Is anxiety increasing or decreasing your desire? Do you have enough contraception on hand? And with kids in the house, who’s having sex anyway?
Here are some thoughts about sexual aspects of our lives in a time of pandemic.
Every January I look back over the previous year’s cases. And while some issues come and go, one thing is consistent year after year: I always see a lot of couples in conflict about each other’s sexual desire.
People are more than “high desire” or “low desire,” but they–and professionals–tend to use these categories, even though they can complicate things.
Some couples are in conflict about a woman’s insistence that her partner stop watching porn.
What does she hope to gain by this?
The FDA has approved Vyleesi, which supposedly increases sexual desire in women.
It won’t work, because low desire in most women is not a biological problem to be fixed.
Joel and Marissa are very nice people. They care for each other and plan to spend their lives together. Each of them has very little sexual experience, however, and they’re having trouble getting into any sort of intimate rhythm together.
They’ve come to me while grappling with a perfect storm: very little sexual experience, very little knowledge about sex and bodies, and a lot of anxiety about sexual activity and competence. This would be enough to make sex difficult for anyone.
I’ve always said that I’m not one of those sex therapists who gives advice. I don’t tell you who you shouldn’t marry, which sex position “most women” like, or if you should try a threesome.
Rather, I see my job focusing more on education: providing facts about biology, laying out competing ideas about how to make decisions, and sharing my accumulated experience of how things tend to work.