Why Don't I Want to Have Sex With My Husband?

Somewhere tonight a woman is lying next to a man she loves. He's a good man. She'd marry him again. And she can't remember the last time she actually wanted him. Later, when the house is quiet, she might type the question into her phone. Why don't I want to have sex with my husband?

My wife asked herself some version of that for years. When I asked Dawn how she'd describe that time now, she put it more precisely than I could: "I wanted to want it more. I just didn't, and I didn't know what was wrong with me."

If that sentence is yours, I want you to hear what Dawn eventually learned. Nothing was wrong with her. Her desire was buried, and over the last five and a half years she has dug it out. What she feels now is bigger than anything she felt at the beginning of our relationship.

Last week I wrote to the men about their half of this, in Why Won't My Wife Have Sex With Me? A man has a real part to play in whether he's someone a woman can desire at all, and most men ignore it. This piece is about your half, and none of it is about blame. Two people built the distance in your relationship. You can only do your own part, and your part is far more powerful than you've probably been told.

Dawn and I recorded this one together, so a lot of what follows is in her words.

A libido doesn't die

I don't believe anyone has a dead libido. When sex and desire fade in a long relationship, the size of either person's sex drive has very little to do with it. What changes is how much of yourself you can reach.

Dawn and I started hot. She describes those first months as a hot and heavy infatuation stage, and then, in her words, it died. She accepted that, the way most women do. Today she says what she feels is "100 times, 1,000 times more than even what it was back then."

When I talked on the episode about bringing a woman's libido "back to life," she corrected me. "We're not going back to anything." The beginning was a glimpse of what was possible between us. Where she is now goes far beyond it, and she believes every woman has more capacity than she knows, including the woman whose desire comes and goes.

Even in our worst years, her body kept telling the truth. She still ovulated. A couple of days every month, as long as nothing came along and knocked those days down, things got fun again, for her and for me. At the lowest point of our sex life, we still had sex most months. I kept track of that far more closely than she did, and the fact that she didn't even notice was one of the things that hurt me most back then.

That's biology, and it's evidence. Desire that surfaces on its own a few days a month is alive. It's buried under everything else, and it comes up for air when conditions allow.

The lies she believed

"I bought into so many lies," Dawn says. "I am the first to admit it."

The first was the simplest one: she thought she just had a low libido. It didn't seem to be there, and she didn't understand sexuality well enough to question it. Nobody had ever taught her. She went to a Lutheran high school, which is not where anyone learns this, and she'll tell you this education belongs at home anyway.

The second was the infatuation stage. The chemistry is hot and heavy at the beginning, then it fades, and that's how life is. We still loved each other. She still wanted to be with me. Sex just wasn't something she thought about. It was, in her words, "so far stuffed down inside in my own programming, and trauma, and wounds," nearly severed from her and tucked into a place she didn't know existed.

Underneath both of those sits a bigger one that almost all of us absorbed as children. Very few of us grew up watching a relationship stay passionate. At best, we saw two people who were good friends. The couples everyone admires are the ones who still enjoy each other's company after thirty or forty years. That's a beautiful thing to have. It's also far less than what's possible.

Some couples do keep the fire alive the whole way through. They exist, and I'm glad they do. It's rare, and it doesn't have to be. When all you've ever seen is friendship where passion used to be, that picture becomes the program you run without knowing it. You expect it, and then you live it.

Desire is the pull

Libido is desire. Desire is the pull: the wanting you feel toward something before you have it.

Willingness is something else. Willingness says yes when he asks. Desire reaches for him before he asks, or across the room on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon when nobody is asking anything.

A new relationship shows you how strong that pull can be between two particular people. It's a glimpse of the intensity that's possible. Most relationships bury it, and then everyone involved comes up with reasons why it had to go.

That pull has to come from inside you. Your partner plays a part. I had a part to play in being someone Dawn could desire at all. Her part was her ability to want anything at all.

You may have read that many women experience "responsive desire," where wanting shows up only after things get started. I see it differently. What shows up once you're touched is pleasure, and pleasure matters enormously. It's one of the main ways a woman relearns her own body, and I'll come back to it below. But pleasure in response to touch is a different experience from wanting him. When those two get blurred together, a lot of women settle for willingness plus pleasure and decide that's all they have. Your own wanting is in there. It just hasn't had anywhere to come from yet.

Her sexuality ran through me

When I asked Dawn what it has taken for her to feel that pull again, her first answer was "So much. Years." Then she went back to the beginning.

