Desire Discrepancy: When Partners Want Sex Differently

Somebody wants more sex than the other. Welcome, it’s the most common thing that comes through my door, and the one I worry about least. Desire isn’t a fuel gauge, and “low sex drive” is about as useful a diagnosis as “my car makes a noise”.

Somebody in your relationship wants more sex than the other.

Welcome.

This is the most common thing that comes through my door on a daily basis and the one issue I worry about THE LEAST.

Desire discrepancy is the gap between how much sex two people want, how often, and in what flavour. That’s it.

If you found this by typing “husband/wife low sex drive” into your phone at 1am with the brightness right down so s/he doesn’t stir, hi there! Sit down.

Let me start by saying that nothing’s bloody wrong with either of you, and I’m going to spend the next fifteen hundred words on why the standard advice about candles and communication can suck sweaty balls.

Let’s start with the mechanics (everything else follows from them.)

Drives are things that kill you if you ignore them for long enough. Things like food, water, sleep, warmth, air. Maslow pyramid shit.

As far as I know, nobody has ever died of a sexual dry spell, though the way some people discuss it you’d think our urgent care would be full of them.

No….

Desire is a motivation. It’s an attitude. A willingness. It’s a relationship to pleasure built out of your personal history, your mood, your bandwidth/capacity, your safety, and whether the person suggesting it has done sod all about the washing up or laundry since Tuesday.

It is an experience of embodiment, not a fuel gauge.

You can’t top up a motivation the way you top up a nutrient deficiency. There is no supplement for meaning. What you can do is change the conditions that produce it, and that is a very different project from the one most couples embark on with midnight googling.

There are two separate systems that everyone confuses, including a lot of professionals.

Liking is the visceral “yes”….

Chocolate. A good kiss. The first ten seconds of a hot bath.

The feeling of pleasure is immediate, largely opioid-mediated, and requires no thinking whatsoever.

Wanting is completely different wiring.

Wanting is incentive: attention, anticipation, your brain flagging that something good may be coming, so look sharp.

That’s the dopamine end of things, and dopamine has been so thoroughly mangled by podcast culture that it’s worth saying plainly. It isn’t the pleasure chemical. It’s the pay-attention chemical. Pavlov’s dog never wanted the bell. He wanted the sausage the bell kept promising him.

Once you separate the two, the whole mismatched libido conversation opens up far more clearly, because you might be sitting in any of these:

Wanting to want, with not a flicker of horny (the most common, and by far the most workable)
Liking something enormously and wanting nothing to do with it
Wanting something you don’t much like once it’s underway
Not wanting the thing you used to want, because the conditions that made it good have left the building

None of those is a personality defect.

Each is a different problem with a different solution, which is why “my wife has a low sex drive” is about as diagnostically useful as “my car makes a noise.”

This is where I part company with a good chunk of my profession.

The standard reassurance is that your lower-desire partner isn’t rejecting you, their body is being careful, they’re stressed, be patient, offer touch that goes nowhere. All true. All somewhat useful. But all of it sails straight past the possibility that the sex on offer simply isn’t worth wanting.

Brains acclimate. Repetition flattens the incentive signal. Do the same thing in the same order in the same room at the same time of night for eleven years and your brain files it under known quantity, no need to look sharp. Same ice cream, different weather. The stimulus hasn’t changed, the context has, and context is what the body votes on.

So sometimes what gets labelled low desire is a body exercising excellent judgment. If sex reliably means the same six minutes, opening with the same shoulder squeeze and ending when he does, a body that stops volunteering isn’t faulty, it’s numerate.

Phil Connors in Groundhog Day doesn’t escape Punxsutawney by doing the same Tuesday harder. He escapes by doing something different inside it. (He also learns the piano, which is considerably more than I’m asking of you.)

The hormone story is the most oversold explanation in the entire field. Hormones account for maybe 20% of your sex drive. That’s it. Which means that 80% of your sex drive is not hormone related.

Testosterone as a standalone fix for low desire in women has inconclusive results. Men with low desire are frequently walking around with perfectly respectable testosterone levels. Hormonal contraception can flatten one person’s libido completely and do nothing at all to the next person on an identical dose. If hormones were the mechanism, the data would be a great deal tidier than it is. So don’t buy into the “it’s your hormones” hype, because it’s not the whole story.

None of which means physiology is irrelevant, and I’d never tell you it was. If your desire fell off a cliff rather than drifting, if sex hurts, if you’ve started a new medication (SSRIs, I’m looking at you), if you’re in perimenopause and your sleep, your mood and your vulval tissue have all filed complaints in the same quarter, go and get seen by a doctor who won’t pat your hand. Ruling things in or out is a kindness to yourself.

