So my brilliant friend Auntie Gibbon graciously agreed to do a guest post! And this is it. Well, the part after this italicized bit. I hope this is the first of many (no pressure, though, I swear). Enjoy, everyone, for she is, like, velociraptor clever. -Q.P.
Before we begin, a caveat: this post pretty much only applies to long-term relationships that are, fundamentally, healthy and affectionate ones. Sexual intimacy often serves as a mine canary, in that enthusiastic participation in what is really the most direct form of intimacy is going to be the first and most emphatic death in a relationship that is being poisoned by mistrust, contempt, power and control issues, or outright abuse. None of this will apply to any relationship whose basic problems boil down to two people who no longer really even like each other, let alone love each other.
That said, once the endocrine glands have backed off from the hormonal surges of the first year or two of a relationship, a few more years after that have passed, the house has been bought, the lives have been entwined, the kids have been had (or not), two people who really do love each other can find themselves wondering how the hell their sex life dwindled to once or twice a month at best- if not more like once every two or three months.
“Science says” that the passionate rush of a relationship is doomed to die, and in terms of a blood test this is true; this is often brought up to allege that the death of sex in a long-term relationship is simply inevitable, or that humans aren’t really wired for long-term monogamy at all, and that people should either plan on lifelong serial monogamy, open the relationship (which is certainly a viable answer for some but not all), or plan to accept infrequent or nonexistent sex as the pure and simple cost of long-term loving companionship.
Yeah, the hormones do calm down over time. For awhile- the “new romance” rush, which can extend into the “oh my god this is the one” territory for two people who really get along well and ARE compatible- the urge to have sex is pretty much covered by sheer biology: you fuck because you lay eyes on your partner and more often than not, if you’ve the time and the privacy, that automatically seems like the best idea going. What changes over time as a relationship enters the long-haul territory isn’t the possibility of feeling passion and desire for the same person over that time, but for those feelings to be automatically generated and kept going by sheer hormonal imperative.
Timing
One of the things that inevitably happens to any couple over the long term is that their life together falls into routine. This is not actually a bad thing; the heart of a marriage (or other long-term relationship, insert whatever applies to you regardless of the terminology used) is the efficient joining of two lives into a single smoothly functioning unit, which benefits everybody, and which definitely involves routines. However, in the course of creating smooth and structured routines, it’s entirely possible that sex won’t have been penciled in anywhere in between waking up, making the coffee, breakfast, morning chit-chat and responsibility allocation, work, chores, hobby time, bed time, sleep, repeat. Once you fall into a routine where a relatively narrow selection of events is going to happen at the same times of day every day and are only modified by vacations, unless sex is within that box of possibilities for a particular time, you will rapidly find yourself having sex only on vacations or times when someone is in a wild-hair spontaneous sort of mood.
Given that wild-hair spontaneous sorts of moods are by their nature rare events, the solution is not so much for both of you to become the sort of person that wakes up and decides that they’d really rather go elephant-hunting or spend the afternoon learning how to walk a tightrope as it is to somehow work it into the set of the expected. Go to bed half an hour before you’re tired enough to be ready for sleep, wake up half an hour before you actually have to be at work, make room in your head for the possibility of fucking your spouse bent over the arm of the couch before you settle in with your sudoku for the evening as equal to the possibility of just going straight to the sudoku. (Obviously your partner needs to be on board with this idea, though it might be a great surprise you probably ought to catch them *before* they roll out the yoga mat.)
Just remember this: you do what you practice, you are what you do. This applies to getting a consistent good night’s sleep, it applies to any skill or activity, sex is not an exception just because your gonads were doing most of the work for you in years past.
If the thought of potentially having to schedule your sex is depressing to you, bear this in mind: even if you somehow fell into a wild and torrid affair with someone impossibly sexy who was not your partner, you’d still have to schedule your sex *and* it might ruin your life.
Treat it like other relaxing things you do for fun and think about it when you’re bored doing obligatory things. If you put half as much effort into planning and refining what you’ll do in bed as you might to what you do on the squash court, D&D table, or with your knitting, you’ll probably wind up ahead of most of us.
Of course it’s not nearly this simple for most of us, but it IS the simplest thing with the biggest potential effect if no other major factors are at play.
