mkvvvv7 Is It OK That I’m Withholding Sex Until My Husband Sorts Out His Invoices?

This is the third installment in a series for this column, answering readers’ thorniest questions about sex and love as part of a special magazine issue on relationships.

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My husband of four decades runs his own business. When I retired three years ago, I discovered significant billing issues behind our sporadic ‘‘cash-flow problems,’’ and set to work organizing his accounting and creating invoices. While he submitted many invoices, he refused to bill his largest customer — one whom I overheard joking that my husband must be rich because he never receives bills from him.

When my husband wouldn’t submit these invoices, I warned him I would deliver them myself. I did, but he called the company the next day and told them not to pay. That was two years ago, and the customer still owes over $80,000 for work done in 2020.

I’ve tried explaining how betrayed I feel discovering he was running his business with our household funds, and I’ve suggested both accounting help and personal counseling. Last year, at wit’s end, I cut off sexual relations with him until he delivered the 2020 invoices,66br.com thinking that would motivate him. We’re still at an impasse a year later. My husband says I’m being cruel (and I would like our sexual relations to resume, too), but I find it hard to believe he hasn’t taken action. Am I being unreasonable? — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

A married couple is economically interconnected — when one falls into debt, the other is affected. So your husband’s business is your business. He has failed in his responsibilities to you. Now, maybe there’s something about his relationship with his indebted client you don’t know about. Is the guy a crime boss? Or is the guy (who notably hasn’t tried to pay up) such a hard-luck case that your husband feels bad for him? I can imagine all sorts of client-specific explanations for why your husband hasn’t sent him an invoice. If there’s more going on than you’ve been told, there’s a failure of candor here. Your husband would be keeping something from you. But the fact that he’s generally failed to keep current with his invoicing points to a psychological issue.

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That initial encounter ended with the man, Derrell Mickles, going out through the turnstile while holding what appears to be an open folding knife in his right hand while the officers follow him at a short distance, the video shows. A second encounter that began about 10 minutes later ended with Mr. Mickles, an officer and the two bystanders wounded.

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