In fact, they will tell you it doesn’t rank up there on their list of priorities.

The adult movie industry has created the perception that if a man can’t keep his magic stick up for over an hour, then there is something terribly wrong with him.

Some idle scientists even suggested that men think about sex after every seven seconds. Good Lord! Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ask any married couple, they don’t have marathon sex on the regular. You will be shocked by how infrequent they do it. Some take months, yet they are still madly in love.

Before men get married, they always ensure they have had enough sex. The opposite could be true for most women; they get married to enjoy and get more sex.

Irish author and poet Oscar Wilde aptly captured it, rather humorously, when he opined, “Men’s clumsy vanity is to be a woman’s first love. But women, with their more subtle instinct about these things, prefer being a man’s last romance.”

Little wonder then that married men always come up with all sorts of excuses to avoid intimacy. “I’m tired and sleepy”, “ I have a headache”, “I have an early day tomorrow”, “I am unwell” and “I am stressed” are common excuses men give when pressured by their wives. And again, contrary to popular belief, men don’t want sex all the time. They have other matters to attend to.

Men not always desperate for sex

Recently, I met a long-lost lady friend I had not seen in almost a decade. She had not aged a day despite been the mother of three kids. In fact, if I were to be truthful, she looked finer than I could remember. Some women are late bloomers, who get better with age.

She still possessed her famed callipygian attributes that had made her a star attraction at the local hangout and the years of disciplined exercise since had thoroughly enhanced her figure.

Once we had gotten over the pleasantries, we began to update on details of our lives since. That is when she reminded me of the rumours. Apparently, everyone in our circle then had always assumed we were an item and had been getting it on. I felt a tinge of regret that nothing significant ever happened between us other than regular courtesies shared among friends.

Friend-zoned

She shared this news with a hint of puzzlement hanging in her voice. “I wonder why we never got it on?” The statement came out of the blue. I talked to my former self. What on earth was wrong with me? Obviously, I was ridiculously slow on the uptake and missed the cue only to realize it a freaking decade later.

Later that day, I tried to remember why I had ended up in the ‘friend zone’ with this potential lover. I recall that she did have a reputation of a sex vixen, and in those days, I was not the kind of single guy to look a gift horse in the mouth or let an opportunity pass. Yet, despite, my natural instincts, I had walked away from the opportunity to indulge in what held the promise of a ravenous relationship. But, I reasoned that it was not the first time I had walked away from a prospective fling.

Never sleep with your pals

Some people might call this maturity but to be frank, it was something less noble and morally inclined. Men call it the fear of consequences. Purely sexual relationships are easy to start, but messy to untangle from. The smart and wise man, learns to contain his urges and comes to appreciate that you cannot get it on with every woman who claims to be ‘into you’.

The unwritten rule is, don’t sleep with your friends no matter how enticing it seems. In the game of casual sex, there is no such thing as a free lunch or as men falsely believe, mutually agreeable rules of engagement. In an ideal world, open relationships and friends with benefits would thrive, but sexual relationships eventually drag in emotional baggage and repressed insecurities rise to the surface as the novelty of variety quickly dies out.

Most of the time, the performance anxiety is so overwhelming, it is not even worth the trouble of satisfying one curiosity. It is a well-known fact that men and women think differently, even though several women still remain in denial. Men compartmentalise sex and love (read loyalty).

Many have no illusion of deriving earth-shattering sex from the women they eventually get married to. Female-oriented magazines dish out all manner of strategies for getting your groove on and spicing up your sex life, but more often than not, familiarity breeds boredom and sex in a relationship eventually functions purely as a stress reliever and a conjugal duty.

The search for a woman who is a ‘lady in public but a whore in the bedroom’ is in due course put to rest. Married men reason that long-term lovers compensate for their lack of enthusiasm or skill in bed in several other ways and it would be short-sighted to rest an entire relationship on past thrills.

Men also turn down sex

One thing that puzzles many women, single and attached, is the otherwise virile-looking man who appears disinterested in sex. Given that women generally have the disproportionate privilege of turning down sexual offers, at least in the prime of their lives, it is confusing when a man you are clearly interested in seems to feign ignorance of your intentions.

Women and excuses

Among married couples, it is only women who can play the headache card. “Sorry babes, it is that time of the month” and the randy husband has to suck it up and wait until the phase passes. A woman can get away with claiming a diminished sex drive and the accusing finger will be pointed at the man. He is obviously not taking care of business.

In popular media, men are portrayed as a ‘gas burners’ and women, ‘ovens’. While a man is always ready for a romp, a woman has to be serenaded and coaxed into the mood for lovemaking. While the twerking generation may be rewriting that script, entire courtship rituals have been written on this premise and women are generally socialised to treat sex as a gift reserved for the man who passes the test of chivalry.

Therefore, when the shoe is on the other foot, the woman who made the first move deals with the rejection rather personally. While men, by virtue of experience are used to pleading and let downs, most women find it had to stomach a refusal from a man they offered ‘the goods’.

Any man who is not interested in sex when his woman desires it will be held suspect and a litany of accusations will follow. Either, he has something going on the side (considered guilty until proven innocent), suffers from erectile dysfunction (not manly enough) or he is on the down low (a closet pervert).

The contemporary woman’s approach to sex is often fantasy-ridden. She may have claimed her body from the ‘oppressive male’ but she still expects him to ignite her inner fires on cue. All a woman has to do is offer herself and the man has to make a good account of himself or they won’t be any second chances.

These misinformed expectations eventually wear a man down and sex gets relegated to a chore. Sex stops living up to its great expectations and male frigidity sets in. If there is one thing that feminism must be credited for, it is for freeing men from socially-sanctioned masculinity ideals. Don’t believe the hype. Sex is great but it is not the end all of a man’s existence.