She wasn't connected to her own sexuality for herself. Everything about it was wrapped up in what she experienced with me. She didn't masturbate. She didn't touch herself. At a deep level, she believed those things were wrong.

"And so anything about sex was in, with, and through you," she said. "If I'm not connected to my own body and my own pleasure for me, I'm outsourcing everything about it. There's no desire that even starts inside of me."

If your sexuality only exists in relation to your husband, then your desire depends on everything about him and everything between you on any given day. A hard week at work, an old resentment, the way he chewed at dinner. The pull never gets a chance to start inside you, because there's very little of you in it.

The turn came one day while Dawn was lying in bed. She asked herself, "What is standing in the way of me feeling turned on?" An answer came that she didn't expect, and the full story of that is in my new book. But in the aftermath of those realizations, she came to see that her relationship with her own body had been severed by the beliefs that she adopted from so much of her upbringing. And one thing was for sure, she had to get over the belief that touching herself was wrong, and she was the only one who could do it.

Years before that, I had pointed out the strangeness of the belief to her. You were taught that my hand can touch your body, and that's fine. But your own hand can't. She agreed. That was exactly what she'd been taught, and she had no idea why. Someone else's hand was allowed. Her own was forbidden. Said out loud, it falls apart.

Some of you are laughing at that. Some of you recognize it, because programming that deep feels true from the inside. For Dawn, touching herself went against what she believed was God's law. She had already left the church by then and started unpacking who and what God was. She still had to decide, on her own, that her body belonged to her.

"I need to own this for me," she told herself. Owning it took a long time. She came up with every kind of reason and resistance. She did it anyway, again and again, until one day she realized, "I can make myself orgasm with my own hand. That's cool. All of the tools are right here."

Before we recorded, I looked it up in my journal. The first time she really went for it on her own, I wasn't home. She texted me, excited and proud of herself. That was May of 2021.

There was a harder part underneath. When she first put her own hand on her body, she felt numb. She didn't feel the pleasure she felt when I touched her, and she couldn't know yet what was behind it. Today she can name it: "I didn't choose it. I abandoned it." Her body had shut parts of itself down to protect her in the world, and she had left them there.

If you touch yourself and feel very little, that numbness is information. It's a part of you waiting to be chosen again.

There's no rushing this

We recorded this episode in October of 2026, five and a half years after that text.

I bring that up to make a point, and I'm not guilting her. Dawn has had to be persistent with herself and patient with herself the whole way, and there was no going faster than she went. That was exactly the right timeframe.

It's one of the reasons I tell people you can't have what we have if you're setting timelines. You force yourself. Your partner forces you. Everybody plays control games. We tried them, and they didn't get us anywhere any faster than Dawn was ready to go on her own. If anything, the pressure we both put on her probably made it slower.

I put plenty of that pressure on her myself. I remember telling her, "I know you want to want it, but find the real wanting, not the wanting to want it." She told me she didn't know where it was. She was being completely honest. I was asking for something that can't be produced on request, by her or by anyone.

If your husband is pushing, or you're pushing yourself, the pushing is a brake. Your body moves at the speed it's ready to move, and patience is part of the work. It's essential that you take off the pressure and start with acceptance. 

Slow down first

Dawn has told women for years that the first step is slowing down. When I asked her why, she started with what it means to be here at all.

Part of the experience of being human is feeling. You have five senses, and you're taking in the world through all of them. When you move through life with force and effort, head down, getting things done, you lose touch with how your body speaks to you and how your own aliveness comes through. "The spirit speaks through the body," she said. "Sensations, pleasure." Rushing and feeling can't happen at the same time.

There's a practical side too. The pull you feel toward your partner is the same pull you feel toward anything that lights you up. At the beginning of our relationship, Dawn had kids at home and I was running a business. Life was full. When desire is real, it overwhelms the importance of everything else on the list and puts it in its proper place.

When the to-do list takes over, there's no room left to feel the one thing that requires you to be open. You can accomplish everything you need to in a day and still feel desire. The question is what comes first. If you burn all your energy on the list, there will be nothing left at the end of the day for yourself or for him. Add children, and it gets that much harder.

So it's worth asking yourself why you feel so driven to get everything done, to control things, to have them a certain way. That drive ties you up, and not in the fun way. It keeps your mind so busy thinking and doing and running that feeling never gets a turn.

