Dear GoodTherapy.org,
Ever since my ex and I broke up a few years ago, my interest in sex has been declining. I have dated a few people since my breakup, but sex just isn’t the same. My libido isn’t what it was, and I just don’t feel “the need” the way I used to. While we were together, my ex and I had a consistently scorching-hot sex life. Sex was extremely important to me and a major source of connection. Now? Most of the time, I can take it or leave it.
Part of me wonders if this is more about getting older and less about something else. I’m 44 now, and I know it’s normal for a man’s libido to decrease over time. But it wasn’t so long ago I was having sex almost daily and it still didn’t feel like enough. The difference is pretty stark, to the point I regularly turn down sexual overtures in the dating world, even when it’s been a week or two. In fact, it’s been a source of discontent in the relationships I’ve tried to develop. I’m not used to being the one to turn down sex.
I don’t feel like attraction is the issue, and I masturbate about as frequently as I ever did. I have to think there is some sort of mental block that is getting in the way of my enjoyment of sex. Maybe my sexual triggers aren’t being triggered enough. Or maybe my needs are evolving and my body is taking the cue. I honestly have no idea, but I miss the old, sexual me.
What do you think is going on? —More Bothered Than Hot
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Dear Bothered,
Thanks for your question. Almost nothing is more personal than our sexuality and associated feelings and desires, so I appreciate your candidness.
Additionally, few aspects of our human being-ness are more complex than sexuality, so without more background I can only give a hunch as to what I think might be happening. I’ll try to be as honest as you were.
The short answer to the question “what is going on?” is: quite possibly a lot of things.
I hear what sounds like anxiety in your concern, maybe even an undertow of loss in missing “the old, sexual me.” Could it be you also miss the old sexual relationship? Your feelings of loss seem to sync up with the loss of your ex, which implies this relationship was of profound emotional importance in addition to being “scorching hot.” In fact, the scorching-hot experience is also powerfully emotional: passionate, spontaneous, wild, and playful. Sexuality is such an overwhelming experience because it involves all of us: body, mind, spirit, emotion, intimacy or closeness with another (relationality), and so on; hence its magnetic psychological force.
As to your specific issue, first I would seek a medical checkup, just to rule out any possible physiological causation.
Ruling out medical challenges, I would reflect upon just what it is you lost, in terms of emotional relatedness, when you lost this partner. I would assume, for instance, that they made it “safe” to be yourself, to let intimate aspects of yourself roam free. What made it so, as best you can guess?
As I read your question a second time, an idea occurs to me. You talk about sex as though it is a free-floating activity, almost as if having a partner is incidental to your sensual pleasure. But the more I study psychology, the more it seems to me that our existence is relational, very much bound with important others. Sigmund Freud himself often hypothesized that masturbation was a way to relieve the sexual attraction to a forbidden or incestuous other—a kind of furtive substitute for sexual longing. (Though it would take Carl Jung to expand the meaning of “connection” or fusion beyond the literal.)
I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that your loss in sex coincides with losing your ex. I’m curious what it is about this other person that created such powerful chemistry between you—and what led to the end of the relationship.
Ruling out medical challenges, I would reflect upon just what it is you lost, in terms of emotional relatedness, when you lost this partner. I would assume, for instance, that she or he made it “safe” to be yourself, to let intimate aspects of yourself roam free. What made it so, as best you can guess?
It is not unheard of that a couple will have a fiery relationship in the bedroom, but struggle to relate, empathize, or communicate. I’m thinking particularly of romantic experimentation where needs or desires are “sexualized” and satiated physically—nothing wrong with that—while unspoken emotional or psychological differences have yet to be addressed or worked through.
I often work with people who can express a strong, historically unmet need to be seen, valued, and respected only via sex or sexual role play, but not in more mundane daily interaction. In other words, the vulnerability is only physical or literal. Eventually, the relationship deteriorates if the emotional/psychological differences are not addressed. The work of the therapy is, often, in helping a person identify and articulate their needs, often difficult given highly critical or absent parents, though sticking with it often leads to more freedom and options in all of a person’s relational arenas.
Another way of putting it: sexual satisfaction can temporarily soothe an emotional anxiety or injury unexplored in the relationship, or a sense of frustration or estrangement, leading to only a fleeting sense of connection—which still does not address the relational friction.
The more I write and think about this, I’m tempted to say what’s happening here may best be described as growing pains. I believe it was the novelist Graham Greene who said that, as we age, companionship becomes more valuable than sex. This often begins to happen slowly as we creep into middle age.
In that regard, you sound right on schedule, though I know it can be unsettling, and even trigger feelings of grief and loss, if solitary sexual activity has been of consolation to you. Your current dilemma, then, could be facing a newfound vulnerability after losing a person who co-created a highly exciting chemistry. It is often the case we desire to share our existence with another more strongly than is consciously believed, whether it be primarily sexual or platonic or somewhere in between. This is often an uncomfortable or even painful adjustment—but not indicative of anything wrong with you. In fact, quite the contrary.
For men especially (though this certainly can apply to women, too), sexuality can come to represent, symbolize, or have personal meaning in many ways: as a means of finding freedom, fulfillment, and validation or a sense of being strongly valued and desired. The magical feeling of sex or romance can arise when we sense that our very being is desired by another, that this deep, profound desire is in sync with another’s desire for us.
This connection can feel transformative. It can loosen the grip of existential alienation or isolation so many of us struggle with, in an era of mostly technological connection. Some of the people I work with in therapy report feeling most “horny” or sexually hungry during or just after a period of grief.
Is it possible the situation is also difficult because your main means of consolation (sexuality, masturbation) is elusive, or less effective, in the aftermath of the breakup? That can be an unsettling realization, indeed, though by no means hopeless.
As we get older, we hopefully discover there is more to partnership than just the physical mechanics or hydraulics of sex. It sounds like you could really be yourself with this person, that you could both reciprocate and find exciting similarity of passion in the bedroom; what, I wonder, prevented this from happening outside the bedroom as well?
In other words, it sounds like you made a profound emotional/relational connection, which you deeply miss. One plus one equals three, meaning two people in deep connection create a third element: the relationship itself, in all of its maddening glory. You found unique chemistry with this person. How could it be the same on your own?
You could, if the relationship is irreparably over, ask yourself what qualities of this person you found so attractive, what it is that made them so special, especially in bed? What didn’t happen in the overall relationship that prevented it from continuing; can you look without heavy self-criticism at your participation here, your 50%, and see if anything can change to attract or keep the next person you’ll hopefully meet?
Perhaps the answer to the latter is emotional closeness, companionship, or friendship—and some deeper self-understanding, maybe even via counseling or therapy.
I can understand your painful sense of loss, bewilderment, anxiety, and even frustration at the dilemma you describe so honestly. At the same time, there is a chance to “make lemonade” by finding or seeking the succor of deeper human connection and self-awareness, with a new partner and/or others who can relate or identify with what you’re going through. It sounds like a kind of (pardon the cliché) midlife crisis, and this is not uncommon in the slightest.
I hope this gives you some food for thought, and I thank you again for your candor.
Best,
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