My Partner Doesn't Want Sex as Much as I Do. What Do We Do?

There are few relationship problems that can make two otherwise reasonable people feel quite as terrible about themselves as wanting different amounts of sex.

If you are the person who wants more sex, you may have started wondering what the lack of sex means. Is my partner still attracted to me? Are we becoming roommates? Am I supposed to accept feeling sexually frustrated forever? You might miss sex itself, but you may also miss being pursued, feeling desirable, or having access to a kind of intimacy that is particularly important to you. After enough rejection, even a fairly confident person can start feeling vulnerable and resentful.

Meanwhile, your partner may be having an entirely different miserable experience. They know you want more sex. They know every affectionate touch has the potential to turn into an initiation. They may feel guilty about disappointing you and increasingly anxious about something that is supposedly meant to be pleasurable. Even if you are trying very hard not to pressure them, they may be putting plenty of pressure on themselves.

Eventually, you can end up in an absurd situation in which both people desperately want their sex life to improve, and almost everything they're doing to improve it is making it worse.

This is one of the most common problems I see in couples therapy. It is often described as a desire discrepancy, mismatched libido, or simply having different sex drives. I prefer "desire discrepancy," partly because "libido" can make it sound as though each of us has a fixed quantity of sexual desire stored somewhere in our bodies, like gasoline in a tank. In reality, desire is much more responsive to what is happening in our lives, bodies, and relationships.

Understanding that distinction can completely change the conversation.

Different sex drives are normal. What happens around the difference is where things get interesting.

If your goal is to find a partner who wants sex exactly as often as you do, under exactly the same circumstances, for the rest of your lives, I have unfortunate news about long-term relationships: sexual desire changes over time.

People get stressed, have children, age, change medications, become overwhelmed by work, deal with health problems, and sometimes discover entirely new parts of their sexuality. The person with higher desire today may not be the person with higher desire five years from now. Even without any of those changes, two people are unlikely to want sex at precisely the same moment every time.

The existence of a desire discrepancy, then, isn't necessarily evidence that something is wrong with your relationship or that you are sexually incompatible. The more important question is what happens between you when the discrepancy appears.

Can the person who wants sex ask for it without making the other person responsible for managing their disappointment? Can the person who doesn't want sex say no without becoming responsible for reassuring their partner for the rest of the evening? Can you talk about what each of you wants without immediately turning the conversation into a negotiation about how often you're going to have sex?

Those abilities have much more to do with the quality of your sexual relationship than whether one person would ideally like sex twice a week and the other would prefer twice a month.

If you're wondering whether differences like these mean that you simply don't fit sexually, I've written more about that in this article.

The pursuit-pressure problem

Let's say you are the partner who wants more sex.

You've initiated several times recently and been turned down. You try not to take it personally, but eventually you do. You start paying attention to how long it has been. Maybe you stop initiating because rejection feels awful, but then you're quietly waiting to see whether your partner notices. When they don't, that seems to confirm your worst fear: If I didn't make sex happen, we would never have sex at all.

Eventually you bring it up.

Your partner hears something like, "You aren't giving me enough sex."

They explain that work has been exhausting, or that they're stressed, or that it's difficult to want sex when they feel like you're monitoring how often it happens. You hear an explanation for why sex apparently isn't important to them.

Now you both have evidence for your respective cases.

The higher-desire partner pursues because they feel disconnected. The lower-desire partner experiences the pursuit as pressure and retreats. The retreat makes the higher-desire partner feel more rejected, so sex becomes even more emotionally loaded. Meanwhile, the lower-desire partner becomes increasingly vigilant about accidentally "leading them on," because cuddling on the couch might create an expectation they aren't prepared to fulfill.

This is how couples who genuinely love each other can gradually make affection itself feel dangerous.

If you recognize yourselves here, I would be cautious about treating "more sex" as the immediate solution. Before you can create more desire, you may need to make sex feel less consequential.

The lower-desire partner isn't necessarily the one with the problem

Once you've established that one person wants more sex, it is easy to decide that the person who wants less must have the sexual dysfunction. Now you have one normal person with a healthy libido and one person who needs to figure out what is wrong with them.

That framing is usually not very helpful.

