Loss of desire in a long relationship: why it happens and what can be done

“Nothing is wrong. I love him, I like being with him. I just don’t think about it any more. I used to spend the whole day waiting for us to get home. Now I lie down in the evening and I’m simply glad the day is over.”

When people describe a loss of desire in a long relationship, they almost never describe it as a disaster. They describe it as something that happened quietly, without a moment they could point to. There was no row after which things cooled. There was no one else. There were just the years, work, perhaps children, perhaps a move — and one day you notice that sex has become something you think about with a faint sense of guilt rather than anticipation.

In this post I want to explain why this happens so often, and to both partners, not just one. If what troubles you most is that one of you wants more than the other, I wrote about that in When your desires don’t match: sex in a long relationship. Here I am interested in something else: why desire fades on its own over time, even when both of you are happy with the relationship — and what can be done about it.

More common than you think

Because almost nobody talks about it, many people feel their couple is the exception. It isn’t. In Natsal-3, a large British survey of sexual attitudes and health with more than fifteen thousand participants, lack of interest in sex was the most common problem reported by sexually active participants: in the past year it had lasted at least three months for 34 per cent of women and 15 per cent of men. That is not a small group of people who are somehow “broken”. That is almost one woman in three.

Research has also shown that time in a relationship is one of the factors. In 2012 the psychologists Sarah Murray and Robin Milhausen found, in young adults, that women’s sexual desire was linked to relationship duration — the longer the relationship, the lower the desire — while in men they found no such link. A decade earlier the German researcher Dietrich Klusmann had described a similar pattern: the frequency of sex fell with the length of the partnership for both partners, while desire changed more in women than in men.

It would be easy to draw the wrong conclusion that fading desire is a “women’s problem”. It isn’t. Men’s desire also changes in long relationships; men are simply less likely to say so, because it feels like admitting something shameful. Research measures what people report, and men report less. And in a couple, the one whose desire has faded more can just as well be him as her.

Before you look to the relationship: the body and your doctor

Before you start thinking about habit, stress and resentment, it is important to rule out physical causes. Sexual desire is also biological. It is affected by hormones, thyroid function, chronic illness, pain, insomnia, pregnancy and breastfeeding, the menopause and many medications — among them some antidepressants, hormonal contraception and blood pressure medication.

So the first step is a conversation with a doctor: your GP, a gynaecologist or a urologist. You don’t need to know exactly what is wrong. It is enough to say: “I’ve noticed I hardly want sex any more, and I don’t know why.” That is an entirely legitimate reason for an appointment. If there is a sexual dysfunction, your doctor will refer you to a specialist in sexual medicine.

Let me be clear about my own role: I am neither a sexologist nor a sex therapist. I am a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy. In couples therapy, intimacy is often one of the themes, because the whole relationship is mirrored in it. Treating sexual dysfunctions, however, is the work of other professionals. This post is about the part of fading desire that is created by the relationship and by life.

Four forces that quietly take desire away

Once physical causes have been ruled out, the question remains why desire has withdrawn anyway. The answer is rarely a single one. Most often four things are intertwined: habit, stress, unspoken resentment and something we might call too much safety.

None of these forces means that love is over. They do mean that desire in a long relationship is something that needs tending differently from the beginning, when it arrived on its own.

Habit: when your partner becomes part of the furniture

At the start of a relationship everything is new. You don’t know how the other person will react, what they are thinking, whether they will still call you tomorrow. That uncertainty is tiring, but it also fuels desire. The body is alert, attentive, curious.

Over time the uncertainty recedes. That is a good thing — it is why you can fall asleep next to the other person, trust them and build a life together. But at the same time something happens that psychologists call habituation: we respond less and less to a stimulus that is always present. Not because it is worth less, but because we stop noticing it. You see your partner every day, in tracksuit bottoms, doing the washing-up, when they are ill. You stop seeing them as someone you might desire and start seeing them as someone you share a household with.

Habit is not the enemy. It is the price of familiarity. It only becomes a problem when it is all that is left.

Stress, tiredness and the to-do list

The second force is more prosaic. Desire needs a little room in your head. When your head is full of a deadline, a sick child, the mortgage and parents who need help, there isn’t much left over for desire.

The Swiss psychologist Guy Bodenmann and his colleagues studied how everyday stress affects couples. They found that external stress — at work, with money, with organising life — doesn’t stop at the individual but spills over into the relationship: more everyday stress was linked to less sex and lower marital satisfaction. You can read more about what long-term strain does to the body in the knowledge base under Chronic stress.

An unequal division of the load plays a particular role here. Whoever feels they carry most of the invisible work — that they have to remember everything, from medical check-ups to birthday presents — will find it hard to switch in the evening from the role of organiser to the role of lover. It isn’t that they don’t want to. It’s that their body is still at work.

Resentment that comes to bed

The third force is the least obvious and often the strongest. Sex is a very sensitive gauge of everything in a relationship that has not been resolved. Unspoken anger rarely shows up in bed as anger. It shows up as coolness, tiredness, a headache, as “I’m not in the mood tonight”.

If you feel your partner doesn’t hear you, that your needs don’t matter, or that you have said the same thing for the fifth time and nothing has happened, your body will resist closeness even if you have rationally decided you don’t care. It is hard to be open and vulnerable with someone you are angry with. I wrote about how small arguments pile up into something bigger in It is not about the dishes: what really lies underneath recurring arguments, and you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under Resentment.