Dawn ties this to identity. Ask most women who they are, and they'll list roles. Dawn used to answer, "I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I'm a personal trainer." Underneath that list sits a harder question: who do you have to be for everyone else?

And who does your body belong to? For a lot of women, the honest answer is everyone. Her body goes where it's needed all day long. To the kids, to her husband, to her job, her responsibilities, her volunteer work, her extended family. Helping people, caring for people, pleasing people, meeting obligations. None of it leaves space for what desire needs, which is room for you to belong to you and to consider what you actually want.

I wrote about this pattern in Receiving To Give. A woman who gives constantly from a self she's lost contact with overrides the quieter signals underneath, a thousand times a day, until she can't hear them anymore. Desire is one of those signals. When the others go quiet, it goes quiet with them.

Dawn's question for the woman in that place is simple. "When's the last time you pleasured yourself? Or did anything just for your pleasure?" For a lot of the women she's worked with, it can't even start there. It starts with ten minutes to sit down and relax.

That's where Communion starts too. It's the six-month container I lead for women, and Dawn will be part of it this year. The very first thing we teach is how to be. Sit down, sit still, and be in your own energy. Every time you've felt desire in the past, it began with noticing something and feeling, "I want that." You need space to feel that, so we start by making the space.

Do you approve of your own sexuality?

Last week I asked the men whether they actually approve of their wife being a sexual being, whether it's okay with them that her sexuality belongs to her. This week the question turns around.

Almost every relationship crosses a threshold somewhere, out of wanting and into obligation. Dawn's first reaction to that on the episode was "Yuck." It is yuck. It's also okay to have been there. We all have. I'd go further. For most couples, I don't think it's possible to keep new relationship energy growing straight from the beginning. You go down before you come back into something greater. Dawn would rather believe a conscious, intentional couple might not have to go as far in the other direction as so many of us do. She also says life changes, kids change things, and you accept what's real.

For us, the threshold looked like this. At the beginning, Dawn wanted me because she wanted me. Somewhere along the way, it became more about making sure she did what I wanted. Eventually we landed on a version of "do whatever you want, I'm willing," with very little of her left in it. Dawn's correction when I said that on the episode: not always. Her sexuality had become wrapped up in me, associated with me, which is the same thing she described above.

I was doing the mirror image. I wanted to please her. I wanted to make sure she was happy with me and that I wasn't upsetting her. Two people abandoning themselves, watching each other, each giving the other what they think is wanted whether they want to give it or not. That's codependency, and it runs both ways.

Unwinding it is necessary, and it's uncomfortable. I have my own sexuality, my own desires, my own wanting, and I have to feel those for Dawn as a separate person. She has her own desire, the things that turn her on, the things she wants, and she has to be able to feel that toward me as something that comes naturally from her. To get there, a woman has to accept that it's okay for her to be a sexual being in the first place.

Last week we talked about the Madonna-whore split in men: the perfect wife and mother he'd never do certain things with, and the other kind of woman he can do anything with and not really care about. Women run that split on themselves plenty. Dawn did. That's not what a mom does. Other women have told us, "I'm a teacher, I can't be like that," or "I'm a doctor's wife, that's not okay in the suburbs." It doesn't matter where yours came from.

What matters is unpacking the words. Whore. Slut. For Dawn, bimbo. What charge do they hold for you? Is it a turn-on or a repulsion? Sit with that. Look honestly at what those words mean to you.

Dawn calls herself a slut and a whore on her OnlyFans page, and a little on Instagram. She loves those words. Men message her to say they don't see her that way, trying to talk her out of it, as if she's too nice or too wholesome to mean it. Her answer is that's just their opinion. Those words light her body up, and she's done the work of understanding why.

Your words may be different. The work is the same: find where shame and judgment are sitting on your sexuality, and stay with them until you can feel what's actually alive in you underneath. That aliveness is what sparks desire, because it's yours. It can be more than "when you take me on a date, I feel a little something." Dates are great. Communication is great. You have to start somewhere, know and understand your body, and bring some willingness and openness to explore.

Capacity

Dawn keeps finding more inside herself. More in what her orgasms feel like, and more in how much pleasure and sensation she can hold in the buildup before one.

Early on, she'd feel it coming and grab for it. No, no, no, don't go away. Then I'd change what I was doing, the feeling would slip, and she'd have to wait for it again. That's gripping and forcing and trying to control, and she'll tell you there's nothing wrong with it. She has done it plenty. She still catches herself focusing on the orgasm, focusing on control, needing to have it, and she brings herself back. Releasing that grip is part of the undoing.

