MEN IN THE BEDROOM: DESIRE DISCREPANCY IN MARRIAGE
Desire discrepancy is an inevitability of marriage. In all long-term relationships there comes a period when one partner’s desire is greater than the other’s – when one partner wants more intercourse than the other is willing to participate in.
Most couples find a way of coping with this discrepancy, but for some it is an unbridgeable gap that gives rise to tremendous hurt and misunderstanding. It can lead to fury and family breakup or to plummeting self-esteem and pathological behaviour.
Sex therapists see more clients suffering from desire difficulties than almost any other type of sexual disorder. There are clients who worry that their libido has waned inexplicably, those who complain of their spouse’s lack of desire and those who feel burdened with an oversexed partner.
Increasingly, it is men who have low desire. The old stereotype of men being eager and women making excuses no longer applies. More and more often, women are expressing frustration about unmet needs.
In the mid-seventies, men accounted for about 30 per cent of low-desire cases treated at sex therapy clinics. By (he eighties they were accounting for more than 50 per cent of cases.
By the nineties, the great majority of complaints that one partner had fizzled out sexually were coming from women.
Women were no longer lying back and making shopping lists or thinking of England. They had become willing partners.
The sexual revolution of the sixties and early seventies promised women new enjoyment. Masters and Johnson freed them from the quest for vaginal orgasms, the pill freed them from fear of pregnancy and the inconveniences of other birth-control methods, and the women’s movement encouraged them to take charge of their sexuality.
But after all that, men began to lag behind and respond less and less frequently to women’s overtures. Women find it upsetting and humiliating to fail to rouse their partner’s libido. While not being touched and noticed affects women severely, men frequently don’t even want to think about the implications of not being interested in sex.
Mrs S.F. was sexually rejected throughout an 8-year marriage. Although she and her husband managed to produce two children, the sex they had was extremely infrequent, always on his terms and mechanical. Painfully she recounted her predicament:
While at home with my two young children I would watch soap operas during the day and cry when there was a romantic kissing scene. I wept because I could not remember what it felt like to be kissed. At the time I really believed that if he would just kiss me now and again, then 1 could cope. I had given up all hope of ever having a normal sex life.
Out of loyalty to him, and to protect myself, I told no-one. I did not feel like a women. I felt devoid of gender. Although 1 was considered attractive, I thought there must be something repulsive about my appearance or behaviour to cause his rejection. I stopped caring about how I looked, gained weight, started wearing baggy jeans, long cardigans and desert boots.
Therapists told Mrs S.F. that her husband was not abnormal. His sex drive was not absent initially but it was low (he wanted sex every 6 weeks). As a result of his upbringing, his history or perhaps his physiology, he had little drive. This is not bad or wrong.
The pain in their relationship came not so much from the differences in their desire but from their inability to negotiate sexual compromises. One therapist put it thus: not only were their sex drives mismatched, they also had mismatched sexual expectations and attitudes. She interpreted his low desire as rejecting and controlling. But it wasn’t. He was not withholding; he just didn’t want frequent intercourse with her or anyone else. She took it personally, and eventually they found themselves in a vicious cycle in which any desire he might have had originally would have evaporated.
What typically happens in such marriages is that sex becomes a highly charged issue, and this has a paradoxical effect. It enhances the sexual readiness of the partner with the high sex drive and inhibits desire in the partner with the low sex drive.
People with a high sex drive often use sex to express and experience love. They have a strong need to be desired, and if they are not, they feel rejected. People with a low sex drive find fulfilment in nonsexual ways, through closeness and communication with their partners. This man would not have understood how painful it was for his wife when he said no to sex.
Desire discrepancy is bread and butter for sex therapists. A mismatch in sex drives is a relationship inevitability, not a dysfunction, and there are ways of dealing with it.
Perfect sexual synchronicity exists only in the movies.
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