If you’re in a long-term relationship, the chances are that one or both of you will experience sexual health issues. Whether the reason is physical or psychological, your sex life can come to a halt, or end altogether, and this can take its toll on your relationship wellness, as well as your own sense of wellbeing. If your partner seems to no longer want to have sex with you, what do you do?
The partners of people with sexual dysfunction have three options:
1. Suppress your own urges. Deprive yourself of sex and feel frustrated as a result. This will inevitably lead you to resent your partner over time, and even develop a stress-induced physical or psychological disease such as hypertension, peptic ulcer, ischemic heart disease, hysteria, psoriasis and migraine.
2. Get out of the relationship and/or start a new one. You may want to leave your partner, or else indulge in sex outside of marriage. A lot of people use their partner’s sexual dysfunction to justify having an affair, as their “valid” needs aren’t being fulfilled. However, I’m not sure your partner will see it that way.
3. Understand, accept and cope with the situation. This is really the only option you have if you want to come out the other side happy and strong in your relationship. You need to understand this is an inevitable part of your journey as a couple, and, when you evaluate the relationship as a whole, there are strong aspects of it – full of genuine love – which are worth staying and fighting for. There are resources available to help you get your sex life back on track, and other ways to share intimacy in the meantime.
The truth is that everyone goes through sexual problems, and it’s not the be-all and end-all of a happy relationship or marriage. Researchers at the Family Therapy Centre of the Western Psychiatric Institute at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania asked 100 married couples about their sex life. While at least 80% of these partners described themselves as “very happy” or “happy”, over 90% reported having a less-than-perfect sexual relationship. Moreover, not one couple expressed a need for change.
The problem is that it’s easier to isolate and focus on a small aspect of the problem – sex – rather than look at the relationship as a whole. More often than not, other factors are at work in your relationship, and just fixing your sex life won’t solve these underlying issues. Sexual dysfunction, be it problems with arousal, desire or with your sexual organs, is often a symptom of a deeper emotional problem, especially if you’ve not experienced any problems with your sexual functioning before. You may have unexpressed anger or disappointment, unresolved conflicts, a fear of failure or a lack of trust, and that is what’s keeping you from enjoying a healthy sexual relationship.
While there are medications you can take to help with sexual issues, and things you can do to spice things up in the bedroom, the problems won’t go away if you try to hide or suppress the underlying weaknesses in your relationship. By discovering the real problems and working on them with your partner, you will see your sexual problems diminish and eventually disappear. You might want to seek the help of a therapist, who can help to open the channels of communication, and find the cause of your sexual problems. The important thing to remember is that sex is a mirror or barometer of the rest of your relationship, telling you how well your relationship is working, and when it needs more attention.