When A Husband Or Wife Doesn't Want Sex

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Recently I attended a seminar by the French psychoanalyst and sexologist Alan Eril. It was about relationships in a couple, passion and love, strong attraction and its loss. I would like to share here some of the ideas and thoughts of this colleague that I find important and useful.

Couple is a myth

If you look at the world with pseudo-scientific eyes, then we can say that life as a couple and family are in many ways cultural phenomena. They are not inherent in human nature from the very beginning. Also, if we believe in the unconscious, we can talk about the attraction to different people present in it. Our unconscious is not faithful.

And here I will add on my own, my position is that loyalty is a choice, just like living with one partner, like family. And if we have chosen a couple for ourselves, this does not mean at all that we will not be attracted to someone else. The point is rather that during our life together with a person we choose him over and over again when life provides us with some other opportunities to develop relationships.

Attraction is an unstable substance

At the beginning of a relationship, we can experience a very strong attraction to a partner and it is good when such attraction is present. Indeed, in this case, it is one of the important prerequisites for our rapprochement, creating an opportunity for us to further deepen our relations.

However, it cannot be constant and remain at the same level. It is quite natural that in the process of living together for 2-3 years, attraction can weaken, and sometimes even disappear completely from one of the partners.

There are certain types of people who, as soon as they begin to experience such a recession, become frightened and turn to find a new partner with whom they try to relive a strong attraction. But is this a way out? For a boy or a girl, perhaps yes. But for a person of mature age who has never been married?.. Here you can already think: is he / she capable of love?

A. Eril, answering such questions during the seminar, speaks of the separation of love and attraction. He calls love a constant, and attraction a variable. In our experience of attraction to one partner, there can be ups and downs, like on a roller coaster. It is important to learn not to be intimidated by the lack of craving for a partner, or to perceive the stronger attraction of one and the weak of the other, not as a catastrophe or something that will never change, but as something temporary that can change in the process of further life together.

Relationships come to death not when we lose attraction to our partner, but when we become indifferent. If the other has become indifferent to us, his life is not important to us, we do not care what happens to him, then here we can talk about the end of the relationship.

In overcoming the crisis of partial or complete loss of attraction, love plays an important role, relying on which partners can find hope. And it is this hope that allows you to weather the recession without seeing it as a disaster or something that will never change. “When attraction disappears, love begins its work” - this is one of the central theses of the seminar.

Of course, you may have a legitimate question - what is love? How to understand that this is love? I think that there is no simple and unambiguous answer here. And I would not like to simplify everything by saying some kind of common banality about love. I can refer the interested reader to Rollo May's excellent book Love and Will. It contains a lot of deep and valuable reflections on the topic of love. And from this seminar, I remember the words that when we truly love another, then we can tell him: "I don't need you, but I love you" … In these words I find the autonomy and maturity of feelings.

Mastering not to dominate

One of the undermining aspects of relations in a couple of aspects is the power struggle. This is a fairly common story when one of the couple tries to dominate the other in different ways: with brute force, humiliation, devaluation, and caring control. There are many possibilities. It also happens when someone deliberately gives their responsibility / freedom to another: "If we are together, you have to do this and this for me … Take care of me … You are a woman - you must … You are a man - you are obliged for me …" …

Either way, all these power games undermine true intimacy and undermine relationships, causing tension, anger, and the desire to harm the other. How to be close if your attraction is fading and you need support, and you meet the enemy on the battlefield?

Hospitality or hostility is a choice. And we do it within a relationship, going towards another or turning away from him. We have the ability to seize power over another or remain vulnerable and allow ourselves to love by laying down our arms and trying to accept the other. Indeed, in order to be vulnerable next to another, you need much more strength than to close yourself off from him, securing yourself with the seized power.

The issue of power in relationships is one aspect that influences the dynamics of attraction, but it is far from the only one. Here we will confine ourselves to this short reflection and move on.

Quality of presence

Eril invites partners to invest more in the actions that they perform in relation to each other. To do this, he invites the couples with whom he works to practice "slowing down." The idea is as follows.

When we live with a person for a long time, many stereotypical and formal actions appear in our relationship. We seem to be having lunch together, but formally we ask to pass the bread, staring at the TV screen, not noticing that there is another person nearby. The same thing happens in sex, in tenderness and affection. We formally stroke another, habitually make love and gradually lose attraction, falling into the illusion of monotony.

So, we can restore attraction by increasing the awareness of our actions, investing in every touch, subtly feeling the slightest changes in emotional colors. To do this, we can slow down our actions. Touch the other, stroking it slowly and gently. Make eye contact, keeping in touch, and doing so for long enough. In general, in order to restore attraction, which has faded for a while, provided that we love another, we can increase the quality of our presence in contact, in relationships, in intimacy. The less formal and illusory familiarity in sex, the more we are involved in this process, the deeper and more subtly we try to feel our loved one, the brighter our experiences will be.

In this regard, ideas come to my mind about various dynamic meditations, which are now practiced in many places. If you find it difficult to come up with something that you can do with your partner, increasing mutual presence, then an easy way is to search for some videos on YouTube from the series of tantric interactions. There are quite high-quality videos showing how you can be close without close physical interaction, but with very close and subtle contact.

At the end of this conversation, I would like to note that overcoming difficulties in relationships is the work of both partners. And here it is very important to be allies, not enemies, reproaching each other that something is going wrong.

So, summing up, let's return to what was discussed. A couple is a myth, the ability to be in a long-term relationship with one person is not inherent in us by nature, rather it is our choice. Attraction is an unstable substance, we can either lose it or find it, relying on love for another and hope. Possessing not to dominate, so as not to destroy relationships and not replace love with power games. The quality of presence, the ability to carefully and fully invest in interaction with a partner there is exactly that resource on which we can rely, restoring the extinct attraction.