Challenges and Choices:
Sexual Desire and Frequency
I am so frustrated; sex used to be the exciting glue in our companionship, and now I hardly ever think about it.” Problems of sexual desire1 are the most common presenting concern that brings couples into sex therapy (and marital therapy for sexual issues). A survey of more than two thousand Christian women, the National Study on the Sexuality of Christian Women (NSSCW), found one in three married women experiencing difficulty feeling sexual desire.2 Menopause, illnesses, medications, and adjusting to changing bodies and roles all create many challenges in the mature years.
Some problems have simple answers: Sell the boat,move nearer the grandkids, learn golf. In desire issues, there are usually multiple, multilayered causes with both partners contributing uniquely to the problem. A complexity of issues along many fronts must be addressed. Creative solutions do exist, but let’s unpack some of the complexity of the issue as we define desire and explore some broad categories of challenges around inhibited desire—with possible solutions.
DEFINING DESIRE
Couples that come for help with desire issues provide a wide range of standards and expectations of normal sexual desire and frequency. Many men set their own sexual desire as the standard their wife must meet. Others pull from friends, media, or culture. Failure to meet the standard they have adopted is interpreted as an inadequacy in themselves or their spouse. Unfortunately, the standards people choose are rarely appropriate standards.
The way the media have depicted sex has added a great deal of pressure and false expectations. The truth is that sexual desire is three-dimensional and stems from our bodies (hormones, genitals, seeing, and touching), our souls (emotions, minds, fantasy, choices), and our spirits (attraction and commitment). In media sex, partners easily become aroused, and everyone has fantastic orgasms.With these expectations ingrained in each of us, a genuine sexual relationship in the real world will most likely produce feelings of inferiority and dissatisfaction. One or both partners begin to wonder, What is wrong with us? The normal aspects of aging can quickly trigger these feelings.
Gender Differences
Husbands and wives will rarely (if ever) have the same sexual desire. Most experts and studies state that men have a more apparent and assertive desire, but it is a myth that men are always hormonally driven and can instantly get erections. Men, too, get tired, have difficulty being aroused, and can struggle with getting erections for a variety of reasons and lose their sexual desire.
However, the complexity of sexual desire in women cannot be underestimated. Many elements can sabotage a woman’s sexual desire: her physical health, energy level, whether or not she is depressed, hormones, how she feels about her appearance, how she perceives her marriage partner, how distracted she is by other concerns, whether or not she has been sexually abused, how her family of origin viewed sexuality, any medications she is taking, and whether or not sex has been or has become painful—physically or emotionally. All of these factors and their interactions combine to create, enhance, or diminish a woman’s sexual desire.
Types of Desire
Sexual desire can be thought of as having three varieties: assertive, receptive, or low. Assertive desire is more typical of men with a longing to seek out sex. This type of desire more actively thinks about sexual activity and initiates sexual connection with a physical drive. A more feminine flavor of assertive desire occurs with what can be termed “alluring” desire. This is typical of the wife who enjoys the feminine power of her body and nature for enticing and turning her husband on sexually.
Receptive desire is more typical of women and includes an openness to sexual activity, enjoying the closeness, and getting involved, often after initiation. Sexual thoughts and arousal may come to the wife after she begins to engage in lovemaking, with an internal response of I wasn’t thinking of sex tonight but, wow, this was a good idea.A flavor of receptive desire emerges as “nurturing” desire. This desire comes to the forefront when a mate may not want lovemaking for him or herself, but wants to give fulfillment as a gift to the partner.
Normal Desire
It is important to realize that “low” sexual desire can be a relative and arbitrary term. Most couples experience desire discrepancy, but both may be normal with one partner having a “high” normal desire and the other a “low” normal desire. Remember the statistical bell-shaped curve:
Fig. 12.1
You probably have heard some story of a woman who wanted sex all the time.We call this the “nympho myth,” and yet 68 percent of women will fall along the middle or average part of the desire curve (see Figure 12.1). Another 14 percent will have either lower or higher desire, with only 2 percent being on the extremes.Wives are often quite average in desire, and the husband doesn’t have to be a sexual machine.
HOW DESIRE IS CHALLENGED AND ENHANCED
Here are five broad categories that trigger low sexual desire. Each of these categories could be a whole book. Be a detective and apply these general problem areas to your specific desire issues.
1. Body Busters and Boosters
The human body is wonderfully complex. It is important to remember that most illnesses as well as the normal process of aging affect the body and can take a real toll on sexual desire.All medications and drugs have side effects and many have some sexual side effects. In several chapters throughout this book, we have considered the effects of aging on hormones. Read these chapters and practice some of the creative solutions we suggest.
