Couple
It's been months or years and asking for it became part of the problem and pretending you didn't care became the other part.
You can’t remember the last time. Or you can, exactly, because you’ve been counting. One of you initiates and gets turned down. One of you avoids initiating because of how it goes when you do. The avoidance becomes the new normal. Eventually neither of you brings it up because bringing it up is its own conversation. You sleep next to them. You don’t touch. You’ve stopped flirting because flirting feels like setting yourself up for rejection.
The sex isn’t really the problem anymore. The pattern around the absence of sex is the problem.
Nothing brought it back.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came up in households where sex was either silent or weaponized, and you both brought scripts about it that don’t quite match. You may have grown up with parents whose physical affection you could feel was performance, and you absorbed that desire was something to manage rather than something that ran on its own. You may have arrived at this marriage carrying a previous relationship where the sexual rhythm was different, and the loss of what you knew has been harder to admit than the absence itself. You may have lived through a stretch when one of you was sick, working too much, or pregnant, and the pause never came undone.
The more one partner asks, the more the other feels the asking as obligation. Obligation kills desire. Killed desire produces less initiation from the asked-of partner. Less initiation from them produces more anxious initiation from the asker. The asker feels rejected. The asked-of feels pressured. Both withdraw.
This is the “be spontaneous” paradox in a couple. Trying to make sex happen by asking for it is structurally guaranteed to make it not happen. The asking is what’s killing what you’re asking for.
For the related sexual side, see I have low libido and I can’t get aroused with my partner .
You can’t request your way back into desire. The requesting is the thing producing the absence.
Strategic therapy attacks the asking-pressuring-rejecting-withdrawing sequence at the seam where each response triggers the next, because that sequence is what’s been killing what each of you wants. We change what the asker does at the moment they would normally ask, and what the asked-of does at the moment they would normally brace. The desire that’s been buried under that loop gets room to surface because the thing burying it stops happening.
The sex comes back when the responses that have been pushing it away aren’t running anymore.
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