Mismatched drives
That sounds like the title of an agony aunt column, but the fact is mismatched drives are probably the reality for the vast majority of couples. While the outliers with one partner who’d like it twice a day and one partner* who thinks once a month is a nice regular schedule are obviously the unhappiest, over time a difference even between one partner who’d like it three or four times a week and another partner who’d like it once or twice a week can get pretty magnified, and the contrast can drive dynamics that steadily make what was initially a non-problem into a fairly large one.
Speaking of routines and doing what we practice, the way this can and often does play out is like this: the partner with more drive always initiates sex, and is rejected as often as not if not significantly more often than not. The partner with less drive gets as much if not a little more sex than they want without ever having to initiate or risk rejection, but also feels pursued in ways they don’t want all if not most of the time, which makes them feel guarded and protective about their bodies and like more is constantly wanted of them- a private and intimate part of them- than they are able or willing to give. The pursuer feels ugly, pushy, and generally undesirable, experiences constant rejection from what they crave as much as an intimate emotional experience as physical relief, and also like they have to push to get their partner to give anything at all.
In this model, even when sex happens, nobody is having that much fun, which is a pretty goddamn sad thing to say about an activity that results in orgasm.
I don’t have a universal solution for mismatched drives, and a truly total one probably does not exist any more than a solution for mismatched heights does, but hopefully some of the rest of what I mean to address can help keep this kind of everyone-loses dynamic from reaching its full toxic potential.
I WILL say that for an individual who really seems to have no drive at all, this is a problem even if you are comfortable, unless you are in a relationship with someone equally low-torque: get yourself to a medical doctor first and have your thyroid and hormone levels checked, and to a therapist if those are clear. If you have no sex drive and NEVER had one and this just seems to be part of your makeup, that’s okay, but you’re probably better off not in a relationship with someone who has one. If it was there and is now gone- doctor time. If it was your energy level or appetite, you’d be alarmed, right? Basic biological needs vanishing is a reason to be medically concerned.
Do You Wanna Touch Me There- or anywhere?
Don’t let basic physical touch fade out of your relationship- it’s a good deal more important than you may think. While there is plenty of debate, often very silly debate, about what the sex lives of apes imply for the “natural” sexual drives and patterns of humans, what’s not debatable is that affectionate physical touch is the basic glue of social bonds for all primates. Old World and New, apes and monkeys and hominids, they all reinforce friendships, kinships, and bonds with preferred mating partners by touch- hugging, grooming, kissing, petting, whatever suits the species and the relationship.
To put it in brief: if you hug and kiss and cuddle your kids more often than your partner, this is a problem.
One of the things that can help to kill touch in a relationship is the above set dynamic of Pursued and Pursuer. Pursuer loves to touch their partner and it makes them feel sexual, because that need for all kinds of intimacy is feeling a bit gnawing. Pursued may not mind being touched but does stress like hell over the feeling of being constantly rejecting, so they learn to dodge and deflect all touch in case it goes to that place that makes both of them miserable- affectionate touch slowly becomes equivalent to an invitation to sex for both of them, and therefore something to avoid unless ready for rejection for Pursuer and something to avoid unless already and actually in the mood for sex for Pursued. No fun, and there goes simple warm kissing and hugging and cuddling, which would probably make both of them feel better.
Speaking of we do what we practice, and we become what we do: in this scenario, first sex and then most touch outside the more formalized gestures become primarily emotionally associated with stress and conflict rather than with pleasure, intimacy, and relaxation.
Play With Me
Couples don’t need to do everything together, and having separate hobbies and worlds outside the relationship can be vital in maintaining separate identities beyond the relationship- but try to make sure that, somewhere in there, you still make a regular habit of playing together in some form. Play board games, play some friendly sport, play video games, play dress-up or patty-cake, it doesn’t matter, just find some way to maintain that bond of mutual silliness and experimentation. Serious charged passionate sex is great, but given that it involves sticking an engorged body part into a wet hole while everything jiggles and everyone is somehow greased, if you can’t laugh and lose your dignity with your partner your sex life is probably doomed.
Remember this is supposed to be fun. Get some washable markers and condoms and stage a home production of Godzilla vs Mothra. Buy a slip-n-slide for the hall. Play two-person strip poker and do a shot and lose a piece of clothing when you lose a hand. Get some washable bath crayons and mark Highest Achieved Ejaculation on the shower wall. Did you know that if you keep up with your kegels, you can turn the human vagina into a fun bathtime water gun? Do you even know how hilarious most porns are when given the Mystery Science Theater treatment? Did you know you can still get off afterward but this time you’ll have someone to do it with instead of that humorless bastard Mr. Lefty?