2. Emotional Toxins and Antidotes
Our positive emotions are vital to sexual arousal. Other types of feelings can be quite toxic to desire, as they have serious negative impact on our personal and relational well-being. Certain emotions must be resolved and worked through for sexual desire to return. A central theme of this book is working through the many normal feelings that will be evoked in the aging process.
Depression, Loss, and Grief. Depression, with its accompanying loss of energy and mood changes and irritability, affects sexual desire and frequency. As negative as the depression itself is, antidepressants often have an inhibitory impact on arousal or orgasm, which can further complicate desire. Grief has a tremendous impact on intimacy in general and lovemaking in particular. One husband in counseling wondered what had happened to his sex drive. In exploring recent losses, he had lost a dad to cancer and retired from his job.Any serious loss can certainly contribute to depression and loss of energy and libido.
Fear. In a culture that adores youth and success and ignores those who struggle, fear can be very restricting to sexual desire—and difficult to accept, explore, and understand. The fear of appearing inadequate or incompetent, or the fear of the effects of aging on the body, can quickly dampen sexual initiative. People can be particularly sensitive to sexual pressure and fear. The fear of failure in a partner’s eyes is enough to hinder anyone’s desire to even try to be sexual.
Anger, Resentment, Disappointment, and Hurt.How can you not step on one of these land mines of feelings as you continually work through the process of aging? It may be a disfiguring surgery, loss of erections, saying good-bye to a tight tummy, or lacking stamina that triggers one of these emotions.
The antidote is to dispute the toxic feelings with a healing emotional connection.The following suggestions can do wonders in overcoming the negative emotions mentioned above.
• Express tender emotions. Cuddling, massage, and verbally emphasizing caring feelings for each other can be redemptive in countering depression, fear, anger, and hurt.
• Tell yourself the truth. In their excellent book Telling Yourself the Truth, Backus and Chapian talk about being able to mentally dispute feelings and work through to a positive place.3 Aging evokes feelings, but we can choose not to allow them to rule our lives as we work through them to a place of acceptance and control.
• Laugh! “A cheerful heart is good medicine” (Prov. 17:22 NIV). Laughter has a way of giving perspective, secreting natural painkillers in the brain, and helps to create a connection between partners. It’s a great antidote to our discouraging emotions, and the great thing is that maturity gives us a greater ability to laugh at ourselves and life.
3. Personal Brakes and Accelerators
How partners initiate sexual activity, sights, sounds, smells, words that are said (or not said), location, time of day, pace, and a host of other factors can be listed as personal brakes or accelerators of sexual desire. As was developed in the beginning of the chapter, desire is three-dimensional and involves our bodies, our emotions and minds, and our spirits. Each of these three dimensions can be important in understanding the complexity of the brakes and accelerators. Here are some examples of the common brakes with possible accelerators in sex after age fifty.
Fatigue and Timing. One of the surprising discoveries in the NSSCW (Hart et al., 1998) was that lack of sexual desire was not the most frequently cited sexual difficulty. Forty-five percent of the married women said their greatest difficulty was finding the energy for sex. If you’re not a night person or are stiff in the morning, aging will exacerbate these characteristics. Make choices and set priorities to overcome fatigue and practice good timing.
Attractiveness and Body Image. Two-thirds of the married women in the NSSCW specifically identified their body image and weight concerns as impacting their sexual desire.4 Women are masters of comparison, which leads to insecurity, body loathing, anxiety, depression, and a belief they are not attractive to their husbands.
Men also can struggle with their body image with its sags and lost muscle tone. Probably an even greater personal brake that must be worked through is the dramatic changes they see taking place in their wife’s body. A husband is more visual but can learn to enjoy a new type of sensuality and erotic arousal. Nipples, labia, and vaginas are very arousing in sixty-, seventy-, or eighty-year- old bodies—especially as sensuality expands beyond body parts to tender touches, erotic caressing, and emotional closeness.
Traumatic Sexual Experiences and Inhibitions.Sexual trauma is anything that disrupts healthy sexual development, bringing distortion and inhibition to personal sexuality and married lovemaking. Perimenopause and menopause may cause unresolved issues (family background, abuse, religious prohibitions, fear of relaxing control) to resurface that need to be reworked through to resolution. Get some counseling and face some of those secrets.
In overcoming the personal brakes on desire, many of the accelerators are commonsense interventions: take a nap before lovemaking, practice putting the soul into sex as bodies are enjoyed in new ways, learn to communicate, and get some outside help.
4. Relationship Bombs and Builders
A couple’s companionship can be a microcosm of what happens in their sex life, and vice versa (see Chapter 7). Marital conflict, boredom, and disrespect often intensify the lack of desire.Traditional marital therapy techniques of teaching forgiveness, assertiveness, communication skills, and conflict resolution skills, as well as working through control issues, can be important when addressing the problems that dump on sexual desire.