Interestingly, the partner who carries the resentment often doesn’t know it themselves. They say they are “just not interested”, and they mean it. Only when a conversation opens up how much has gone unsaid does it turn out that desire hasn’t disappeared, but has hidden behind a wall.

Esther Perel: safety versus novelty

The fourth force is the most paradoxical. In her book Mating in Captivity, the psychotherapist Esther Perel put forward an idea that surprised many readers: love and desire do not have the same needs. Love needs closeness, safety, predictability. Desire needs distance, mystery, something unknown. Love is about having; desire is about wanting.

This means that the very things that make a long relationship good — knowing each other down to the last detail, always being available, telling each other everything — can at the same time stifle desire. Perel observes that people desire their partner most when they see them from a distance: performing, laughing with others, in their element, being someone who isn’t only theirs.

In the language of family therapy we call this differentiation: the ability to be in a close relationship and still remain a separate person with your own thoughts, interests and world. Couples who merge into one — who do everything together, have nothing of their own and don’t allow each other to be different — often have a warm but rather quiet bedroom. I wrote more about what happens when partners start to develop each in their own way in When your partner grows in another direction: differentiation in a long relationship.

This is how a conversation with a couple who came with exactly this question might sound (composite, not a real person):

“But we do everything together. We even go to the supermarket together.”
“When did you last see him doing something he’s good at, without you being part of it?”
She thinks. “Last summer. He played at our friends’ wedding. I didn’t know he could still play the guitar.”
“What was it like, watching him?”
She smiles, a little embarrassed. “As if I didn’t know him. It was… lovely.”

That moment of “as if I didn’t know him” matters. It is not proof that you should live apart. It is proof that there is still something unknown in the other person — and that desire returns when you catch sight of that unknown again, if only for a moment.

What can be done

The good news is that fading desire is not a one-way street. But the solution is not a single technique or a weekend in a hotel. Three things help.

First, novelty in your shared life. Arthur Aron and his colleagues showed that couples who do new and somewhat exciting things together report greater relationship satisfaction than couples who only do pleasant, familiar things together. You don’t need to go skydiving. A new route, a new course, a conversation about something you have never talked about is enough.

Second, space for each of you. Your own friends, your own hobby, your own time. Not as an escape from the relationship, but as a way of having something to bring back to your partner — and of letting them see you from a distance.

Third, treating sex as something you share. Amy Muise and her colleagues found that people who care about their partner’s sexual needs — not out of duty, but because they care about them — maintain their own desire for longer in long-term relationships. This does not mean having sex when you don’t want to. It means that sex is a subject you are both responsible for and can talk about. And for many people desire doesn’t even begin before touch, but only wakes up during it. You can read more about this in Responsive desire: why, for many people, sex doesn’t start with wanting it.

And finally: if resentment is in the background, desire won’t come back through novelty. First you need to clear up what was left unsaid. Sometimes a couple can manage this alone; sometimes help from a third person is welcome. In couples therapy we don’t start with sex, but with how you hear each other and what happens when one of you needs the other.

Exercise: the partner you don’t yet know

You can do this exercise on your own, today. It takes ten minutes and a little curiosity.

1. Write down three moments when you felt most attracted to your partner, or when they were most attracted to you. However long ago it was.
2. For each, write down what was around it: where you were, what they were doing, whether anyone else was there, how you felt about yourself.
3. Look for the common thread. Were they in their element? Were you somewhere new? Did you feel relaxed, rested, free?
4. Choose one small thing that could bring that condition back, at least partly, this week — a walk together along an unfamiliar route, an evening out with your own friends, or simply asking about something you don’t yet know about them.
5. If you feel safe enough, tell them what you wrote down. Not as a demand, but as a memory: “Do you remember when…? I saw you differently then.”

The point of the exercise is not to schedule sex. The point is to notice what feeds your desire — and that this is not a mystery, but something you can go looking for.

Where this explanation doesn’t apply

Everything I have written applies to couples who love each other and whose desire has faded because of life. But it doesn’t always apply.

Not every decline in desire is a problem. If you are both content with having less sex than at the start, and nobody is suffering, there is nothing to fix. There is no correct frequency. It only becomes a problem when one or both of you are suffering.

Sometimes the answer lies in depression, anxiety or trauma. Loss of desire can be one of the signs of depression, and often a side effect of its treatment as well. A history of sexual abuse can unexpectedly reopen old wounds in a long relationship, just as safety grows. In these cases novelty doesn’t help; a different kind of help is needed — I wrote about the link between depression and the relationship in Depression in a relationship: what happens to the couple, and what you can do.

Sometimes fading desire is a message about the relationship that is hard to hear. If the relationship is full of humiliation, control or violence, the body protects you by withdrawing. Then the goal is not for desire to return, but for you to be safe. If you are experiencing violence, in Slovenia you can call the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence on 080 11 55, or 113 in an emergency.

And sometimes it isn’t a decline at all, but desire that was always low. People differ in how much sex means to them, and some experience little or no sexual desire. That is not an illness to be treated, but something a couple can talk about openly.

What to remember

• A decline in sexual desire in a long relationship is very common and does not mean love is over.
• Rule out physical causes first — with your GP, a gynaecologist or a urologist.
• Desire most often withdraws because of habit, stress, resentment and too much merging.
• Love needs safety; desire needs some distance and novelty — a long relationship needs both.
• There is no correct frequency of sex; it is only a problem when one or both of you are suffering.