I feel surprised by how much it’s taken the wind out of my sails and made me feel so sad and lonely
My husband and I have been married for 15 years and have two children and if you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said we were happy. But although we get on like a house on fire, he seems to have completely gone off sex and any kind of physical interaction with me. I’ve tried all the sexy seducing, and he still shows zero interest – and he won’t talk about it either. I feel surprised by how much it’s taken the wind out of my sails, and made me feel so sad and lonely. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong and I don’t know how to make it right. Please help.
– Deserted
Sex. That bottomless source of confusion, even when you are in what appears to be a solid relationship. Emilie remembers someone helpfully telling her something like ‘if you put a pound in a jar for every time you have sex in the first year of marriage and then take a pound out for every time you have sex, for the rest of your life, you will never empty it’. Thanks, helpful person. But, when you are bringing up children and when you’ve been in a relationship for a while, it is impossible to be as spontaneous and delirious as in the early days. You have to attack the sex scheduling with military precision – create a sexcel spreadsheet as it were. Not forgetting the way Covid forced everybody together all the time. All that proximity. Throw in a side of cost-of-living crisis, war, political uncertainty, floods. It’s no surprise that people’s sexual mojos are missing-in-action. It can be very lonely in relationships when this form of communication is switched off. So how to turn it back on?
Some might leap straight to the idea that he could be having an affair but we really don’t recommend this course of catastrophising. It’s alienating and accusatory and only one of a rich tapestry of possibilities. Think hard about what is going on his life. Is everything ok at work? How is his job security? Is he enjoying it? Does he feel validated? Has anything changed with him physically? Is he injured in some way and is therefore not exercising or in pain or not sleeping? Has there been a change in the dynamic of his wider family? Emilie has a friend whose husband lost interest in sex for a years after his father died. Another friend became totally consumed with work (he works in politics so there was a lot) and that’s where all his energies went. Is he obsessed with something or unusually anxious? Are the children happy? Hell, it could be climate change panic choking the engine of his sex drive.