There are certainly medical and physiological reasons for changes in sexual desire, and a significant or unexplained change is worth discussing with an appropriate medical provider. Medication, hormones, pain, sleep, depression, menopause and perimenopause, erectile difficulties, and other health factors can all affect sexuality.

But desire also responds to context.

I would want to know what the sex itself is like. I would want to know whether both people are enjoying it. I would want to know whether one person is consistently doing more giving than receiving, whether either person feels responsible for producing an orgasm, whether sex follows the same script every time, and whether the person who "doesn't want sex" actually doesn't want sexual pleasure—or simply doesn't particularly want the sex that is currently available to them.

Those are not the same thing.

This is especially important when sex has started to feel like a chore. If you regularly have sex because you feel guilty, because your partner has been disappointed lately, because it has "been too long," or because agreeing seems easier than having another conversation about why you aren't in the mood, your body can become very good at learning that sex is an obligation.

Then everyone is baffled about why you aren't spontaneously craving more of it.

Dutiful sex can solve tonight's problem while making the larger problem worse

I want to be nuanced about this because people have sex for all kinds of reasons. You do not have to begin every sexual experience overwhelmed by lust for it to be consensual, pleasurable, or worthwhile. Responsive desire is real, and sometimes you start out feeling fairly neutral and become interested once something pleasurable begins.

That's very different from repeatedly overriding yourself.

Duty sex can temporarily relieve tension in a relationship. The higher-desire partner feels wanted again. The lower-desire partner may genuinely enjoy making their partner happy, and perhaps they even enjoy parts of the sexual experience themselves. The conflict disappears for a while.

Unfortunately, if one person's sexuality repeatedly becomes the tool the couple uses to manage the other person's distress, there can be a cost. The lower-desire partner may gradually lose track of the distinction between I want this and I'm willing to do this, while the higher-desire partner may discover that more frequent sex doesn't actually resolve the loneliness if they suspect their partner is participating primarily to keep them happy.

I've written much more about this dynamic, including duty sex and what happens when pressure becomes associated with sexuality, in this article.

You need to talk about what "sex" means to each of you

When couples tell me they disagree about how much sex they should be having, I'm often interested in backing up quite a bit. What are we calling sex, and what are you actually missing when you say you want more of it?

For one person, sex may be the place where they feel most loved, playful, embodied, and connected. For another, sex may have become a fairly predictable sequence of activities that requires energy they don't currently have. One person may be asking for intercourse while the other would enthusiastically welcome making out, mutual masturbation, massage, or lying naked together without having to worry that stopping there will hurt someone's feelings.

Sometimes a couple's sex life has become so goal-oriented that there is very little room between "nothing sexual is happening" and "we are now having Sex™."

Finding that space can be enormously useful.

This is also where talking explicitly about sexual compatibility becomes important. Compatibility doesn't require two people to have identical desires. It requires enough honesty about what each person actually wants that you can find the places where your sexualities overlap.

That conversation can include frequency, but it should also include pleasure, touch, fantasies, initiation, novelty, turn-ons, turn-offs, boundaries, and what helps each of you feel relaxed enough for desire to emerge. You may discover that the overlap is considerably larger than you thought. You may also discover some genuine differences. Either way, you finally have useful information.

What if we aren't used to talking about sex?

This is where I think couples therapy, sex therapy, or coaching can be particularly valuable.

People sometimes assume that because they have been having sex together for ten or twenty years, they should be able to talk about it. Unfortunately, sexual experience and sexual communication are completely different skills.

You may be perfectly capable of saying, "We aren't having enough sex," and completely unable to say, "I miss feeling desired by you, and I'm embarrassed by how much that matters to me."

Or perhaps you can say, "I'm tired," but haven't figured out how to say, "I feel like sex has become something I provide for you, and I don't know where I am in it anymore."

Those are much more vulnerable conversations.

A therapist can help slow things down and notice when you start translating vulnerability into blame, defensiveness, or problem-solving. Sometimes I help people find words for something they can feel but haven't yet figured out how to articulate. Sometimes my job is simply to ask questions neither person realized they were allowed to ask.

Having a third person in the room can also make it easier to talk explicitly about sex. There is something remarkably powerful about discovering that the thing you've been too embarrassed to say out loud is, in fact, something another human being can hear without gasping or falling out of her chair. As a sex therapist, I find it is often so simply and straightforwardly helpful for people to hear me using plain language about sex.

