Getting libido back after years... anyone managed it?

[chalkcircle]

Name changed for this. It's really long, sorry.

I think my marriage would be defined as sexless. We do it, oh, a few times a year on average. We've been together almost a decade and it's been that way for over half of our relationship (we have one DD but our sex life went downhill long before I fell pregnant with her - what can I say, apparently we're quite fertile). I am the one with no libido. Poor DH would have it every night if he could, I think.

We are warm and loving in other ways, and we both regularly say how happy we are. I really love him. Really really do. We talk about the sex issue sometimes. I check in with him to see how he's doing, I try to reassure him that I do find him attractive and love him, and he knows that if it really starts getting him down then I want him to tell me so that at least we're figuring out what to do together. Sometimes I think it all seems too good, too sane, and we can't really be surviving my lack of desire with the rest of our relationship intact... can we? Wouldn't anyone else have chucked me by now, or be feeling desperately unhappy?

He never tries to push it with me, never gets moody about it, and he immediately takes no for an answer. We had a couple of hiccups with that when we first started dating but that was genuinely poor communication on my part, appearing half-willing and half-reluctant, because I had never previously had a relationship where I felt I could say no outright. Saying no was a new idea for me. And I think that's the problem, my previous relationships and my lousy self-image, but ffs when am I going to get over it?

I was a bit of an outcast at school and never dated anyone until I was 18. After how I was treated at school I assumed I must be physically repulsive, so I ended up with the first dickhead who expressed a real interest. I lost my virginity to him after an evening of me saying no and him saying, "Oh go on. Pleeeease. It'll be really fun. Have some more wine". I did eventually say yes. At the time I was pleased to have it over with, I guess, and excited to have confirmation that I was not, after all, unfuckable. I was glad not to be a virgin any more. But I wasn't turned on and the sex itself didn't feel nice, it didn't really feel like anything. I was relieved when he pulled out.

Same with the boyfriends and one night stands that followed - I would see someone I liked the look of, and sometimes I'd get turned on, but sex itself was always me offering up my body in the way I was 'supposed' to. It would never occur to me to say no if I wasn't in the mood, because who was I to reject attention and approval? A few things happened that I consider sexual assault, but a lot of it was me technically consenting because I needed the confidence boost of being shaggable. I spent a lot of time staring at ceilings and waiting for it to be over. It sounds more fucked up to me now than it ever seemed at the time. Is that how everyone's early relationships are?

I didn't have an orgasm for years after I became sexually active, and even now I can only reliably get there on my own. But that doesn't bother me, tbh - trying to orgasm with DH takes ages and stops being fun so that it just turns into a different kind of pressure. All I want is to be able to enjoy the physicality of it and be in the moment, being close to this man that I love. We have had sex like that before. I know it's possible. I wish I could want it more often!

Last night we were going to have sex. We talked about it. I was happy about the idea, I wanted to do it. We hopped into bed. He rubbed my back for a while. I was still happy. Then his hand moved onto my bum and suddenly I was afraid, I froze up, I just wanted to protect my body. I asked to just cuddle for a bit so we did that. When I felt better we tried again, but I got scared again, so we stopped. It's as if there's an endless ocean of NO inside me and now that I'm in a relationship where I finally feel safe to say it, I can't do anything else. I thought my sex drive would wake up again after I'd felt safe for a while, but it seems not.

We'd actually like to TTC our second child. I'm pretty sure that will need to involve some sex. And I am so sick of this. I feel like there should have been a healthy, happy sex life waiting for me as I grew up, and what I got instead is this mess. I want to enjoy lots of lovely sex with my lovely husband. I'm 30 and I'm tired of this crap. I just want to have some fun, bloody hell.

Has anyone been in this sort of situation and managed to turn it around? The more I write the more I think I need therapy to sort this out, but we are in debt and skint... Anyone who read to the end, thank you. Even just writing it all out has been useful.

OK.

First off, if you are in debt and skint and can't afford therapy (which, to be honest, I think you may well need), then you absolutely shouldn't be trying to conceive another child.

You sound like you have a really good partner, which is great. I would sound a note of caution in that neither of you is possibly really thinking long term. You are 30 and I assume he is around a similar age. I was in a sexless relationship. We'd been together 4 years when it went really downhill and we had no children involved. My ex just didn't have much of a libido. I loved her, so said it didn't matter. For the next 6 years we had no sex. Cuddles and a kiss last thing at night, but that was it. That's how she liked it. I accepted it.

Then at 36 I decided to end the relationship. I was 36 and had spent the last 6 years with a roommate and not a lover. I didn't want to spend the next 36 years of life not having sex.

I am still single, four years on. But I wouldn't go back to it.

I would investigate with your GP whether any counselling or therapy might be available on the NHS. But other than that, hopefully some people on here will have some great advice.

What you're describing sounds like an aversion bordering on phobia surrounding intimacy. Your early sexual experiences probably haven't helped this aversion. Your description of a detached approach where sex was something 'done to you' rather than something engaged in positively - I hate to say it - sounds more like the memories of a paid sex-worker than the usual romantic early sexual encounters people experience in teens/twenties.

