Help Requested: Marriage Sexual Chemistry

I’m new here, but seeking advice.

My wife and I have been married for two years, and we have such an amazing relationship. When we have sex, it’s fantastic, but there are a lot of ways we don’t really mesh because we both want and seek different things and have different ideas.

One issue is that she has a very low libido. She is only really aroused by physical touch. We used to sext at the beginning of our relationship when we both had high libidos. But once she became pregnant and her libido tanked, she has not liked sexting with me anymore. She wants sex to be spontaneous, but we have a newborn, so a lot of the times it feels like it needs to be planned out a little bit. The only other thing that I’ve gotten from her is that she would get aroused reading some fantasy. So I’ve encouraged her/us to read some books with some sexual content in hopes that it might help boost her a little bit. But with pregnancy and now the newborn stage, that’s been impossible. But it’s place where we can still make progress in the future.

When we got married, she didn’t want to masturbate anymore, as she wanted all of her sexual energy to go towards us. But I am a big enthusiast for her to masturbate. It’s my BIGGEST turn on. During the end of pregnancy, she did start to masturbate in the night to help her sleep. That time was the best for our sexual relationship because it boosted my libido through the roof. I know there are lots of benefits for masturbation, and when she does, it really helps us connect a lot more physically.

She stays home with our children and I know how stressful that can be. I would love for her to feel the desire to masturbate when I’m at work to help stress, or just to have some time to herself. I don’t force it on her, but I have always promoted it and encouraged her to be fully open with herself sexually. She manually stimulates herself a lot when we are being intimate, and she has no problem with that, as long as it never became an escape from sexual relations with each other, which it hasn’t.

From the beginning she has said no to me masturbating. She has always made sure I am taken care of, and wants me to ask her I want or need sexual attention. She is remarkable in that. And for the most part I’m okay with that. I don’t really want to touch myself most of the time anyways, and times when I am home and with her are the only times I’m really in the mood for anything. And of course I want to be doing things with her. But with the newborn taking so much out of us, we hit the bed and she often falls straight asleep. But many times, after some time cuddling, before I fall asleep, I get horny. But she’s only getting four-ish hours of sleep at night, and I feel bad waking her up to get me off. But that’s what she wants. At the same time, I want to be able to just do it myself really quickly, so I can let her sleep. And also so that I can get to sleep too.

There are occasional nights that I spend away from home because of work, and sometimes I am horny thinking of her, or just need help sleeping. But I don’t masturbate because I know it will upset her, and I have lost so much sleep because of it. When it comes to masturbation for both of us, I wish we could find a middle ground that is acceptable to her that doesn’t leave me feeling like I have to sacrifice so much.

I also enjoy bringing a lot of different ideas into the bedroom. For example, I introduced her to toys, which is something she didn’t really want at first, until she had her first orgasm with one. Now she loves it! When she masturbated a lot during pregnancy, she used toys. I also encouraged reading sexy novels, either together or separately. We experimented with some light BDSM, we tried a session of her being completely dominant, we played board games in a sexual manner, and the list goes on.

It hurts me a lot mentally that there’s nothing I do or anything about me that turns her on except when I’m physically touching her. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to find something that she would like that isn’t solely focused on me initiating sex through touching her. I still hope to find something that she likes outside of that one method. I just feel so much pressure on me to do everything a certain way that she wants. But I also have so many desires and things that I have to push to the side. I am hypersexual. I think about her sexually most of the day.

I’m in the process of looking for a sex therapist as well during this time, but I wanted advice from all of you too!