Warning in advance this is going to be an extremely long post.

I grew up in a household with a father that was extremely dominant and a mother that was extremely submissive. Obviously I don’t have insight into their sexual practices, but I do think observing them in their everyday lives did to some extent shape my views on how a sexual relationship should function. I also started watching porn at a young age - and was immediately drawn to/turned on by the male’s pleasure being the only focus of sex. This may be a weird introduction to a post, but I provide it in order to give a bit of explanation as to how I ended up like I did.

Another piece of information that’s important to know is that I have an extremely small penis. That’s something I wasn’t able to admit for most of my life, but can now. I won’t say the size, but I will say it’s about as small as a man can possibly be without being diagnosed with a micropenis. In my late teen/very early 20 years I had a series of very unsuccessful sexual encounters with women (mainly due to my size and also an issue I have with premature ejaculation). A couple of women in particular were very cruel about my issues, and I would say these experiences furthered my views that a sexual relationship is not a partnership, but a power struggle in which each party is attempting to get the upper hand. I know that sounds ridiculous to say, but people develop ridiculous views on topics and I’m trying to be as honest as possible about mine.

My wife grew up in a similar household to mine and developed similar views on male led relationships. We met when I was 22 and she was 18 and we hit it off instantly. She was a virgin with basically no sexual experience at all, including foreplay. Shortly into our relationship she got pregnant, and being crazy kids we decided to get married. Two years later we had our second child, both daughters.

We’ve been married for close to 20 years now, I’m 42 and she’s 38. We have one daughter that’s now off to college and our second will be heading there next year. I’ve always been fairly good looking but my wife has grown up into an absolute 10 out of 10. To be fair, she was probably a 9 out of 10 when we met, but she didn’t realize it. She is out of my league in basically every way.

Over the years I think I’ve been a very good husband in all non-sexual ways. I now understand that for the majority of our marriage I’ve been about as terrible as a person can possibly be sexually. I suppose I always must have known this at some level, but when you’re getting what you need from a situation and nobody else is complaining it becomes very easy to act like there’s no problem. Our sexual relationship has always been 100% completely about me. This is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever admitted, but until the last few years I had never given my wife an orgasm. There is plenty more to say on that topic but maybe I’ll leave it there for now.

About four years ago my wife met a group of female friends. She’d never really had close friends before. In high school she was shy and not overly popular, and then we met and she got pregnant. Through her 20s and early 30s she was consumed with motherhood and satisfying a very unreasonable husband. Anyway, this group of friends were unlike anyone my wife had met before. They were very open and talked candidly about their partners and sexual relationships. When they began to peel the onion away at my wife, me, and our relationship they were appalled (correctly so). My wife was also floored to learn about their partners - the penis sizes of their partners as well as how attentive each of them was to their wife’s sexual needs.

My wife kept this to herself for a period of time and things remained as they were. Eventually she couldn’t hold it in anymore and it came pouring out. I was extremely defensive and rude about it all. This then caused her to become rude as well.

A few days later once we had cooled down she brought it up again. This time we were able to talk about it in a slightly more diplomatic manner. This progression continued for a while until one night when we had a relationship altering discussion.

Things moved fairly quickly after that and what had been a male led relationship quickly became a female led relationship. She made it clear to me how she deserved to be treated and I started to be terrified of losing her. I started going down on her daily (sometimes more than once a day) - before then I’d only gone down on her a handful of times in our entire relationship. She stopped going down on me altogether and we essentially stopped having intercourse. She also said cruel things to me. I think she was processing the realization of how terrible I had been to her for the better part of two decades. One night she casually mentioned that in her friend group one of the women “had settled for a guy with 6” because he was so amazing in every other way, but the rest all had partners between 7” and 8” “ This was a rocky period for us and I generally didn’t react well to her comments.

Over time we started to meet somewhere in the middle. Not in terms of the type of relationship it was - it very much stayed (and still is) a female led relationship. But she started being kinder to me and I started to understand just how badly I had treated her sexually for so long.

Things stayed like that for quite a while, until one night she dropped the bombshell of wondering whether I’d be willing to consider an open relationship. That was about a month ago. We’ve had further conversations on the topic, but nothing has happened yet.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks very much for reading. I’m hoping to find an intelligent pen pal to talk some of this out with.