Growing old together is not always easy. Midlife crises and their many changes don’t always bring with them the resolve to take the high road. Here are some challenges that must be resolved for sexual desire and “feeling in love” to return.
Conflict and Distance. Shrill, angry wives and passively angry husbands with continued power struggles or unresolved issues have a very negative impact on sexuality. Lovemaking reflects whether a couple like each other, are intimate companions, or have many unresolved conflicts.
Extramarital Affairs and Other Distractions. Affairs and other ways of adulterating marital companionship can be common in midlife crises, retirement, and the empty-nest years. Society trivializes adultery, but there is no more powerful way to sabotage sexual wholeness and the hope for true intimacy. Put in place needed boundaries and get therapy to resolve hurts and distancing.
Inertia. An object at rest tends to stay at rest and dig a deeper rut, while one in motion will stay in motion. This law certainly applies to a sex life too. If a couple make love once a month, it is easy to slip into once every three months. Don’t buy into the myth that couples in their fifties and older don’t make love with frequency. Find those optimal times weekly and stay lovers.
Polarization. As couples wrestle with sexual desire difficulties, often they begin to polarize: One partner feels they have sex “hardly ever,” and the other believes they have sex “all the time.” One mate will feel emotionally neglected, and the other will feel sexually deprived. Conflict can escalate with mates living in each other’s debit column and focusing on shortcomings. A negative pattern develops that further inhibits sexual desire.
Here are three relationship builders that can help you rev up a sex life where you may not have made love in months or years:
1. Start with rebuilding the companionship. Do some playful, nonsexual activities together.
2. Increase your nonsexual touch and physical affection. Oxytocin is a peptide secreted in the brain that flows to various parts of the brain and throughout the reproductive organs of both men and women. It rises in response to touch and promotes touching. Oxytocin effects are increased by estrogen, which has led researchers to hypothesize that oxytocin may be especially important in sexual desire in women.Without touch, oxytocin production falls, as does the bonding in the relationship, lowering sexual desire even further.5
3. Make love more frequently. It may take some effort and a few failed attempts to get back to a more consistent sex life. Start with sensual massage, tune in to sexual sensations, and then include a lot of love play and nude hugs and showers before attempting intercourse. As with jumping into cold lake water on a warm, summer day, you eventually must hold your breath, psych yourselves up, and jump into having intercourse. Go into it with no expectation other than breaking the ice. Orgasms aren’t necessary. Set a date night to relax and choose to make love.
5. Environmental Hazards and Healers
Sexual desire can also be blocked and dumped on by our religious and family values, societal myths, and factors out of our control. These must be understood, disputed, and healed. Here are some common environmental hazards.
Expectations and Myths. Myths abound about sex in the mature years.We have sought to dispel many of these misbeliefs throughout this book. One couple confessed in counseling that they both believed that lovemaking would totally stop at age sixty. Sure enough, from their midfifties on it slowed down and was gone by sixty. Expectations of more time spent in romance, balanced time around the children’s needs, or increased sexual variety must be talked through, or resentment can build and desire will be affected.
Parental Models. Your parents teach you about sex and relationships.They model the ability to be affectionate and affirming. Families openly and subtly impart values to you about sex and trust and self-esteem. Your relationship with your family and parents, even if they are deceased, has an ongoing impact on your current sexual relationship. Discuss this with your siblings or a counselor as you grow and heal some of these attitudes.
Religious and Societal Prohibitions. Sex is a gift from God, but you couldn’t prove it by many people raised in Christian homes and the church. Sex was never talked about and was treated with such hesitation and avoidance that they are afraid of sexual intimacy.
Powerful healing influences can be appropriated when the environment has dumped on and squelched sexual desire.
Undertake Renewing Your Mind. Identify the erroneous messages about sex in your head and challenge them with truth. Do a lot of self-talk.You might say, “Relax . . . it’s okay . . . enjoy . . . play at it.” Create positive affirmation statements: “God created sexual pleasure”; “I am capable of change”; “If I enjoy sex, it does not mean I will lose control”; “Sex is fun, and I don’t need to feel guilty anymore.”
Pray! Sexuality and sexual expression were God’s idea and His gift to us. When we, or those we try to help, encounter sexual problems, we need to turn to God for help, hope, and healing.We can practice praying, individually and together, for the growth and health of our sexual relationship.
Low sexual desire is truly a complex puzzle, but sexual intimacy is not just an option if you want to remain lovers. Be courageous and assertive in not settling for low desire and unsatisfying, infrequent lovemaking. Find those creative solutions.