In Search of Lost Libido

When sex is going well between me and my husband, there is very little I can do wrong in his eyes. If the kids stomp on my last frayed nerve and I screech at them like a harpy to drive them out of my presence he might say, “Little jerks. Here, let me pour you another glass of wine.” (This is a certain stage of marriage at its finest — insulting your shared offspring and abetting one another’s substance abuse. The important thing is to do this together, without judgement.) However, when my husband does not feel well laid, I can shriek at the kids in the morning and he’ll come home that evening still displeased with me and my shrewish temper, and maintain that displeasure no matter what display of family peace and harmony greets him when he walks in the door.

It’s not just me he dislikes when he’s in this state. When he feels sexually deprived, he, too, is irritable and impatient with the kids. He lacks all enthusiasm for his job. He feels the joy has been sucked out of his life and he has nothing to look forward to but years of drudgery in the service of his ungrateful family. He cannot be enticed by proposals of movie-watching, dinner in nice restaurants, time away from the rest of us, or any of the things he usually enjoys. He is immune to any acts of kindness on my part — except a rewarding round of intercourse, which, not surprisingly, is difficult to pull off in these circumstances.

More than one long-married couple among my friends report a similar dynamic. As problems go, this one seems easy to solve:

Do something we both enjoy, together and frequently. Simple, right?

Well, no.

My husband’s libido and mine are two completely different animals. His is a large cat. It sleeps lightly and is easily roused both day and night. Mine is a bear, subject to lengthy periods of hibernation and irritable when poked awake by, say, a bored cat wanting to play. It seems laughably obvious that these two animals do not belong together. How could they ever make each other happy?

But my libido wasn’t always a bear. It used to be a cat, too.

When my husband and I were first together, we wanted each other so badly that we’d get it on in the kitchen because the bedroom was too far away, or we’d park just short of our destination on car trips and climb into the back seat because we’d been feeling each other up the whole way and were on the verge of spontaneous combustion. But this wildcat kind of desire disappeared for me early in our marriage. A year or two in I tried switching up my birth control pills because I thought the hormones were wrecking my sex drive. Later I thought I’d deliberately squelched this part of myself for fear I would cheat on my husband. I was so afraid I would, because the only times I felt that easy, quick attraction he used to spark, it was for someone else. If I had sexy dreams and woke up so turned on I had to wake him up to do something about it, those dreams were not about him. Later still, I blamed the kids, the hormonal changes of pregnancy and breastfeeding, intimacy overload, exhaustion.

My husband felt betrayed and suspicious. “I know this is part of you,” he would say. “I remember it clearly! It didn’t just evaporate. It’s there somewhere. It’s bound to be up to something, but no matter what I do, I can’t get to it!” I couldn’t get to it either. I imagined a river vanished underground, perhaps eroding a giant sinkhole beneath the foundations of our marriage.

So I went looking for it. I’ve been looking for years now, and although I haven’t found a magic spell to turn my libido back into a cat, I have found a few things, here and there, that make it feel less like a bear. They don’t last long, but I don’t need them to. They’re like glamours I carry around in the pockets of my mind. I pull them out when my playful cat of a husband tries to wake my hibernating bear and we’re headed straight for the kind of fight that can make the cat sulk for days.

What are these magic things? They’re stories.

I find them:

