I stopped trying to start sex because I couldn’t take being turned down anymore. Part of me wanted to see whether she would come to me if I gave her the space. She didn’t. What I didn’t expect was that, eventually, I would stop wanting it too.
We’ve been together for five years, and we’re both in our early thirties. At the beginning, we could barely resist each other. Whenever we had the chance, we had sex. I expected that pace to settle down. I didn’t expect moving into our first apartment together to mean we would almost stop.
That was when it dropped to about once a month. My desire stayed where it had been, so I kept trying most days. The rejections felt cold. After enough of them, trying again meant putting myself in the way of something I already knew would hurt. Eventually I decided to stop initiating and wait for her to make a move.
For roughly four years, once a month was more or less our pattern. This year, even that has faded. Sex went from a monthly encounter with little enthusiasm to something that happens every few months and feels like a chore. I miss the passion and the spontaneity, but I also miss the simple sense that she wants to be there.
Now my own sex drive has dropped to almost nothing. That might sound like the mismatch has worked itself out. It hasn’t made me happy. I’m miserable, and I don’t know what to do with the difference between no longer wanting sex and feeling okay about how we got here. I used to know what I wanted, even when I wasn’t getting it. Now I’m struggling to describe what’s missing without pretending I still feel the same desire.
There’s something from the time we moved in that I keep coming back to. The apartment had plumbing problems, and she blamed me for not getting them resolved quickly enough. She was out of the country during that period. I was getting tearful, frustrated calls from her every day, while much of what needed to happen felt outside my control. I still wonder whether she resents me over it.
Because the change in our sex life started around then, I’ve linked the two in my head. Sometimes I’m convinced she’s disgusted by me. But that’s my explanation, not something she has told me. I also find myself guessing that the occasional return of her desire follows ovulation because of its regularity. I don’t actually know that either. Those are the answers I’m left supplying when I can’t get a conversation to go anywhere.
When our lack of sex comes up, it gets brushed aside, then ignored and forgotten. I’m left with the same uncertainty afterward. An affair or asking to open the relationship doesn’t even make sense to me as an answer: I don’t have a store of desire waiting for another woman. That desire has dwindled too.
I have no idea how to bring this up in a way that won’t disappear into another conversation we never finish. I can say that we barely have sex. I’m much less sure how to explain that I’ve stopped wanting it, and that I’m still deeply unhappy.
