My husband and I have been married for five years and are having trouble with our sex life. From the beginning of our marriage (we only started having sex after marriage) I wanted sex more frequently than him. In the first year or so of marriage we’d have sex two to three times a week which I enjoyed, although sometimes hoped for more.
A few years into our marriage my husband had a very stressful time at work. Sex dropped to roughly once a week, typically on the weekends. He picked up running to help deal with the stress and really enjoyed it.
While I was happy for him, I also found it particularly difficult because he’d run five or six times a week, maybe for an hour or so each time, but when we tried to have sex he’d often have no energy and not be able to physically perform. I felt deprioritised, like he was putting work and running before me. Over a year we’d have sex maybe once or twice a month.
We have now stopped working and are enjoying a period of travel. I hoped that without work stress he would have more time and energy for intimacy, but it hasn’t been the case. He very rarely initiates, and when I initiate he’s often tired or finds it hard to perform. He still manages to run five or six times a week though.
We’ve spoken about it and he assures me he desires me, loves me, finds me attractive. However, I don’t feel that way. It feels like we’re good friends, but that the romantic and sexual side of our relationship is dead. I find myself feeling impatient and angry and sad, and often rejected. He’s said he will “try harder” but that makes me feel upset because it feels as if he’s having sex just to please me. I don’t want to make him feel like this is a task to attack, but I want to feel desired and cherished – what can we do?
Eleanor says: Often in a situation like this we move too quickly to asking how a couple can have more sex, instead of asking how to have more desire for sex. For that, I think it helps to start with a bigger question.
What is sex, to the two of you? Sometimes the problem is that two people see sex in radically different ways, so when one says they’d like more sex, the other doesn’t want more of that thing. But it sounds like maybe you both see sex the same way – and perhaps that’s part of the problem.
Look at the way sex is described in your letter; the cloud of associations around it. Running, energy, performance, whether he’s physically able to perform. Sex seems defined as something men can find themselves physically unable to perform at; something at which it’s possible to fail. The flipside is that for him, well, sex is something he might be physically unable to perform; something at which it’s possible to fail.
Great sex does not have to involve truckloads of cardio. And in my view, the only way you can fail to “perform” at sex is by being cluelessly indifferent to your partner’s pleasure. Lesbians tend to have more orgasmic sex than straight women, and there’s rarely an erection involved. The erotic is so much more than penetration and exertion. It is completely possible to be transcendent, free, joyous, together, spent, without doing any of things that running could possibly compromise. That might be what we really want anyway, when feeling cherished and desired is the goal: to find the erotic together.
If a person’s concept of “sex” bakes in something negative, shameful or evaluative, that will show up in how – and how much – they want it. If what sex is for them is “a site of expectations,” or “an artificiality”, or “something shameful”, “a place where I have to pretend” or “an opportunity to fail,” they will act differently around it than someone for whom sex is “uninhibitedness” or “discovery” or “a place to be vulnerable”. If you want sex – definitionally to you, a place to feel cherished and desired – and to him, sex is just as definitionally a test of performance, it’s no wonder you might differ in how much time you want to spend at it.
Could you perhaps try to find out about things like that lurking in his concept of sex? Remember it can be really hard to notice or share these things, because even admitting fears or insecurities can feel like “failing” in the dreaded way. The next step might be to ask how you could change the way sex is defined between you, so it stops meaning things that stand in the way of wanting it.
That might not be what’s happening, of course. People do just have different libidos, priorities, hormonal profiles, and you could always focus on having better sex instead of more. But sometimes how much we want sex is explained by how we conceptualise it.
I really like that your question was “what can we do?”. As you say, you don’t just want sex for yourself. You want sex you both desire: consuming, liberating, revealing. Igniting that desire might start with getting clear on – and changing – what “sex” means.
