What to Do When Your Partner Often Wants Sex but You’re Not in the Mood

How to handle this common conundrum in a long-term relationship.

You love your partner and want to be with him. But you just don’t seem to want to have sex with him.

And it’s wearing on you.

You don’t like making this person you care about feel rejected. And you don’t like feeling like their advances are a nuisance, something you have to deal with, like dirty dishes in the sink or a car without gas.

Avoiding him gracefully is a skill you’ve honed. You do anything to make sure he doesn’t get encouraged, like avoiding sexy clothing around him, pulling away when he touches you, and ensuring your mouth remains closed when you kiss.

Or maybe you’ve started to resent her slightly. Because often you succumb to that pressure. There are only so many excuses you can make in order to avoid her. So you have sex just to get it over with and buy you another few days, weeks, or months before “it’s time” to do the deed again.

There is no joy in it anymore. It’s simply an obligation you must fulfill every now and then to keep her from accusing you of not loving her anymore.

Does this sound familiar to you? Are you in this place or do you imagine that your partner might be?

If so, you’re not alone. This is commonly referred to as the chasing dynamic, and it’s defined by one person in the relationship always chasing the other for sex. The further one runs away the faster the other chases.

Now how do you get out of this hole? Here’s some advice.

Stop kicking the can down the road.

At some point when I was in my first-ever long-term relationship, I lost the desire for my partner. When he came onto me, I’d make excuses for why I didn’t want to have sex until I’d run out. And when I ran out, I’d have sex just to appease him and get it out of the way.

I was afraid to admit, not just to him but to myself, that I didn’t really want him. How do you tell someone you love, you don’t want to have sex with them?

That’s an extremely difficult thing to hear. But what I didn’t know back then but do now is this: The alternative is much much worse.

Having sex when you don’t want to have it is even sadder than telling someone that difficult truth.

The reality is if this is the dynamic you’ve suffered for a while, your relationship is in trouble anyway. And your partner probably already knows that somewhere deep down inside.

You might as well address it head-on.

The first step to solving this is to commit to the fact that you are done kicking the can down the road. You’re done hiding from the truth and avoiding confrontation. It’s time to heal your relationship.

Spend some time figuring your own shit out.

Forget your partner for a second. This is hard situation not just because of them but because confronting this truth just as an individual is scary. We get the impression from popular culture that if we love our partners, we should want to have sex with them all the time. And if we don’t, there’s something wrong with us. As psychoanalyst Michael Bader says in his book, Arousal:

“The topic of sexual frequency is shrouded in a cloud of unrealistic expectation and embarrassment.”

Many people believe they do not have sex as often as they should. Bader continues, “If some degree of sexual boredom is universal, perhaps it needn’t be so shameful.”

And he’s right. It’s not something to be ashamed of.

There are many reasons you might start losing sexual interest in your partner. In my case, with my partner in college, we had been fighting a lot. He was very controlling and jealous and so at some point in our relationship, I’d started making a habit of lying to him about what I was doing or where I was going.

Being deceitful to my partner created a distance between us. For a lot of people, especially women, we need to feel the emotional closeness in order to get turned on, at least with someone we are familiar with.

Lying also meant my respect for him had deteriorated. You can’t really totally respect someone if you lie to them.

In my case, our sexual problems were actually just a reflection of a much larger problem, a breakdown in communication and trust.

Maybe that’s the case for you too. Often (not always, but often) your sex life reflects the health of your relationship in general. And even when the two things don’t relate one-to-one, we often see them that way.

However, it could be something totally different. For example, both men's and women’s desire for sex can decrease naturally with age.

Another possibility is simply familiarity. There is evidence to suggest that simply cohabitating with a partner can cause you to lose sexual interest in them over time. For both men and women, it’s normal for desire to wane.

Take some time aside to think about this. Journal about it, talk to your doctor or therapist about it, if possible. Figure out why you think you might want less sex than your partner does.

Make a plan.

As you might guess, simply going up to your partner and telling her: I’m not interested in having sex with you anymore — full stop — might not go down so well.

They’re going to need to hear more than that.

So revisit the reasons why you think you have lost desire. This will inform what you will suggest going forward.

In the case of my relationship with my ex from college, we were having problems and I was not ready to be in a long-term committed relationship, anyway. It wasn’t worth working through our issues, so the solution I chose was to end the relationship.

Given we shared no bank account or children, it wasn’t extremely hard to do (okay, it was actually really hard, but I understand it could have been 10 times harder.)

But in hindsight, maybe that wasn’t the only option for us. What if our lives had been more intertwined? What if I had wanted to commit to him for the long haul?

Then I would have needed to come up with another solution that would work for both of us.

This would mean coming clean about everything that I lied to him about and seeing if he would be willing to start over. In other words, deal with the overarching issues in our relationship.

In the case that you don’t feel desire and you don’t have a specific reason for it, you might want to take the approach suggested by Emily Nagoski in her best-selling book Come as You Are. Basically, go on a sexual hiatus and make time once per week for intimacy, as opposed to sex. I outline how to do this more specifically here.

Tell your partner how you feel.

Okay, so you’ve made your plan. Now it’s time to actually talk to your partner about it.

But don’t get too stuck on one idea of how this conversation will go and what will come out of it. At this point, you have not talked about this at all. So you don’t actually know yet how your partner feels about the situation.

Find a good time to have a long talk.

Once you’re sitting down with him, you can say, “I don’t feel in the mood for sex lately. I think it might be hormonal.” Or “I’m not sure why, but I haven’t felt desirous in a long time.”

Whatever you end up with as the reason, say that first. Cut to the chase.

And if you want to stay with your partner, the most important thing you want to get across after that is this: “I love you and I want to work on this, and I have some suggestions about how we could, depending on how you feel about it.”

Empathetically come to an agreement.

After you’ve put the discussion on the table, now it’s up to her to tell you how she feels. Expect that she might be hurt or angry. This is normal. It feels like a huge rejection from the person she loves the most.

Give them space to feel whatever it is they need to feel and don’t expect a response even that day.

Once emotions have settled, revisit the conversation. Try to get them to tell you what their ideal sex life looks like and why.

How often do they want to have sex? And what are the reasons they want more sex? Do they want to have sex to relieve stress? Do they just want quality time with you, to have your attention on them? Are they worried, that if you two don’t have sex, the relationship itself will fall apart?

Try to understand where they’re coming from. And that will help you find a solution together.

This is a scary situation to be in, and it could end in fights, tears, and bruised egos. A lot of couples don’t talk about their sex lives at all just to avoid these messy feelings.

But addressing this head-on might be the best thing that ever happened to your relationship.

By revealing your most private thoughts to your partner, you will get closer to them and you will feel more alive and free than you ever have.

Remember, you are not alone, you are normal. This is normal. Don’t be afraid.

Vulnerability is the key to closeness, connection, and that wonderful thing we all live for called love.

If you dug this article, stay in touch with me as I share all the lessons I’m learning in sex, love, and life.