This week I received and extremely sweet email from a fan, who also asked me for some advice. He and his girlfriend have been dating for a long time, and both love each other dearly, however due to an increasingly busy schedule their sex life decreased. So today’s cookie question is all about how to fix low libido and bring back your sex drive.
All couples in long term relationships will go through ups and downs when it comes to their sex lives. Your sex life is just the same as your life life, and sometimes life gets in the way of sex. But it’s when those things keep getting in the way, and sex steadily drops places on the list of priorities that we can start to feel less into it.
It’s completely common, and often referred to as “dead bedrooms” – now this is the very worst, when you hardly have any sex at all, maybe once every three months or less. The thing is, it’s very gradual most of the time, and you don’t realise your sex life is dying, until it’s too late.
Well it’s not never too late. There are multiple reasons why couples start having lower sex drives. The most common one is probably tiredness. When you live busy lives, going to work, looking after a family, trying to juggle the million and one things you need to get done, it’s hard to work up the energy for sex when you finally get to bed. Instead all you want to do is go to sleep.
Sex can sometimes end up feeling like a chore, or routine, you may feel pressured by your partner and when these feelings come into play, it’s hard to enjoy it. You stop enjoying it, you stop wanting it. To fix a low libido, you’ve firstly got to change how you view sex.
Start by stop thinking about sex at all. Sometimes we focus on one thing and it makes it a bigger deal that it really is. So stop putting all that pressure on yourself when you don’t need to. Instead, think of ways to relax and find time for intimacy.
Intimacy is not the same as sex. It can be something simple like just finding time to really talk to your partner. When we live busy lives, sometimes we forget to listen, and it’s important in any relationship that there’s good communication between the two parties. So find sometime to sit with each other and just talk about your day, or your parents, or that new fad diet the girls at the office are doing.
Next is to re-introduce physical contact. It’s another form of contact. The important thing is that you should want to touch your partner for the feeling of intimacy and not for the feeling of sex, and there should be no pressure of sex when you do this. Things like holding hands when you’re sitting on the sofa together, or just brushing their hair away from their face. It can be a hug, because sometimes we forget how nice hugs are.
The point of all this is to reconnect with your partner, to make them feel cared for, and most importantly wanted. It helps to make you feel wanted as well. You can’t have sex without the feeling of being wanted. So you’ve got to be happy with yourself as well, and you have to communicate with your partner.
Now to bring back the sex, you don’t need to do anything crazy or kinky. You don’t need to try out new sex moves, or fetishes, because that’s probably not the problem. It’s very easy to say “sex has gotten boring, and we need to just spice it up” but these are just short term fixes.
I would say make time for dates. Have a night once every week, or every two weeks, where you take the time to get dressed up, go out to see a movie or a have a nice meal. You could stay in, and run the bath with candles and bubbles and soft music. You could go to a football match. Do couple things, date things that you used to do more often before.
You can write date nights on the calendar and have them as something to look forward to. Then enjoy your date night, for what it is. Enjoy the film, or the meal, or the football match. Have fun with your partner. When a loving couple are relaxed and happy, when they both feel wanted, that’s normally when your sex drive comes back. You forget about the destination and instead enjoy the ride.
So remember:
1) Time to Talk
2) Intimacy Not Sex
3) Time for Fun
Now if you do want to know some sexy ways to spice up your sex life, I’ll be doing a follow up blog next week. Stay tuned.