Bit of an embarassing one lads, my sex drive has taken a battering. Me an my fiance have always had mismatched libido's so this is nothing completely new, but recently, I've had practically no interest in sex, not even masturbation when I'm alone. When we do have sex, it feels like a real effort (it's more to shut her up, she guilts me with the 'you constantly reject me and make me feel unwanted') and I get little enjoyment from it and feel a little depressed/lonely afterwards (this is a new feeling).
It's nothing personal to her, I just don't want sex. If this was the other way around and she didn't want it but I kept badgering her, I'm sure she would be calling me all kinds of things in front of her friends.
Any ideas on what I can do? Anyone gone through this before?
I know it can get worse with age; I turned 30 a month ago, but surely I'm not old enough to see a decrease in libido am I?
How much sleep are you getting? How's your diet and general health? Drink much? These things become a lot more of a factor in your libido as you get older.
I get about 6 - 7 hours of sleep, diet isn't great but isn't awful either, bit bland. I normally drink a crate of Guiness and a couple of large Hoegaarden's a week.
Whenever I hit the depressed part of my bi-polar cycle I lose all interest in sex completely. I've been through a very similar situation (where I got a lot of grief and emotional blackmail off my gf at the time) and I was only 23 or so, so I can definitely sympathise.
I probably can't offer any real advice as my situation / causation is probably quite different to yours but like other lad said more sleep, less alcohol, and a bit of exercise will probably turn things around.
Best guess is a bit of seasonal effective disorder. When did it start? Although its a bit of an exercise in false-positives, were you feeling a little down before this started?
Firstly: You need to sit her down and have a frank word about the guilt tripping thing. That's not only a dickhead double standard, but it is actively counterproductive. If she wants you to shag her more one of the things she's going to have to accept is letting you initiate it more, without it feeling like an obligation.
If she can't get that concept through her head your relationship is as good as over, to be honest. I'm only very slightly exaggerating.
Secondly, as the other lads said, sort your lifestyle out a bit. It'll do you more favours than making your knob more perky. The second and most important advice I can give you is to simply not worry about it. Put it out of your mind. You're an adult, you're in your thirties, you're not a teenager anymore. It's not sad that you're less interested in sex, it's just that presumably, you've already had plenty of it. There's only so many ways you can do it, believe me. I've done most of them.
The issue is that women often place a lot of their self esteem in their desirability as a fuck hole, frankly, just like blokes are obsessed with dick size. But it takes two to tangle as they say, and you're a man with other interests and passions in life; no matter how attractive your missus is, her meat hole is, at the end of the day, just another meat hole. It's nothing special, but most women seem to expect the man to do most of the work as if it is. Your partner has to appreciate you're not a dog who's just going to stand to attention and beg and roll over every time she holds out a treat.
To clarify on that last paragraph, I mean to say that sex is important as a form of validation, to most women. When you scratch past the surface I tht's not that you're not pounding them often enough, under the surface, but more about the lack of that validation- But it's not really fair to place that burden on you. The solution to this problem is one that requires cooperation.
>>30530 >That's not only a dickhead double standard
God don't tell her that. You want her being open and sympathetic, not arguing with you about if sexism goes both ways.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I agree I could do with cutting down on the drink a little, but it is a bit habitual. Not an alcoholic my any means but perhaps a consistent drinker. Cut it down to eight cans on Saturday though and I tend to do most of my drinking across one or two nights at most.
Exercise is also something I could do with more of.
Relationship is alright I guess. She gets on my nerves a lot but so does everyone and we are cooped up together due to lockdown and she was out of work for a few months following a post-grad. I am a pretty down/depressesd character but I've been like that for a long time, not necessarily because of the relationship.
Agree with a lot of what you say. Honestly, sometime I want a coffee and a book more than anything else. Truth be told, even when I wanted it more, I rarely enjoyed sex a whole lot, often preferring oral etc but she doesn't like it as much, which is fair enough. I just find going straight to sex every time a bit boring to be honest.
>>30540 >Not an alcoholic my any means but perhaps a consistent drinker. Cut it down to eight cans on Saturday though and I tend to do most of my drinking across one or two nights at most.
You might want to adjust your perception of what counts as normal. I suggest taking a month off to reflect.
That's a bit over the top. Eight to ten pints on a Friday and/or Saturday is basically just normal drinking. The problems begin when you start finding excuses to grab a few cans after work during the week. That's the slippery slope. Will remember to tick sage for /A/ stuff in /emo/.
>>30530 > The issue is that women often place a lot of their self esteem in their desirability
A lot of it comes down to this. Nature abhors a vacuum and if you're not making her feel wanted then things start getting messy. Sadly a lot of, mostly younger, women (especially good looking ones who've had blokes chasing after them relentlessly since they first started wearing a bra) really do have a lot of their own personal value tied up in someone wanting to shag them. You not wanting to jump them basically feels like a total rejection of them in their entirety.
Like >>30532 says you don't want to go and start having a rational conversation with her about it; the problem is emotional and trying to bring logic into it isn't going to help matter.
If push comes to shove you can always can always turn the foreplay up to 11 and go down on her until your tongue cramps. If that still doesn't make your soldier stand to attention and get you in the mood too, well at least you tried.
How happy are you? Do you guys have a good time as a couple outside the bedroom? Do you *want* to want to have sex more often? Can you find out if she wants sex, or intimacy?