Or don’t go quite that far if you can’t face the maid the next day, but work actively to preserve mutual play in your relationship, and extend it to the bedroom when and where you can. It’s easier to relax enough to be sexy when you can laugh about it. If part of the problem is stress, regardless of whether or not the source of the stress has anything to do with your relationship, being able to relax naked with your partner becomes really important. Likewise, being able to easily play sexually is a lot easier if you’re already in practice playing together nonsexually.
Talk to Me
Yes, yes, yes, it’s not news; communication is vital to maintaining a healthy relationship. This does not mean that you should tell your partner absolutely everything that crosses your mind, and it definitely doesn’t mean you need to approach every rocky moment with a profound and lengthy analysis with what’s wrong with your relationship, especially because often what caused the rocky moment could be mostly solved with a sandwich and a beer.
If, after quiet and mostly unemotional analysis, preferably bounced off your most pragmatic and reasonable friend, you feel you have identified a Relationship Issue That Needs Addressing, then absolutely you should find a good time and place to bring that up and talk it out. What I’m talking about, however, is much simpler, which is simply saying aloud what you may be thinking and you probably already think your partner knows or should know but doesn’t necessarily, or doesn’t really know in their heart.
You probably already know that when you’re in a black, pissy mood you should let your partner know that the reason for your anger is nothing to do with them, because being the nearest available intimate and feeling your anger quite keenly, they will worry that it is or get defensive because they think it is and they did nothing wrong. Likewise, if your sex drive is in the toilet or you just don’t feel like having sex even though your partner’s been really super nice and is obviously hopeful, you need to let them know that it’s not all or even mostly about them. If it IS, in fact, all about them, then obviously you need to address that, but otherwise it’s important for them to understand it’s not about you rejecting them as undesirable.
Think about how your sexual dynamic must affect your partner. I don’t mean you beast, why can’t you keep your hands to yourself and give your poor partner some peace, or you heartless refrigerator, why can’t you just have more sex, I mean think about what their position must feel like and how it might suck for them as opposed to how your position sucks for you. Pursued may feel like a piece of meat or that they must protect their body and therefore it’s not fully theirs around their partner; Pursuer may feel totally rejected and frozen out; neither one is a fair assessment of their partner’s actual intent to make them feel. This is especially important when it comes to gender dynamics, because men and women often internalize messages about how the opposite sex sees them that aren’t really true, especially in a long-term intimate relationship.
It may seem odd that a man can be fully convinced his wife doesn’t find his dick attractive or exciting even while she’s gobbling it like a Klondike bar because women don’t get excited about men and she must be doing it out of love or because she’s looking to get something out of it, or that a woman can be convinced her partner sees her as a fat, plain-featured cow even while he’s doing everything he can just to have sex with her and he must be doing it because men just want a wet hole to stick it in at the end of the day even if its owner is an ugly hog no one could ever beat off to… but neither scenario is even remotely uncommon. They need to hear otherwise, and you need to mean it.
Likewise, despite its being something we’re bizarrely trained not to do even though long-term relationships are what we’re told we should strive for in order to legitimize our sexual feelings, it would help the both of you out to really talk about your sexuality and what turns you on and why. Employ alcohol if you need to- if ever there were a positive use for something that lowers inhibitions, this is it right here. The goal here is not to find fantasies to act out together, though that can sometimes be a fun side bonus, it’s to get a good idea of how your partner really thinks about sex and most importantly about themselves in terms of sex instead of what you project onto them without that information.
No judging allowed. If it turns out your partner’s into kiddie porn or the non-fantasy kind of rape, then okay, you have my permission to judge, but if you want to have sex and you want your weird little self indulged, you need to take it calmly and lovingly when you find out they’re into feet or piss or Bill O’Reilly. You don’t have to participate, you just have to be okay with the existence of their desires and their roots rather than punishing your partner for being sexually open with you. Hell, if you’ve got play and not taking yourselves seriously down pat already, you can even laugh as long as it’s the “with” kind. Being his loofah might even turn out to be kind of fun; there’s a *lot* of hotness value in seeing your partner really, seriously, uncontrollably turned on and more to the point really, seriously being thrilled to death to be able to share that with you.
