There are a lot of married British ladies over 35 out there who never have sex—and it's their husbands' fault. But it's not just married British ladies with this problem. Women everywhere have a fucking problem. The widespread, but apparently mistaken, notion is that women are the ones who are "too tired" or "have a headache." But according to this study quoted in the Daily News, it's the dudes who aren't in the mood.
This was borne out in conversations with several ladyfriends of mine. "Our sex life was great for the first year," says a 29-year-old editor I'll call Liane. "Then we started doing it less and less, and I was always the one initiating." Liane and her boyfriend have been living together for a year and a half, and co-habitation has just made things worse. "Now it's like we're roommates, not lovers. He's really affectionate, but we hardly ever have actual penis-in-vagina sex. I'm dying here."
One wonders, of course, why Liane and her boyfriend do not simply break up. "That would seem to be the logical thing to do, wouldn't it?" she says. "I do love him, though. I don't really know what to do. If I suspected he was cheating, it would be easier to break up with him."
And indeed, cheating is often the cause of the loss of interest! (Or a weird gain in interest.) A 30-year-old blogger I'll call Jill had been dating her boyfriend for almost a year and a half when he lost nearly all interest in sex. "And this was after he used to BEG ME to have sex all the time," she says. "He had effectively emotionally 'pulled out' of the relationship and so was no longer interested in doing it."
Jill tried to talk to him about it, she says, but he would brush her off, saying he was "too stressed out." But in reality, he had moved to a new city "and realized he could have terrible sex with dozens of girls instead of just me," she says. And she cautions: "Don't ever believe them when they say they're too stressed out for sex. He just doesn't want to do it with you anymore."
A 32-year-old woman I'll call Katherine, who lives in Park Slope, says she realized early on in her relationship with her now-ex-husband that she had a higher sex drive than he did—but it wasn't an issue until a couple years into their relationship, when it went way down. "When we talked about it, it felt so weird and Twilight Zone-y," Katherine says. "I am a woman! You are a man! How come i want it and you don't? But he maintained throughout that he doesn't have that high a drive."
The Daily News blamed a number of factors: the rise in Internet pornography, the recession, performance anxiety. Is this what happens in life, to everyone? It's all too depressing to even contemplate.