You don't need to become people who casually discuss your sexual fantasies over breakfast. You just need enough language to let your partner actually know you. Even before the hyper-vulnerable emotional conversations, you may discover that you need help saying “Can you move your hand a little to the left and do that same thing you’re doing, but slower?”

What if the difference is real?

Sometimes, after removing pressure and resentment, improving communication, and getting much clearer about what both people want, a significant difference remains.

One person genuinely wants much more sexual connection than the other. Perhaps one person has desires their partner doesn't share, or sex occupies a fundamentally different place in each person's vision of a satisfying relationship.

I don't think therapy should try to talk people out of those differences. Part of healthy differentiation is being able to recognize that your partner is allowed to want something you don't want, without either of you having to become wrong.

For some couples, there is enough overlap to create a satisfying sex life despite significant differences. Others reconsider what sexuality needs to mean within their relationship. Some couples begin conversations about ethical non-monogamy or an open relationship, although I would be extremely cautious about treating non-monogamy as a pressure-release valve for a sexual relationship already filled with resentment or coercion. If one person is agreeing to an open relationship primarily because they're afraid their partner will otherwise leave, you haven't eliminated the pressure; you've changed its form.

If that's a possibility the two of you are considering, I would start with this article rather than assuming that adding other sexual partners will automatically solve a desire discrepancy.

For other couples, the difference ultimately reveals a genuine incompatibility that they have to decide how to live with. The purpose of couples therapy isn't to guarantee that every difference can be resolved. It's to help you understand the difference clearly enough that the two of you can make thoughtful choices about it.

A better question than "How often should we be having sex?"

I wish there were a correct number I could give couples. It would make this work considerably easier (but also probably way less fun!).

There isn't. What matters is whether both people have enough agency, pleasure, connection, and freedom within their sexual relationship.

If your partner doesn't want sex as much as you do, neither of you necessarily needs to be fixed. But the pattern you've built around that difference may need attention.

The higher-desire partner deserves to talk honestly about loneliness, desire, rejection, and the importance sexuality has in their life. The lower-desire partner deserves a sexual relationship in which saying no is genuinely safe and saying yes can mean something.

From there, you can get much more curious about what each of you actually wants. You can find the overlap instead of endlessly litigating the difference, and experiment with ways of connecting that don't require either person to abandon themselves to keep the relationship intact.

And perhaps most importantly, you can stop treating sex as a problem one of you needs to solve for the other and start treating your sexual relationship as something the two of you are creating together.

If these conversations repeatedly turn into arguments about who is asking for too much, who isn't trying hard enough, or whose needs matter more, that conflict may also be part of a larger relationship pattern. I talk more about that in this article.

If you want some support with this work, and think you and your partner could benefit from relationship counseling, couples therapy, or non-monogamy coaching, click here to schedule a free, 15 minute call with me to see if I could be a fit for you!

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it normal for couples to have different sex drives?

Yes. Differences in sexual desire are extremely common, and desire can change throughout a relationship in response to stress, health, hormones, parenting, relationship dynamics, and many other factors. A mismatched libido does not automatically mean you are sexually incompatible.

Can couples therapy help with mismatched libidos?

Yes. Couples therapy can help identify the patterns that have developed around sexual desire, including pressure, rejection, resentment, avoidance, and difficulty communicating about sex. Therapy can also help couples talk more explicitly about pleasure and find areas of genuine sexual overlap.

Does low sexual desire mean my partner isn't attracted to me?

Not necessarily. Attraction is only one factor affecting sexual desire. Stress, pressure, resentment, exhaustion, medication, physical health, relationship dynamics, and the quality of the sexual experiences themselves can all affect whether someone wants sex.

Can an open relationship help if we have different sex drives?

For some people, ethical non-monogamy is a relationship structure that allows partners to explore different sexual desires. However, opening a relationship generally works poorly as a quick solution to pressure, resentment, or conflict about sex. Both partners need genuine freedom to decide whether non-monogamy is something they actually want.

What if we've tried talking about sex and it always turns into a fight?

This is a particularly good reason to consider couples therapy or sex therapy. A therapist can help you identify the pattern that takes over when you discuss sex, put language to more vulnerable experiences underneath the conflict, and create enough space for both partners to talk honestly without immediately having to solve the problem.