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I have sat across my medical desk from thousands of women over 30 years of practice. I have heard the same sentence in different ways: *he went elsewhere and somehow I felt like I owed him. *
There is a moment when sex stops being sex and turns into a debt that the husband thinks he is owed. It’s not usually because a marriage hits a dry season, or even because hormones or bodies change, though those are important factors.
Instead, it’s when the message, spoken or unspoken, becomes… you owe me.
Ewww.
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I was taught, the way most women are taught:* love gets proven through willingness: how much you give, how rarely you refuse, how available you stay.
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What I know now: *Willingness with a price tag isn’t love. It’s more like a toll booth. I believe a yes that costs you something to withhold was never truly a yes, a whole-body yes.
I know this terrain from the other side of the desk. I have had patient after patient describe the same arc. Sex became something she was supposed to provide. When she didn’t, he went elsewhere, to an affair, to a stranger, to whatever made him feel entitled again.
The logic she carried out of that marriage is devastatingly simple: if she had given him what he wanted, maybe he wouldn’t have needed to go elsewhere. That logic is a distortion every time I hear it. His choices were his choices and her body was never responsible for preventing them.
Here is how an erotic field gets contaminated. Initially it’s through consequence. Say no and he withdraws. Say no and he’s furious. Say no and he cheats, or reminds you how long it’s been, or makes you responsible for his frustration. Technically, no is allowed. It just costs you. And your body learns that equation long before your conscious mind can name it.
That is not freely given intimacy, and your nervous system knows it. I believe it’s important to distinguish between giving freely and giving from guilt, fear, or coercion.
Sexual intimacy runs on the same distinction. Desire needs freedom. Consent needs the real possibility of refusal, without punishment. The moment refusal carries a cost, spoken or implied, the erotic field changes. Sex can still happen. Orgasm can still happen. A marriage can run for years on this arrangement. But the sacred part is gone. The woman is no longer fully inside her own desire. Part of her is managing the fallout of having said no.
There’s a canyon between I want you and you owe me. Wanting sees the other person. It tolerates uncertainty and allows for an answer you don’t control. Owing turns a partner into a debtor, and converts intimacy into an invoice. It tries to make your refusal a moral failure.
Most women get trained for this economy well outside the bedroom. We’re taught we owe pleasantness, caregiving, endless emotional regulation, gratitude, beauty, one more try at the marriage, the version of ourselves that asks for the least. Eventually a woman can get so fused with giving that nobody around her, including her, notices when generosity has quietly turned into extraction.
**Bottom line: **if refusing costs you something, it isn’t consent. It’s compliance and it comes with a price that involves self abandonment.
Sometimes the body knows before the mind does. Disgust shows up, and women are trained to distrust it: soften it, investigate it, forgive faster, examine your own contribution. Sometimes that’s wise. Sometimes disgust is just accurate data. It’s the nervous system saying I do not want this inside me anymore, faster than the intellect can build a case for it.
I spent years afraid of my own disgust. I assumed it meant something was broken in my sexuality. I’ve since come to think it meant something was working exactly right in my perception. Your body is not the unreliable narrator here, it can be more reliable than your mind.
The question most women bring me, eventually, is how do I get him to understand. How do I explain this better, communicate more skillfully, repair this.
Sometimes those are the right questions.
Eventually a different one arrives: Who has jurisdiction here. Who gets access to your body, your time, your care. Who decides what you owe. Who gets to define family, and who gets to stay in the house.
Some relational problems need better communication. Others need better boundaries.
What stays with me most isn’t any single patient’s story. It’s watching the pattern show up again in her daughter, the same equation, inherited before anyone sat the girl down and explained it to her. That’s why the work isn’t only about freeing ourselves anymore. It’s about stopping the logic of indebtedness before it travels into another generation of women.
We can teach our daughters something different: love doesn’t require self-erasure. Care isn’t consent. Marriage doesn’t create sexual ownership. Motherhood doesn’t cancel your boundaries. Generosity isn’t a lifetime promissory note. And family isn’t just people connected by blood or law. It’s a place where everyone stays a subject, where nobody has to surrender sovereignty to belong, and nobody has to pay for saying no.
**Bottom line: **the deeper repair on offer here isn’t getting better at describing what you want. It’s learning to catch the exact moment wanting gets replaced by owing. The erotic body always knows the difference, and once she knows it, she cannot unknow it.
Sure, you can owe money and it’s clean, no submission or self abandonment. You stay in place as the steward of your body. Your capacity to love, nourish, mother, partner, and give does not grant anyone the right to take.
You can love without debt.
Eager to hear your reflections and what you notice reading this pose.
xo, Dr. Sara
