When you want sex more or less than your partner

One of you would like more. One of you would like less. One of you lies awake wondering what is wrong with them for wanting it. The other lies awake wondering what is wrong with them for not. Neither of you says so, because it is the one subject that is somehow harder to raise with the person you sleep next to than with anyone else.

This is the most common sexual difficulty couples have. It is so common that it is strange we talk about it so little. Here is a plain attempt.

Nobody is broken

The person who wants more is not a pest. The person who wants less is not frigid, or cold, or withholding. You are two people with different appetites, and appetites change with age, stress, health, medication, children, work and how the relationship is going. The person who wanted more at thirty may want less at forty-five. The gap is not a verdict on either of you, and it is not, usually, a verdict on how attracted you are to each other.

It becomes a problem when it becomes a score. When one of you is keeping count and the other knows it. When every touch carries a question. When the one who wants less starts going to bed early to avoid the question, and the one who wants more starts reading that as rejection, and both of you are right about what is happening and wrong about why.

What tends to sit underneath

For many people, especially in long relationships, desire is responsive: it shows up once things have started, not before. Waiting to feel like it before anything happens can mean waiting a long time, and it is easy to mistake that for not wanting your partner at all.

Exhaustion matters more than anyone admits. So do small children, who do not care about your evening. So does resentment: it is very hard to want someone you are quietly angry with about the housework, and the anger about the housework is often the actual conversation. Some common medicines flatten desire, including many antidepressants and some contraception. Low mood does the same. Pain during sex, for anyone, kills wanting fast and is worth a GP visit rather than silence. Menopause changes things physically and is treatable.

None of these is fixed by one partner trying harder to want, or the other trying harder to persuade.

Talk about it somewhere else

Not in bed, not after a refusal, not at midnight. In daylight, clothed, in a kitchen. Each of you say what it is like from your side without arguing with the other's version. "I miss feeling wanted by you" and "I feel like I'm failing a test every night" can both be true at once and both deserve to be heard.

Ask what would make it easier rather than what would make it more. Often the answer is about everything but sex: time, sleep, being touched without an agenda, a conversation that is not about the children. Agree what you will try. Agree to come back to it in a month. Low drama, slightly awkward, enormously better than another year of silence.

Help exists and is ordinary to use. Relate offers sex therapy. COSRT lists accredited therapists. Your GP can check the physical causes.

The line that matters

Everything above assumes something that needs saying out loud: both of you are free to say no, and no costs nothing.

Nobody owes anyone sex. Not because you are married, not because it has been a while, not because they have been good lately. Wanting more is fine. Asking is fine. Being disappointed is fine. What is not fine is pressure: sulking that lasts for days, guilt, "if you really loved me", comparisons, going cold until you give in, or making the rest of life harder until you do. A yes given to make the pressure stop is a payment.

If you are the one who wants more, check with yourself whether any of that is you. Most people who do it do not think of themselves as pressuring. They think of themselves as hurt. Both can be true, and the hurt does not make it all right.

If you are the one who wants less and you have started to say yes because saying no is frightening, or because you know what the evening will be like if you do not, then this is something with a different shape from a mismatch of appetites, and it belongs with the other questions at What is coercive control? rather than on this page.

For everyone else, which is most couples: the kitchen conversation is the whole secret. It is awkward for about four minutes and then it is just two people talking.