Why Has My Sex Drive Disappeared?
A loss of sexual desire can be difficult to explain, especially when nothing obvious appears to have changed.
You may still love your partner. You may find them attractive. The relationship may be affectionate and stable. Yet when sex is suggested, something in you withdraws. You feel tired, irritated, pressured or simply absent from the moment.
For some people, desire fades gradually. Sex becomes less frequent, then stops being spoken about. For others, the change feels sudden. They can remember a time when desire came easily and cannot understand where it went.
The question is often framed as a search for a missing drive. Where did it go? How can I get it back?
Those are understandable questions. They can also lead someone to treat desire as another bodily function that should perform reliably when called upon. Sexual desire rarely responds well to being ordered back into place.
Desire does not always follow love
It can be unsettling to discover that love and sexual desire do not move together.
You can care deeply for someone and have little desire for sex with them. You can also feel desire in situations where love, trust or compatibility are absent. This does not necessarily mean that a relationship is failing.
Love often seeks closeness, reassurance and a sense of being known. Desire can be stirred by something less settled. It may depend upon distance, uncertainty, privacy, imagination or the feeling that the other person cannot be fully possessed.
Long-term relationships naturally create familiarity. You know how your partner takes their tea, what irritates them, how they sleep and what they are likely to say next. This familiarity can be comforting. It may also change the conditions in which desire once emerged.
The task is not to manufacture distance for its own sake. It may be useful, however, to ask whether each person still has room to exist beyond their familiar role in the relationship.
Are you still encountered as a lover, or mainly as a parent, provider, organiser, carer or housemate?
What was happening when desire began to fade?
When people say that their sex drive has disappeared, they often search first for a physical cause. Physical health matters and should not be overlooked. Hormonal changes, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, pain, exhaustion and certain medications can all affect sexual desire.
There may also be something to learn from the timing.
Did desire change after the birth of a child? After moving in together? Following an affair, a bereavement or a period of illness? Did it disappear when sex became connected to fertility, conception or the pressure to become pregnant?
Perhaps the change followed a promotion, redundancy or financial difficulty. Maybe one partner became more dependent upon the other. Perhaps resentment has been building around childcare, money, housework or emotional responsibility.
A symptom sometimes says something before a person has found the words to say it themselves.
This does not mean that a loss of desire is deliberate. Someone may sincerely want to want sex. Yet another part of them may experience sex as exposing, demanding or unsafe. Their body may hesitate where their conscious intentions do not.
When sex begins to feel like a demand
Desire can become quieter when sex is experienced as an obligation.
This may happen without either partner making an explicit demand. A disappointed look, a familiar silence or the fear of causing hurt can be enough. Someone begins to feel that they should want sex because it has been a while, because their partner has been patient or because a healthy relationship is supposedly meant to include a certain amount of sex.
The person may agree, but no longer feel present.
Over time, sex can become organised around avoiding consequences. One person initiates carefully, already expecting rejection. The other senses the expectation and feels watched. Both become increasingly alert to what the encounter means.
Will refusal cause an argument?
Will agreeing create an expectation for next week?
Will losing an erection be interpreted as a lack of attraction?
Will difficulty becoming aroused confirm that something is wrong with the relationship?
At that point, sex is carrying far more than physical intimacy. It has become loaded with meaning; a test of love, attractiveness, masculinity, femininity, loyalty or the future of the relationship.
It is difficult for sexual desire to move freely while it is being pressured.
The pressure to perform
Performance anxiety is often associated with erections, but it can shape anyone’s sexual experience.
A person may monitor whether they are sufficiently aroused, whether their body is responding properly and whether their partner appears satisfied. They are physically present while also observing themselves from ‘outside.’
Sex then feels less like an encounter and more like a task being assessed.
This can create a painful cycle. A single experience of losing arousal or struggling to orgasm becomes something to anticipate the next time. The fear of repetition makes repetition more likely. Eventually, avoiding sex may feel safer than risking another experience of embarrassment or failure.
The disappearance of desire can offer protection from this anxiety. When you do not want sex, you do not have to discover whether you can satisfy yourself or your partner.
Psychosexual therapy can help by listening to what failure would mean to a particular person. The fear is rarely confined to the mechanics of sex. It may touch older questions about adequacy, desirability, self-worth, control or humiliation.
Being wanted can also be uncomfortable
People commonly assume that everyone wants to feel desired. In reality, another person’s desire can be complicated.
