- Many people believe that the risk and novelty that arouse sexual desire are incompatible with the familiarity and security that develops in a long-term intimate relationship.
- After disentangling the effects of age and relationship satisfaction, sexual desire does tend to peak in the first year of a relationship and then decline in the second year, mostly stabilizing after that.
- Despite the average trends, substantial numbers of older adults report high sexual satisfaction, suggesting that it is possible to maintain sexual interest even in a secure long-term relationship.
The Course of Sexual Desire
A religious friend from a community that forbids premarital sex tells this story. On the eve of their wedding, engaged couples are advised to place a large jar by their bed, and then to deposit a penny in the jar every time they have sex during the first year of the marriage. After that year, they are to retrieve a penny from the jar every time they have sex. The joke is that they will never empty the jar. Many communities tell versions of this story.
FIGURE 9.5 The sexual doldrums. On average, the passion and excitement of the first year of a relationship fades by the second year, but this decline is not universal—and far from inevitable.
What gives this parable its lasting resonance is the common stereotype that sexual passion peaks early in an intimate relationship, and then gradually fades. In her 2006 book Mating in Captivity, psychotherapist Ester Perel proposed one explanation for this common belief. According to Perel, long-term relationships present couples with a trade-off when it comes to sex. On one hand, sexual desire tends to be aroused most by novelty and risk. On the other hand, commitment to a relationship tends to be reinforced by feelings of familiarity and security. But you can see how these two processes might oppose each other: The safer and more reliable the relationship grows, the less sexy it becomes (Figure 9.5).
Interviews with women seeking treatment for low sexual desire echo these ideas (Sims & Meana, 2010). For example, when asked about the forces that get in the way of feeling sexual, one 34-year-old participant responded:
There was a lot of desire when I was dating, excitement. On the flip side, when you’re married, I know exactly how my husband is going to touch me, I know how much he loves me and I’m not embarrassed to take my clothes off. There’s a comfort there that is important to me. It’s just not as exciting . . . the desire is lost. You go from being real careful around each other and being on your best behavior. Then, of course, you start to get comfortable with one another and that changes—your bad habits come out, your bad moods come out. That takes some of the desire away whereas when you are dating, it’s just so sexual and so amazing and so exciting . . . Desire dwindles as you become a couple. (Sims & Meana, 2010, p. 367–368)
Studies that have tracked how sexual desire and sexual frequency actually change over time offer some support for these beliefs. On average, couples have less sex as they get older (Call, Sprecher, & Schwartz, 1995; Willetts, Sprecher, & Beck, 2004). But the major reason for this decline is age itself: The physical changes associated with getting older interfere with sex, especially for men (Araujo, Mohr, & McKinlay, 2004). Changes in the relationship are another major reason. If sexual desire is associated with relationship satisfaction, then desire is likely to decline as relationship satisfaction declines over time.
After disentangling the effects of age and relationship satisfaction on sexual desire, is there any truth to the idea that it fades simply because the relationship has lasted longer? There is. Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany independently confirm that sexual frequency and satisfaction do tend to peak in the first year of a relationship, and then decline markedly in the second year, even after controlling for the effects of age and relationship satisfaction (Call et al., 1995; Schroder & Schmiedeberg, 2015). In both of these studies, however, the declines level off after the second year. What remains is a lot of daily fluctuation in feelings of lust for the partner, depending on the emotional climate of the relationship on a particular day (Ridley et al., 2006).
Does this mean that long-term couples really do have to decide between passion and security? Is the excitement of that first year always fleeting? Despite the average trends, the good news is that declines in sexual desire are neither inevitable nor universal. In a recent survey, one-third of the participants report that the passion in their relationship has stayed constant over time (Frederick, Lever, Gillespie, & Garcia, 2017). The National Poll on Healthy Aging finds that, among older adults between the ages of 65 and 80, 74% describe their sex life as satisfying (National Poll on Healthy Aging, 2018). And even age-related declines in sexual desire are significantly smaller for people in better relationships (Birnbaum, Cohen, & Wertheimer, 2007; Iveniuk & Waite, 2018). As hard as it can be, some couples do manage to thread the needle, maintaining a healthy and satisfying sex life within a stable and secure relationship.