Hello wonderful people of Reddit. I’m not sure if I’m looking for validation or advice. Or both. Probably both. But also please tell me where I’m wrong or could be better.

Here’s the situation…

My wife and I have been married for 8 years and we have two kids. I’m 30 and she’s 28. When we were dating the physical infancy was amazing. We both come from very religious backgrounds and are still heavily involved in our church. So we never had sex while dating, but we basically got as close to the line as we could. Haha. She would initiate things, I would initiate things, and we both couldn’t keep our hands off of each other. Literally. She wanted to do things to me. I wanted to do things to her.

Thinking back now, our wedding night sex sucked because neither of us knew what we were doing. But the passion was there and we both wanted it. More importantly is that she wanted it.

That’s basically the last time we had real, non-duty, mutually engaged, passionate sex.

So here’s the situation now..

We don’t have a dead sex life. It’s just a ton of duty sex. The only time my wife initiates anything is like on holidays or my birthday. But again it feels like duty sex because you are “supposed” to have sex on Valentine’s Day or your anniversary or something like that. The other times I’m the one that has to start and I’ve tried everything.

I’ve tried hinting at things, but she doesn’t seem to take the hint.

I’ve tried asking directly for things. Almost every time it’s a “bad time.” But if I keep asking throughout the day she eventually will do something together.

I’ve tried starting with cuddling her or massaging her, but if that goes anywhere it’s duty sex again.

She doesn’t hate sex. She enjoys it when it’s happening (to clarify, she likes when she orgasms, she doesn’t seem to enjoy doing anything to me whereas I really enjoy doing things to her). She rarely ever wants sex, but once we are in there she enjoys her orgasms.

Here’s how the sex goes…

I always initiate (as described above). She will do things to me, but to me it feels like she is performing an obligation. She’s pretty vanilla (wasn’t that way when we were dating). Anything within her boundaries she will do, but again, it’s in an obligatory way.

She likes when I do things to her, but it doesn’t feel like she wants/needs it like when we were dating if that makes sense. I’m the one that initiates things to her and she just kind lays there and orgasms with basically no feedback or reciprocity going on. So even though I enjoy doing things to her I kind of feel like an object when that happens because I’m really not getting any feedback. We’ve talked about that so sometimes she gives some feedback, but it feels obligatory. I don’t need to like moan or whatever. I just want to feel like she wants it (and me!). Right now she enjoys it, but it doesn’t feel like she wants it. It’s like she could go without, but enjoys if it happens.

Whenever we’ve talked about things it kind of goes nowhere.

There are three different ways the talks go. First is that she acknowledges that I’m unhappy with our sex life and says she wants to be better, but she (and I) don’t know how to make things better. You can’t force a sex drive.

Sometimes talks don’t go well and I get things like “girls just don’t have a sex drive” or “non of our friends that are girls have a sex drive either.”

The third outcome is she tells me how I don’t fulfill any of her needs for physical touch that aren’t sexual (things like cuddling or holding hands or hugging). She’s right - I could be way better at those things and filling her needs. But I feel no desire to do that when she isn’t filling my needs. I don’t expect her to fill mine before I fill hers - just recognizing that we are a death spiral here where neither party is happy. I also don’t want transactional sex. Where I do cute romantic things in exchange for sex. I want mutual sex and she wants mutual romance. It’s tricky.

I’m wondering where things went wrong and how to fix them, because what I keep coming back to is things were great when we were dating. We were romantically into each other and physically intimate with each other (as much as we could be).

Any help or condolences would be appreciated. And please ask for clarification if that is helpful!