Being wanted may feel flattering, but it can also create unease. It places you in a position within someone else’s imagination. You may begin to wonder what they see in you, what they expect and whether you can continue to be what they want.
For someone who has felt intruded upon, objectified or controlled in the past, sexual attention may bring a sense of danger even within a caring relationship.
For another person, being desired may create a fear of disappointing the other. They may feel that they have been given a role to play and that their own uncertainty has no place within it.
A loss of desire can sometimes create distance from the question of what another person wants from you.
When domestic life changes the relationship
In Dublin, many couples are living with long working days, expensive childcare, limited space and very little time alone.
By the time the children are asleep, the kitchen is cleared and tomorrow has been organised, neither partner may feel much like a sexual being. They have spent the day being useful to employers, children, relatives and each other.
Exhaustion can take a real toll. So too the affect of being continuously useful and functional.
Desire often needs some space in which a person is not just performing a function for somebody else. This can be especially difficult after becoming a parent. Bodies, bedrooms and routines may no longer feel private. One partner may feel touched all day and unable to tolerate further physical contact. The other may experience the loss of sex as a loss of closeness and reassurance.
These experiences can easily become personal accusations.
“You never want me.”
“You only touch me when you want sex.”
“You do not see everything I am carrying.”
“You do not care that I feel rejected.”
The argument appears on the surface to be about frequency, but underneath it may be a struggle for recognition and care.
Resentment has a sexual life
Desire can survive disagreement, but it has more difficulty when resentment cannot be articulated.
A person may say that they have simply lost interest in sex. As therapy develops, it often becomes clear that they feel taken for granted, criticised or left alone with responsibilities. Perhaps they no longer trust their partner after a betrayal. Perhaps affection has become difficult because anger has never been acknowledged.
Sex may then become the place where an unresolved conflict appears.
Refusal can carry a message that has not been spoken elsewhere. Initiating sex can also become a demand for reassurance that the relationship is still intact.
Neither person may be fully aware of what is being communicated. This is one reason why simply scheduling more sex does not always resolve the problem. The practical arrangement may be sensible, while the difficulty that made sex disappear remains untouched.
Sexual desire may not have vanished completely
It can help to notice whether desire has disappeared everywhere or mainly within a particular context.
Do you still fantasise? Do you notice other people? Does desire appear when you are alone, on holiday or away from ordinary responsibilities? Can you feel it in dreams, memories or situations you would never act upon?
This is not a moral investigation. Fantasy does not provide a simple verdict on a relationship. It can, however, show that desire has a life beyond conscious preference.
People are sometimes disturbed by what appears in fantasy because it does not match the person they believe themselves to be. They may try to suppress it, correct it or replace it with something more acceptable.
Psychoanalytic therapy offers a place where fantasy can be spoken about without treating it as an intention or confession. The question is less about whether a fantasy is good or bad and more about the position the person occupies within it.
Are they wanted, watched, pursued, ignored, powerful, passive, exposed or free from responsibility?
The details can tell us something about the particular conditions under which desire becomes possible.
Can therapy bring desire back?
Sex therapy cannot promise to restore a previous level of sexual desire. It should not set a required amount of sex as the measure of success.
It can help someone speak more freely about what sex has come to mean.
That may involve grief about ageing or changes in the body. It may involve anger towards a partner, fear of dependence, shame, memories of earlier experiences or a difficulty tolerating another person’s desire.
For some people, sexual desire returns as pressure and anxiety lessen. For others, therapy makes it possible to acknowledge that their relationship to sex has changed. Sometimes a couple begins to speak more honestly about differences that had previously been managed through silence, avoidance or obligation.
Most importantly of all; the experience and meaning of sex is always singular for each person.
The aim is not to force sexual desire towards a socially approved outcome. It is to understand how desire has been organised in this person’s life, what has interrupted it and what place they have been asked to occupy in relation to others.
When to consider a medical assessment
A sudden or persistent change in sexual desire can have physical as well as psychological causes.
It is worth speaking with your GP when the change coincides with new medication, hormonal symptoms, pain during sex, erectile difficulties, vaginal dryness, significant fatigue, low mood or another change in physical health. Pregnancy, the postnatal period, menopause, ageing and some antidepressants or blood-pressure medicines may also affect libido.
Medical and psychological questions do not necessarily cancel each other out. A person can be affected by hormonal change and also by what that change means to them.
Clinical Reading:
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud
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Desire and its Interpretation: Seminar VI – Jacques Lacan
- On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Seminar XX – Jacques Lacan
Counselling
Eating Disorders & Body Dysmorphia