Please talk to your GP

The debt is under control, steadily being cleared - we have plenty of income for rent, food and things DD needs, we just don't have a lot extra for luxuries, and on that basis I think we'd struggle to pay a therapist - though depending on how things go, we may have to find the money from somewhere. Sorry, didn't mean to be misleading with "skint". We're not financially buggered, we're just not especially well off.

Thanks for your comment. Food for thought.

Cogito - oof. That's hard to hear. But also almost a relief to know that it's not supposed to be like that. Thank you.

It's really not supposed to be like that, no. We've all had disappointing sexual experiences - or I have, at least. But if the main thing you've taken from previous sexual encounters is that a) you had to stay in control whilst at the same time b) you didn't feel able to say no, then the logical way to achieve both is to create a kind of steely detachment and rig up a huge number of emotional barriers to protect you.

You mention that you were treated badly at school which led to a huge dip in self-esteem and regarding yourself as ugly . Were you bullied?

Wish I could get the guts to show this sort of thread to my DW, re the "see your GP" advice. OP, please do this else your DH could be like me in 18 months time. You can't have sex just to please your DH - that's why I don't push with my wife, but he will be increasingly feeling down, rejected and depressed inside no matter how much support and understanding he's giving outwardly.
There is really no winner when one partner doesn't want it and the other does.
Hope you get to move forward.

Cogito, yes, bullied in a big way. A lot of slagging in general and particularly about how ugly I was, a running joke where lads would ask me out and then fall about laughing because obviously nobody could really want to... Stupid stuff really, but it was non-stop from age 11 onwards so I guess I developed my sexuality while believing that I didn't really deserve one. Sounds obvious when I put it like that.

Minus, can I turn that round too and say please talk honestly to your DW about how you're feeling? That you absolutely don't want her to have sex just to please you, but also that you're sad about the way things are? I ask DH how he feels, I ask him to please please tell me if it makes him sad - not to pressure me, I know he doesn't want to do that, but so that I can understand what state my marriage is actually in and act accordingly. If I think he's OK, I will approach this in my own time because it is private, painful and difficult (and I have limited faith in GPs after a bad experience asking for therapy in the past); if I thought I was going to lose him I'd be down the GP tomorrow and I'd flog every bloody thing I own to pay for private therapy if necessary. If your DW thinks you are OK then she's not acting in full knowledge of what you need.

Sorry, I can't contribute any answers but I'm in a very similar situation and want my libido back! I don't see splitting up as the answer as I love my DH and went through similar in my only other long-term relationship.

Hope you don't mind me hanging around chalk

Me too. I honestly wouldn't care if I never had sex again for the rest of my life. I would, like Boy George, rather have a nice cup of tea.

But DP doesn't feel that way, and once I actually get going I quite enjoy it, though really have to fight feelings of detachment.

I had a very similar early relationship history to chalkcircle, feeling ugly, amazed anyone would go out with me, feeling I 'ought to' have sex, lots of one-night stands that I thought would bolster myself-esteem but of course destroyed it. The icing on the cake was being raped at knifepoint in my early 20s, then going out with (who turned out to be) a gay man in my early 30s.

Not sure if current lack of libido is my past coming home to roost, the peri-menopause kicking in, having a small child (after years of miscarriages) or what, but while on the surface it feels perfectly satisfactory, I guess that it really isn't. But at the same time, I don't want to open that can of worms.

"I guess I developed my sexuality while believing that I didn't really deserve one."

Yes. You learned how to relate to people sexually at a time when you didn't value yourself. Sex was not an outward expression of affection but something you offered up cold in an attempt to be liked and because you thought it was expected. Looking back, do you think any of the people you had sex with then consciously abused your vulnerability? You said you didn't feel able to say no. Was that purely coming from your insecurity or was there more coercion going on than 'have another glass of wine?' Were any of them a lot older than you? Your current reaction to a loving partner certainly has a lot of the hallmarks of a survivor of sexual abuse.

I honestly don't know. :( They tended to be mid-twenties to my 18 or 19, so a bit older but not drastically. That first boyfriend wasn't the nicest bloke, but luckily not terribly interested in me (not that I thought it was lucky at the time) and we fizzled out when I moved 200 miles away for university. Other guys were manipulative sometimes, plain weird sometimes, but nothing outside the bounds of ordinary people being ordinarily bad at relationships. The times I count as assaults were more often men I didn't know very well and had ended up alone with - one in a train carriage, one in a multistorey car park. It was the car park one who turned up in my head last night, come to think of it. Backed me up against the wall and groped me. I was going to a bar to meet friends, couldn't shake him off until they turned up. This all feels so messy.

I don't think many of them would have needed to intimidate me to get sex out of me. The fear was there in my head already - I was terrified of breaking the spell and finding out I wasn't good enough after all. Argh.

If you were subjected to sexual assaults then you might benefit from talking to Rape Crisis. Just because you were a vulnerable young person struggling with self-esteem and maybe exercising poor judgement, it doesn't mean that you were in any way to blame for what happened. The relationships you describe as manipulative and weird I suspect would have been abusive rather than just ordinarily bad if you went into detail.

It is messy to be traumatised and I think, because it is having such a profound effect on your ability to enjoy a normal, healthy, intimate relationship with another adult, you would benefit from talking to Rape Crisis, Womens Aid and other sources of advice and counselling.