Just don’t accept “it’s your hormones” as the whole answer. It’s usually the first line of one.

Take sex off the ultimatum list first.

The moment intimacy becomes something one of you owes and the other collects, desire legs it out the back door. It cannot survive conscription, and nothing I can teach you will outrun a scoreboard. Obligation sex is NOT sexy.

Stop waiting to feel horny. The spontaneous model, where lust descends like weather and only then do you have sex, describes a minority of people and almost nobody over forty with a mortgage (or kids!). For most of us, willingness arrives first… you decide you’re up for finding out, you begin, and arousal turns up about eight minutes later once the body has clocked that something interesting is happening. Deciding isn’t faking it, it’s the same principle as not waiting until you fancy going to the gym. Motivation is a bitch and she never shows up when you want her to. We decide, we show up, and then with consistency, we find our discipline regardless of motivation.

Change the context. Try a different room, different hour of day/night, different order of operations, clothes on, hands only, a fortnight where nobody’s allowed to come. (That last one is cruel and it works.) You’re not manufacturing desire out of nothing. You’re giving an incentive system something worth paying attention to.

Figure out what you want to FEEL (emotionally, spiritually, and physically) during intimacy.

We all have different feelings we want to feel. Some of us want to feel cherished, others ravaged, others safe, others wild, punished, used, free, merged, desired etc. There’s a whole host of feelings we may WANT to feel during sex and also a host of feelings we don’t want to feel. Figuring out what we do and don’t want to feel is key.

Keep up solo arousal, and not as a consolation prize. Call it mastubatory maintenance. Or mindful erotic practice. Or “quality solo time”. If the only time your body is ever asked to become aroused is when somebody else wants something from it, of course it hesitates. Bodies that get regular, unpressured, unwitnessed pleasure are much quicker to say yes to company.

Last, and least popular: some of the friction is the point. Eroticism runs on tension, on not quite knowing, on the gap between two separate people. Couples who sand every trace of uncertainty off their sex life in the name of comfort tend to be baffled about where the heat went. It went where you sent it.

You’re not a nuisance and your wanting is not a character flaw. Being the one who reaches out more is exposing, and after enough braced-for-no evenings people go either cold or sulky, neither of which is a good look on anybody.

Two things, then. Offer closeness with no bill attached, so your partner can choose you rather than manage you. And ask yourself honestly whether you’d want the sex you’re offering. If that answer takes you longer than a second, you’ve found your next conversation.

You Can Want Each Other Differently and Still Want Each Other

Most of the couples I see aren’t mismatched. They’re knackered, under-informed, and working from a model of desire that was wrong when somebody handed it to them. The gap between you isn’t an accusation, it’s information about what each of your bodies needs before it will bother.

And if you want to want it, you’re in the good seats. Wanting to want is most of the way there, on a bad map.

None of which resolves neatly. Some year soon you’ll be the higher-desire one and have no idea how that happened.

The Questions Everyone Is Secretly Googling

What is desire discrepancy?

The gap between how much, how often, or in what way two partners want sex. It’s one of the most common things couples bring to a sex professional and, on its own, tells you nothing about the health of your relationship.

Is it normal for couples to have different sex drives?

Yes, to the point of tedium. Almost every couple has a higher-desire and a lower-desire partner, and those positions swap over the years, often more than once.

My husband/wife has a low sex drive. Does that mean s/he isn’t attracted to me?

Usually not. Low desire is far more often about stress, resentment, medication, sleep, boredom, or a sex life that’s become entirely predictable. Attraction and wanting run on different circuits.

Do hormones cause low libido?

Sometimes, partly. The research on testosterone and desire is inconclusive on its own: plenty of people with low desire have unremarkable hormone levels, and plenty with low levels want sex constantly. Worth investigating, never the whole story.

How do you deal with mismatched libidos?

Take ultimatums off the table, stop waiting for spontaneous horniness, change the context instead of trying to repair the person, figure out what you want to feel, keep up solo arousal, and deal with the resentment (yes, including the washing up).

When should we get help with a desire discrepancy?

When the gap keeps producing hurt or distance, when there’s pain involved, or when you’ve had the same conversation nine times and it ends the same way each time. That’s the moment for someone who works with bodies and not only with talk.

Desire Is Not a Drive, Which Is Why It Doesn't Behave Like Hunger

Wanting and Liking Run on Separate Wiring

Different Sex Drives, or the Same Tuesday Fourteen Hundred Times?

Before You Blame the Hormones

How to Deal With Mismatched Libidos

A Word for the Higher-Desire Partner

You Can Want Each Other Differently and Still Want Each Other

The Questions Everyone Is Secretly Googling