• In books. A romance industry that nets a billion dollars a year (in the U.S. alone) is a giveaway that I’m not the first person to stumble on this solution. And yet, though I have dabbled in reading romance, and have indeed found some very hot sex and been turned on by it, I haven’t tended to find stories that really work for me in romance novels. What kinds of stories really work? Ones that connect me to my own experience of desire. I have been madly in love. I have felt desire that made me so wild and wanton I barely recognized myself. I want stories that make me remember how it feels. In the romance novel plots of good girls who learn to be bad, bad girls who learn to be good, Cinderellas rescued from empty lives by wealth, hot sex, and true love (in that order): Where am I? Nowhere I can see. I’m the little match girl looking in the windows at someone else’s food and warmth. I tend to find what I’m looking for in books that tell bigger stories, of which desire is a part. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series is my favorite. Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles is another. Neither bears any resemblance to my life, but when the characters fall madly in love, madly in lust, I remember perfectly how it feels.
• In my writing. Stories that connect me to my own experience of desire are not easy to find. I can think of various reasons for this, but they all pretty much boil down to: Shame. Sex is as many different things as food is. It can be transcendent in a way we’ll remember all our lives. It can poison us. It can be utterly mundane, a responsibility, a chore. But though we don’t mind admitting this about food, we don’t generally allow the same sort of honesty around sex. We bandy about packaged versions of it — airbrushed girls in swimsuits draped over sports cars, the dukes and billionaires of romance novels — that bear as much resemblance to the sex we have as a McDonald’s hamburger advertisement bears to a home-cooked meal. Somehow we believe in this packaged version, and think, when it looks like nothing we know, that there’s something wrong with us. So we talk about it even less. When literary writers say it’s impossible to write well about sex, I think it must be this packaged version they’re talking about. Slapping the slick, consumer idea of sex into a novel that is otherwise concerned with getting at honest truths about human existence would be a little like hanging a McDonald’s ad in the Louvre. Because we’re ashamed of sex, we have turned it into something false, and because it’s false, the kinds of writers and publishers and readers who value the real shy away from it. And yet — we yearn for the experience itself. Not the fake, but the real thing at its best. At least, I do. So, in the time honored tradition of writers short on the stories they want to read, I make my own.
• In flirtations with other men. These are often much more than stories, and I could devote an entire essay to the role of the “work husband,” the gym crush, the old flame rediscovered on Facebook who corresponds enthrallingly from afar. These “emotional affairs” get a terrible rap. Just as bad as a physical affair, countless click-bait articles scold, as if there’s no meaningful distinction to be made between thinking and doing. (Taken to its logical extension, this line of reasoning would mandate locking up murder mystery writers.) When handled in ways that skirt the jealousy issue, I have known these relationships to improve marriages at least as often as they damage them, in the same way that any close friendship can. They meet emotional needs our poor, overtaxed marriages can’t handle. They can make us happier, more fulfilled, less resentful of our spouses for not being everything we need at every moment. Happier people make for happier marriages. The jealousy issue is difficult to skirt without wading into dishonesty, though, and that’s no small problem. This is where stories come in. I transform blameless interactions with men I’m attracted to into lurid, fantasy affairs in the privacy of my mind. I admit this is risky. It is impossible to want a man who is not my husband without, well, wanting him. But wanting and having are not the same, and so far I have managed to remember that the goal of this game is to want. I’ve got the having covered. Jealousy is still a problem sometimes. My husband is attuned to me closely enough to be aware of what I’m doing and we’ve had quite a few fights about it. But we’ve had better sex, too.

What do these stories do for me? I think they simulate the ready passion of a new love affair.

Emily Nagoski writes in her illuminating book Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life, that the highest intensity kind of desire tends to occur at the beginnings of love affairs when the security of the attachment between the lovers is uncertain. This explains why I was a cat when my husband and I first met, but have been a bear ever since. Nagoski wisely points out that the sex isn’t always good just because the wanting is high-intensity. What I mostly experience is the inverse of this. The sex my husband and I have when we both want it is excellent. But I don’t always want the sex just because it’s good.

And there’s no surer way to turn good sex bad than not to want it.

These stories, these glamours that make me want what I already have, are not a perfect solution. Because of course they don’t make me want precisely what I have. The obvious flaw, particularly as my husband sees it, is that my stories are not about him. He wants me looking in his eyes, seeing him, wanting him, not drifting on a fantasy of my imaginary characters or, even worse, some non-imaginary man. I’d like that, too. But how?

Emily Nagoski would advise me, I think, to reframe my goal. Why would I want that anxious, insecure-attachment kind of sex when the possibility of something much deeper and more meaningful exists with my husband? She would tell me that what I have is already perfect, if only I would stop buying into the notion that my desire should be the spontaneous kind more often experienced by men. Most women experience contextual desire — the kind that kicks in once we’ve been hanging out for a while in a sexy situation, rather than the kind that flares up at the least provocation and propels us nearly against our wills into the sexy situation. I think she would tell me: You are a bear, not a cat. Bears are marvelous when you find the right way to wake them up. Love being a bear! I think she would tell my husband: Don’t poke the bear. Wake her nicely, don’t stress her out, and she will make you happy. She would tell him: The little monitor in your brain that pushes you off the cliff of despair when you don’t get laid is adjustable. Sex is not a drive, like hunger, like thirst. No one has ever suffered tissue damage for lack of it.

I’m pretty sure Emily Nagoski is right. I’m going to experiment with her advice. But I doubt I will stop reading sexy stories, writing sexy stories, engaging — opportunity permitting — in the odd fantasy affair. I doubt I will give up falling passionately in love in my imagination. Because waking the bear up nicely under stress-free conditions frankly sounds like a lot of work. It smacks of planning, childcare, reservations and expense. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that would fit into ten minutes before the alarm clock goes off on a weekday, the last chance at armistice in the face of looming interspecies war.

Sometimes I just need to feel like a cat.