It sounds like there's a communication issue above all else. Personally I'd veto all of >>30530's advice, that's not someone you want to listen to about communicating with your partner/talking to women in general.
There's the issue of your libido, and the issue of communication. She's not listening to you about it, maybe try getting her to open up, ride out the emotional wave if it happens, try and glean something from it, hopefully it's actually helpful, and then that might work.
Or get couples counselling if you guys can't figure out how to listen to each other.
>That's a bit over the top. Eight to ten pints on a Friday and/or Saturday is basically just normal drinking.
That does sound a bit like enabling in the circumstances. There's a big difference between going out and drinking, and just drinking. You're right on that slope, but there's a few other slopes, especially when you're getting older. Am I just being a dour cunt?
I think you're right about it changing as you get older. I'm banging on 40 now and barely drink, but when I was 30 I still used to drink stupid amounts and when I was in my 20s I was in the pub after work every night of the week. My own drinking problems didn't really start until I began drinking on my own, at home, during the week. In fact, for me, the big shifts were starting to drink at home in the week, and starting to drink in the morning to kill the heebie jeebies.
I'm rambling, but to summarise I don't think that eight tins on a Saturday is going to be a problem for anyone. Oplad could definitely try a dry month and see how it makes him feel, though. It's definitely not going to do any harm and he could spend the pennies he saved up on a Hitachi magic wand and send his missus to the moon. Or something.
Sage for rambly /A/ bollocks apropos of nothing very much at all.
I wouldn't consider myself particularly happy, I have my moments but I feel down or at leas 'okay' most of the time. That's due to lots of things though.
I want to have more sex so that she'll be happier that we're having more, but personally, I'm kind of content. Truth be told, as far as actual pleasure goes, I get more from a wank that puts me to sleep.
We have a fairly good time outside the bedroom sure, although we're limited to what we can do at the moment.
Maybe my drinking is over the top, but I do it with things I look forward to, like a family quiz or watching concert footage/old music videos and getting nostalgic.
>Personally I'd veto all of >>30530's advice, that's not someone you want to listen to about communicating with your partner/talking to women in general
Why? He's absolutely right. Maybe a bit blunt for your tastes but there's no use pissing about. I'm assuming OP has more common sense to go quoting that post at her, but the observations are accurate.
I'd agree to an extent, and I don't think it's healthy to be anything but frank about that kind of thing. Relationships are at times transactional, at times selfless, and almost never perfect. Treating any problem like it's entirely one side's issue is not a recipe for success.
You can't say you honestly respect women unless you're willing to hold them to the same standards you would yourself or another lad, in my opinion, and that means there's every bit as much cause to evaluate the role they might play in a situation.
IIRC, I think after around 28, men's testosterone levels decline sharply. I've just turned 30 myself and find myself a lot less interested in wanking and fucking than I used to be. I honestly think it's just an age thing.
>>30577 You say that but I've had a similar experience to >>30576. I was a horny fucker all through my twenties and then all of a sudden I hit twenty-nine/thirty and I feel like my penis has gone to sleep forever. It's disturbing.
I'm at the end of my thirties and if I get the flat to myself (a rare thing these days) I could easily have five wanks in a day and I'm not exactly dripping testosterone out of every pore. I'm not expecting my sex drive to die out for a long while yet, even if it does wax and wane with my general mood / mental health outlook.
Finding the cause for lack of libido is a bit like finding the cause for a headache -- often there's just too many factors at play to really isolate one and say "fix this, OP".
That said the thread has already come up with many plausible explanations. It could be any combination of alcohol, unhealthy living, stress or unhappiness, or issues in your relationship.
A bit more detail might help. When were you last having sex regularly, and has anything changed since then?
Probably not what you want to hear but it ended up, well, ending. Not entirely because of the sex thing though, in fairness; and in retrospect part of the reason I didn't want to fuck her was all those little things that would eventually split us up.
And if I'm completely honest with myself that was the thing- It wasn't my sex drive that was gone, it's just that I didn't want to fuck her. I'm an introvert at heart so any great amount of time spent with another person eventually wears down my energy, and she wouldn't ever leave me alone long enough to recharge. If she'd have given me a bit more space, I might have had more enthusiasm for it, but I couldn't get that through to her, try as I might.
Comparing it to my current partner, there's a night and day difference. We're not fucking every morning and every night, it's maybe once a week or two at the moment. But given the circumstances of the past year that's understandable, we're practically prison cellmates, so we don't give each other any grief over it. She did ask me once if I was losing interest in her, and I asked her in return, "When's the last time you sucked my knob?" and she went "Yeah, fair point."
It's hard to find her really desirable when 99% of the time all I see is her sat there slobbing it in front of the telly with greasy hair, in her dressing gown, covered in the stains of spilled Chinese. It's hardly sexy in b4 "speak for yourself", and I'm perfectly sure she feels the same way about me sat in the dark with a thousand yard stare in front of Elder Scrolls Online, having only got up to either piss or make Pot Noodle for the past two days. But given the circumstances, it's not really fair to expect each other to try much harder.
Point is, there's no conflict or tension over it, so it's not brewing into something ugly down the line. If it was my ex we'd probably have come to physical violence by now.
Anyway sage for turning this into my own blog post, soz.
