What to do if your partner wants more sex than you

When I first met this client - let’s call her Sasha - she felt guilty for not desiring sex as often as her husband. To her, sex felt like just another thing on her already long to-do list that she would have been content to forget about. However, she knew how important sex was to her higher-libido husband.

While it’s incredibly uncommon for libidos to match up perfectly throughout the full duration of a relationship, discrepancies in desire levels can still create many challenges for those involved.

The lower libido partner often fears being cheated on or broken up with due to the lack of sex in the relationship, while the higher libido partner can start to feel unloved or undesired after their advances are continually turned down.

This is what was occurring within Sasha’s relationship, and she’d come to me to seek help in restoring the stress-free and enjoyable state of her sex life, which had characterised the earlier stages of her marriage.

The first thing that I made sure she knew is that, regardless of how happy sex makes her husband, she never has to have it if she’s not fully on board.

The pressure that she was feeling to take responsibility for her husband’s sexual satisfaction even when she didn’t want sex herself was making sex feel like a chore. This was a perspective that we would need to rewrite if she was ever going to get the genuine enjoyment from it that her libido would need to thrive once more.

To do this, Sasha needed to reconsider the best ways to say ‘no’ to her husband while we did more behind-the-scenes work to reconnect her with her genuine desire for sex.

She had described that her current tactic for this was blunt, having done it so many times that she hardly thought about it now. So, we put together a few lines that she could say when she wasn’t in the mood that took into account how vulnerable attempting to initiate sex can be. They included reiterating that not wanting sex didn’t mean she didn’t love and desire her husband, along with suggestions of how they could compromise on something that met both of their needs.

Sasha also requested that her husband meet her in one of her love languages, words of affirmation.

She had been fearing that he would not want to stay in their marriage if they weren’t regularly having sex. To quell these concerns, she requested that he periodically remind her that he loved her regardless of what was happening in their sex life and that they were in this journey of sexual evolution together as a team.

This took more pressure off Sasha, which in turn creates space for turn-on and pleasure to grow.

As part of this discussion, they talked about their other preferred love languages and committed to incorporating more platonic physical touch into their relationship. They began to implement this on weekend mornings, when neither of them had to rush off to work and they had the luxury of being able to stay in bed and cuddle together.

Cuddling and kissing was something that had diminished within their relationship, as Sasha found herself avoiding it out of fear that her husband would want to go further than that. Now, she was able to communicate what her boundaries were ahead of time so that they could enjoy this time together. The physical closeness and lack of pressure even allowed Sasha to access her desire for sex on some of these mornings.

The tools of communication, compromise, and connection through various love languages helped alleviate tension from their relationship. This, combined with the efforts Sasha and I put into generating new foreplay ideas, enhancing her sense of safety during intimacy, and addressing past issues in the relationship, enabled the couple to rebuild a sex life they could once again take pride in.

*Originally published at Stuff.co.nz