Our Relationship Lost It’s Fire. How Do We Get The Spark Back?

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

I’ve read articles where one person or the other in a relationship has lost their interest in sex, but what happens when it’s both of you?

So, my husband and I have been together for close to twenty years now, including five as married partners. We’ve had our ups and downs, opened our relationship and closed it occasionally as needed, but we’ve always had a strong sexual connection with one another. This connection has weathered a lot of trials – when my father died suddenly from a stroke; when my husband lost his job; when we both had to pack our bags and move last minute to take care of his ailing parents while he still didn’t have a job; to my switching careers and his string of ill-fitting jobs before he found his current job that he loves. Through it all, we’ve always had that spark. It may not have been the sort of “can’t keep our hands off each other” the way it was when we were both horny 20-somethings, but it’s always been there, and it’s always been part of what’s kept our relationship strong.

Then the election happened, and things just seemed to taper off until it stopped completely. By the end of January, we hadn’t had sex in two months; not with each other, not with any outside partners and honestly, barely with ourselves. I haven’t had any interest in masturbating and my husband, likewise, hasn’t had so much as morning wood.

We’re both healthy, with recent physicals that tell us that everything’s ok on a hormonal level. Neither of us have had any major life changes or started new medications. I’m honestly unsure what else it could be, because it wasn’t like turning off a light, more like the way a faucet slows, drips and then stops. Except it doesn’t seem like we’re able to turn the faucet back on again. Neither of us currently has an outside partner and we’re not really interested in finding one and it’s not like we’re unhappy with each other. We still love and care for each other and can’t imagine life without each other. It just seems like we’ve hit a dead patch and we’re not sure what to do.

Do you have any advice to bring things back when both people in the relationship just aren’t feeling it?

Winter Doldrums

You know the famous quote from Sherlock Holmes, the one that goes “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”?

Well, the same thing applies here. You’ve eliminated the obvious possibilities – there hasn’t been any major life changes, you’re physically in good health, neither of you are interested in other people, and so on – and so it seems the most obvious answer is… well, you’re too depressed to fuck.

Here’s the thing about the human libido: it’s a weird, fickle little bastard that doesn’t seem to make a lick of goddamn sense in its response. A lot of the time, it has as much to do with what’s in your head as what’s in your pants. A lot of people who deal with a sudden or unexpected death, for example, find that they’re almost uncontrollably horny in the aftermath, at a time when they would be forgiven if sex was the last thing on their mind. For them, it’s like their sex drive is a part of their brain that’s lashing out against the unfairness of death; they respond to that loss with the ultimate rejection of mortality by being driven to the act of creating new life. Some people lose their libido during times of stress, like their body is reserving their energy for other tasks, while others become veritable satyrs, almost insatiable as orgasm serves as a release and reprieve from the tension. Some people don’t feel sexual desire unless they feel an emotional connection and some people lose desire when they start to catch feelings. So you can be forgiven for being confused when, after all the craziness that you’ve experienced didn’t make a dent in your libido, this is when it decides to crash.

And honestly, it’s understandable. This is a time of incredible upheaval, when the world feels like its on a tipping point, again. This is the sort of thing that tends to put people in survival mode, rather than thinking about banging. During the lockdowns, people used to joke that this was going to lead to a massive baby boom; after all, the world was suddenly stuck at home and the assumption was that we’d all start friggin’ in the riggin’ ‘cuz there was fuck-all else to do. Instead, there was a global decline in births in most of the developed world, and even subsequent surges have never returned the birth rate to the previous levels.  

Well, now the US is at a place where the most marginalized among us are at risk, where the strength of the Republic is being tested to the breaking point by people who seem determined to drive a bulldozer through all of it in the name of personal power and making billionaires just a little bit richer and fuck everyone else. It’s certainly possible – likely, even – that the sheer scope of the danger and uncertainty, to the economy, to the country and to the people has left the both of you in a place where sex isn’t the last thing on your mind because that would imply it was still on the list.

So what do you do about this? Well, I think the first thing is that you don’t want to psych yourself out about it. Our libidos can respond to our brains as much as it does to our limbic system, and starting to treat this like a permanent change or getting too deep in your heads about it is precisely the sort of thing that’s likely to keep you from feeling like setting the sheets on fire again. When you get caught up in the panic and keep it in the forefront of your mind, it can be a self-reinforcing cycle; you worry about how little sex you’re having, which tanks your libido, which makes you think about it constantly, which makes you worry. Making it front and center of your worries keeps your attention on the part you don’t want – the sex you’re not having. But trying to not think of it isn’t the answer either. It’s like trying to not think about Sabrina Carpenter riding Gritty in a pony-play outfit while singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins; the more effort you put into pushing it away means you can’t stop picturing it.   

(What can I say except “you’re welcome”…)

But here’s the other thing about libidos. One of the weird things is how often it tends to respond to the status quo. If you’re not having it, you tend to want it less; if you’re having a lot of it, you tend to want more. So sometimes the answer is to break the status quo and force the issue.

Now to be sure, that’s easy to say and hard to do when neither of you are feeling like getting busy. However, this is a good time to take a page from Dr. Emily Nagoski’s book and pay attention to what’s known as responsive desire; that is, desire that happens after sex is initiated, rather than getting horny and then initiating sex. Instead of waiting for desire to come back on its own, I would suggest seeing about whether you can summon it instead, like you’re trying to invoke Priapus and Eros.

