In a relationship, but horny. It feels like being at the supermarket without any money. Wandering the aisles with your stomach rumbling, you know you don’t have enough money to buy anything, but food is close enough to trigger all your senses. What a predicament and still, this is the reality for so many people!
Why don’t we talk about it? If being permanently sexually frustrated were not difficult enough, we often go through it alone or deeply misunderstood. While most of us will agree that it is not realistic to feel the same passion (note the word “same”) for the lover we just met than for the long-term partner, this doesn’t mean that we have to accept a sexually deserted life. As the famous psychotherapist Esther Perel puts it in one of her podcasts, if the passion we experience at the beginning of a relationship were to stay the same, nobody would go to work. We would be bonobos.
Image by mmcclain90 from Pixabay
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line couples come to accept that little sex or mediocre sex is just part and parcel of a long-term relationship. It is taken as an uncontroversial truth that there is an inverse relationship between time and sex: the longer a relationship lasts, the less sex you have.
Add to this the entrenched belief that love is more important than sex. By this token it is totally unjustified to leave someone you love “just” for sex. This is how instead of harmoniously feeding each other, love and sex divorce: sex becomes the prisoner of love.
So one feels pretty much trapped, assaulted by all type of existential questions: What is more important, love or sex? Am I a bad person for wanting to sleep with other people? If my partner doesn’t fulfill my needs, can it be considered cheating if I sleep with someone else? Does this mean that I don’t love my partner anymore? How long can I go on living this way? Are there sex parties in my city?
Different people find different solutions to this conundrum, so I won’t even attempt at presenting possible “solutions” that will always be subjective and insufficient. Having said this, I do believe the way the question is treated must be addressed.
First of all, there is no shame in being horny, and this applies both to men and women. The idea that women want less sex than men is a myth (sorry). We all need sex and this doesn’t mean that we are lusty little hornballs. So in the same way as “where do we eat” or “what do we eat” is a normal everyday conversation in a couple, “how do we like it” and “how often do we want it” should be part of the conversation too.
Inevitably, there will always come a time when one is hungry and the other not, when one feels like overindulging and the other would be happy with an apple…which leads me to the second problem: taking sex personally.
Don’t take me wrong, sex is personal, but we tend to overestimate our turn-on power. While there is no doubt that our sex appeal was key to attracting our partner, not everything is about us. We can be a turn-on but when things go south, we are not necessarily the turn-off. When we get refused or our significant other doesn’t come to us for sex anymore, we immediately infer that he/she doesn’t want to have sex with us. We feel rejected, unattractive, self-conscious, not enough.
But in fact, it may also be that our significant other doesn’t feel like having sex at all. So many things can be the reason…Life just gets in the way. We are busy, worried, tired, or in the midst of a pandemic…and sex may be the last thing we are thinking of.
Another reason why we may not be on the same page (sexually speaking) with our partner has to do with our sex appetite. Just as it happens with food, where we don’t need to eat as much or as frequently as others, we may not be in sync when it comes to how regularly (or for how long) we want to have sex .
Having said this, one cannot deny that sometimes we don’t have as much sex as we want to simply because we get too cozy, too comfortable or too predictable. The same closeness that we yearned for when we were single becomes the killer of the excitement that sparked the passion when love was new.
Unfortunately, we see sex so differently from other experiences in life! While we understand that experiences get “used”, that the tenth time we do something will never feel as intensely as the first, when it comes to sex we act as if we could keep passion “intact”.
However I am convinced that beyond the firecracker-sky of those first passionate encounters, lies a whole uncharted world of love making, one that only couples who know each other deeply and who have weathered love-hate storms can access. They will tell you that sex drive doesn’t just come, but it’s something you can work on. So if you are in a relationship and you are horny, rest assured, you are not alone, but you can do something about it. Good f*ck, I mean, good luck!