Long story short (too late): One of the major upsides of a long-term relationship over a series of hormone-fueled flings is being able to really share all of yourself, including your naked embarrassing silly sexuality, without fear. Don’t miss out because talking’s awkward.
You For You
This actually leads up into what I feel is the heart of the whole issue, and what makes the difference between a long-term relationship that continues right on past the inflated hormones into long-term happy fucking and mutual adoration and a long-term relationship that has nothing really wrong with it other than everyone is quietly alone inside their own heads and most certainly alone in their pants.
Here’s a secret: the hormones are a distraction, something you can measure with a blood test but not really the biggest difference between a partner you’ve been fucking like a mad rabbit for six months and a partner you’ve been with for fifteen years that you fuck maybe once a month.
The person you’ve been with for years is someone you are convinced is a person you’ve built up a whole self and identity with and they can’t be fooled about it. The person you’ve known six months is someone you can be someone other than that self with. And! This is the key bit- if the self you feel you really are, the one very probably in that long-term relationship, is someone you feel is unattractive, boring, not very passionate or sexual, or otherwise not the kind of person that fucks someone over the arm of the couch instead of sudoku- you can pretend to be a wildly sexy person with someone newer, and you can feel you’ve gotten away with it. And your hormones will help!
Once you’ve been with someone long enough and your hormones aren’t driving you to inspired new heights, if you really feel you’re unattractive or unsexy, you will also feel that your partner, who knows everything else about you including your issues, your insecurities, and the fact that you get gas if you eat lentils, also must know this. And then, even if you want sex- you may not want sex with them, or may not want it very often, because it’s very tough not to be who you feel you really are around them, which is an unsexy person they’re not attracted to. And because we do what we practice and we become what we do… you become that person that doesn’t have sex unless they’re somewhere or with someone they can pretend to be the kind of person that does. (At which point you will become the kind of person that has sex- behind their partner’s back and with people they have little real connection to.)
It may turn out that, with self-knowledge and honesty, you actually *aren’t* attracted to your partner anymore if you ever were, or the reverse case, or that you’re actually gay, or that enough critical pieces have died in the meantime that the relationship is not resurrectable… but without it, you’ll never find out one way or the other, and you still won’t be getting any.
Push Me, Pull You
What about Pursued and Pursuer? Given that they’re the base of billions in therapy and self-help books and I keep bringing them up as an example of how the dynamic can set itself and reinforce itself, it seems a little unfinished to just leave them chasing each other in a circle to exhaustion.
Pursued may learn to not automatically say no to any touch or intimacy and to sometimes give Pursuer a chance to try and get them in the mood- but only if Pursuer can also learn never to whine or beg or guilt-trip if the answer turns out to be no in the end anyway, because the only way Pursued will ever relax into intimacy is if they don’t feel they have to give their body up just because they feel a little good and a little close.
Pursuer may learn to stand still and let Pursued approach and initiate- but only if Pursued makes a serious effort to learn how to enter this mindset in the first place and be sexually ready and aggressive, which they’ve possibly never had to actually learn to do in their lives. If Pursued is the sort who simply doesn’t think about sex most of the time unless someone is nibbling their neck, they need to develop that habit through practice as well.
Pursuer needs to tell Pursued how much they want the connection with their partner more than just the physical release and that’s why they don’t just go away and masturbate- and then never make a lie of this by acting as though sex were something Pursued would just “give” if they were only kinder rather than a completely shared experience with their body. Pursued needs to tell Pursuer that Pursuer is attractive and loving and kind and everything Pursued loves, and a rejection of sex is not a rejection of them- and then never make a lie of this by coming up with constant obvious bullshit excuses or being constantly distant in other ways.
Be kind, be honest, know yourself, actively work to create new or better habits, and take your partner for who they are rather than who you imagine a partner to be, and yourself for who you are to them as well as who you’ve convinced yourself you are, and you will have happy sex within a long-term relationship until your bodies give out.
Given all this, perhaps it’s not a surprise how many of us rely on hormones.
*Obviously the cultural trope is that men want it more and women want it less, and indeed I’ve known many couples and individuals for whom this is true. I’ve also known some women profoundly depressed because they wanted more and their male partners wanted less, up to the extreme of him wanting none at all, and although I’ve never encountered a man who would admit to being in this position, I’ve met enough of their wives, girlfriends, and exes to know they must exist.