I’m not suggesting that you two force the issue – whether with a few drinks, some edibles or some blue pills to make the erections happen. I don’t think trying to force arousal is going to be the right move; it’s more likely to reinforce the feeling of ‘well, this ain’t happening’. Instead, what I would suggest is that you schedule time for just the two of you; maybe this can be at home or maybe this can be at a romantic overnight somewhere. The important part is that you’re going to make time for the two of you that’s just about the two of you and the intimacy of your relationship. No internet, no distractions, just the two of you having time to yourselves that’s strictly for yourselves, with both of you strictly there in the now. You cuddle, you rub each other’s backs and feet, you engage in all the affectionate,  intimate physical contact of couples and just… relax. There’s no pressure to do anything except to simply enjoy the almost primordial pleasure of being in physical contact with another person. Give each other those hits of dopamine that come from skin-to-skin contact and just let the universe dissolve to just the two of you.

From there, you go where the mood leads you. Maybe you decide to make out a little, maybe you share a long hot bath, maybe you just decide to fall asleep in a two-person cuddle-puddle. The important thing is that you’ve stolen away this time from the world and shut everything out because this is just about you. You give yourselves permission to have sex if you feel so moved, but also to not do so if you don’t. Maybe you’ll decide to get things started even if you’re not necessarily in the mood. Maybe you’ll decide to just enjoy a moment of peace in your two-person cocoon away from the world. You may decide to try doing the little things that you know get a response from each other and see what happens. Or you may just decide that a night without thinking about sex and just being intimate is what you need.

Then, schedule another night. Again, it doesn’t need to be an elaborate date night, it just needs to be something you’ve carved out time for, that you can look forward to, when there are no other distractions or demands on your time or attention. Be physically close and intimate but otherwise without expectations and a “whatever happens, happens” attitude. I think you’ll be surprised at how much tension drains away, even if you don’t necessarily feel the familiar stirrings… and taking away that tension takes your foot off the brakes, as Nagoski suggests.

Yes, it may take a bit before your libidos return to where they were before, but these moments will help reinforce the connection you have to each other. The intimacy is as important as the orgasms and the moment of peace will be like a cool washcloth on a fevered brow. That, I think, will make it a lot more likely that you’ll feel the beginnings of a spark… with plenty of tinder left around for that spark to catch.

Good luck.

Dear Dr NerdLove,

So I used to be friends with this guy two years ago. We weren’t super close, but we were still friends. A year later, we didn’t have any classes together and sort of fell apart.

During this time, I may have developed a crush on him. Now this year, apparently, I’ve been kind of too obvious about it (according to my friend, who later asked him out for me. He said no) and has stopped texting me and talking to me.

Recently I apologized for potentially making things weird and asked if we could still be friends, to which he said yes

However, I feel like it’s not really going back to how it was before. I’m always the one starting the conversation, and he replies quickly but just stops talking to end the conversation. I still might have a crush on him, but mostly just want to be friends. We have the same music taste, which I can almost never find in people my age, so I think we should be good friends.

Why does he not want to talk to me, and how can I make things better between us?

Bring It Back

I wish you said how old you all are, BIB, because I’ve got questions, starting with “why did you send your friend to ask him out for you?” That seems like an almost painfully middle-school thing to do; I don’t think that would be a deal breaker, but I could certainly see it being a weird moment if you all are college age or older…

Anyway, the issue here is that you’re asking me the wrong question. I have no idea what’s going on in his head, seeing as I’m not him, so I can’t really tell you why he doesn’t want to talk to you. There’re just far too many possibilities and not enough information to make even an educated guess.

It’s possible, for example, that he feels weird knowing that you had a crush on him and had the same response a lot of people have when they think someone’s friendship was a pretense to get close. Or he could be worried that by being overly friendly, he’s inadvertently leading you on or giving you hope where there isn’t any and he doesn’t want to be cruel. There’s every chance that he’s got a lot going on in his life and simply doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to be as responsive or as involved with your friendship as he might have been when you still had classes together. Or it’s possible that you overestimated the level of friendship you had and while you considered him a close friend, he didn’t necessarily see you the same way.

It’s also possible that it’s as simple as the fact that you’re not in class together anymore. Not every friendship is meant to last forever, and many are as much about circumstance as they are about personal connections. Some friendships are a little like skateboard on a flat street; it rolls easily as long as someone is propelling it forward, but without that outside force acting on it, it stops rolling and comes to a standstill. In many cases, proximity and convenience are the forces that propel a friendship forward. Take those away and it eventually rolls to a stop.

While you were classmates, the friendship was convenient and easy to maintain; after all, you’re seeing each other on a daily or weekly basis. But without those external forces bringing you together, there simply wasn’t as much that was maintaining your connection and you simply drifted apart.

But as I said: I don’t know what’s going on in his head, since I’m not him and I’m not there. Maybe he was sincere when he said “sure, we can be friends again” or maybe he was being polite. Maybe he’s busy or maybe he’s not feeling it. What I can tell you is that this is a time when pushing the issue isn’t going to help. There’re very few times when one person giving the full court press has resulted in a positive outcome, and most of the time, those were much stronger friendships before there was any distance.

I know you don’t find many people close to your age who share the same taste in music, but that may simply not be enough for him to want to be friends with you to the same level you do. Right now, you’re watering what seems like a dead plant. I don’t think you’re going to get a return that’s commensurate with your effort, and you’re expending effort that would be put to better use elsewhere. I think your best choice at this point is just to match his energy. You don’t need to pull back to zero, but I think you should dial your expectations and effort back. Let it be what it is now, without trying for more, and see. It may be that your pulling back creates enough of a vacuum that he will expend energy to fill it… or it may be confirmation that this is the upper limit of what to expect from him.

It stings, I know, but better to let this be whatever it will be instead of continuing to water a plant that won’t grow.

Good luck.