Desire discrepancy

One of you wants sex more often than the other. That is the whole of it, and by itself it is a difference in appetite rather than a fault line running through the relationship. Bodies rarely keep the same pace as each other for long.

What wears people down is almost never the difference itself. It is the layer that grows on top of it: the one who reaches out starts hearing every no as a statement about being wanted, and the one who declines starts bracing for the question before it has even been asked. By that point nobody is talking about sex any more. You are both defending yourselves.

The number is not the thing to fix

Couples often arrive wanting a figure they can agree on. Twice a week, once a fortnight, something settled and written down. A figure buys about ten days of quiet. Then whoever agreed to it under pressure begins to resent it, and the other one can feel that happening long before either of them says so.

The question that actually goes somewhere is what has to be true for wanting to be possible. For one of you that might be very little. For the other it might be a day that felt shared rather than carried alone, a body that has stopped running on adrenaline, a door that locks. Those conditions are specific, and you can do something about them in a way you never can with a number.

Where it stops being a standoff

Something shifts once both of you can say the true thing without it costing anything. The partner who wants more usually wants evidence of being wanted, not a quota. The partner who wants less usually wants the freedom to decline without it detonating, which happens to be the same thing that makes a yes worth having.

Neither of you has to change size to fit the other. The work is arriving at something you both actually chose, rather than one of you agreeing and the other one settling.

Where this work happens: For Couples · Related reading: When one of you wants more sex than the other · Back to the relationship glossary

RelatingWise offers coaching and education, not therapy. Anything that needs clinical care belongs with a therapist; Patricia works as one in her own practice at patricia-heinis.de.

A note on who this is for: we write in terms of couples and partners for simplicity, but this is for every gender, orientation, and relationship form, and for you and whoever you love.