Notice how closely that matches the rest of her life. A woman who manages her whole day manages her pleasure the same way. The same hand that grips the to-do list grips at the orgasm. Letting go in bed and slowing down in life turn out to be the same practice.

Dawn's orgasms were one of the reasons I fell in love with her. Today, when she comes, I see God. If you're new here, we live full-time in an RV, and sometimes Dawn is in the bedroom enjoying herself while I'm on a coaching call at the other end. My camera starts to shake. That's what happens when your house has a suspension 😂.

The gasoline and the match

A woman is built to be receptive. Your desire comes from inside you, and you also feel it in response to what life shows you and gives you.

A while back I recorded an episode called The Gasoline and the Match. The image is simple. As a woman, you're like a can of gasoline, carrying an enormous amount of sexual potential. In a lot of cases, that potential needs a match.

You can be your own match. That's self-pleasure. That's connecting with your own desires and fantasies. It's also letting someone see you and know you deeply, which starts with knowing yourself and then opening yourself up to be seen by your partner.

So look at what you keep down. What do you not let anyone else see? What don't you even let yourself see about your own desires? Open the fantasy vault. Open the kink vault. In my experience, the earliest turn-ons of our lives, the first times from way back, tend to hold a huge amount of that gasoline. They still have the power to light you up.

Your biggest turn-ons won't be found among the things you've already judged acceptable. They're in the shadow, the corner where you shoved whatever excited you and didn't feel okay. What lives there is suppression, and it's where you meet yourself. "You gotta go down in the darkness and meet the devil," Dawn said. "It's not really the devil. It's the things you've judged."

The more of that work Dawn has done, the more she's felt turned on by life itself.

Turned on by your own life

Around the same time as that text, five and a half years ago, Dawn was doing yoga in the upstairs bathroom of the house we lived in then. It was a long room with a hard floor and a big window, and she could be alone there. One bright, sunny day she finished her practice with the window open, lay down in Shavasana, and said, "God, fuck me wide open."

It was desire moving through her, and right then a breeze came through the window. She felt it as a direct answer from the universe: Yes. I've got you.

That moment has come back to her many times. It led her somewhere she now says plainly. Life is meant to penetrate a woman. Through your senses, all day long, the world is entering you. So she asks: are you turned on by your own life? If you aren't, it's possible. You can wake up and feel turned on just to be alive.

When I asked her how, her first answer was acceptance. Acceptance of yourself and of your emotions. You go right down into the muck, and for a long time it won't feel like being turned on by life. That's okay. Dawn started this work in her late thirties, after a long time moving, as she puts it, in "the wrong direction" from herself, living by and through the lies she believed. There's no single workshop and no simple answer. It starts with self-acceptance.

One of the things I teach women about the how is to notice what it feels like to receive your life, because you're receiving all day long. What does it feel like the first time you see your husband in the morning? Driving to work? Talking with that coworker? When the dog needs to be fed? When you sit in the sun? When you give yourself pleasure?

Pay attention to how each one feels, beyond what you're doing in it. Desire is a feeling. It comes from inside you, and you have to be able to feel something before you can want anything. Try it for a week. Pick a few ordinary moments a day and ask what this feels like in your body. You're rebuilding the channel desire travels on.

Feeling runs on one channel. A woman who turns down her anger, her grief, or her wanting in one part of her life turns it down everywhere, including in bed. Turning it back up works the same way. Every ordinary moment you let yourself actually feel opens the channel a little wider.

There's no technique

A lot of women find an episode or a post like this because they're looking for the tip. The thing to do that gets them there.

The thing that gets you there is learning how to feel again. Often there's a well of things you haven't let yourself feel sitting between you and that ability. That's the part that isn't fun, and it's the part that matters most.

When a woman can't find the feeling, she often looks back and thinks, I know I felt it before. It was a new relationship. Maybe I need to leave. Most divorces are initiated by women, and I believe a big part of the reason is that they want to feel something, they don't feel it where they are, and they hope someone else will give them that feeling.

Take ownership of your own life instead. You aren't a victim of it, whatever has happened to you.

I once said this to a coaching client who was right at the edge of leaving: "If you're that close to saying 'fuck it' and leaving, try saying 'fuck it' and staying. Say all the things you haven't wanted to say. Speak up for the things you haven't been willing to speak up for. Start living for yourself the way you imagine you would if you had the relationship you wanted, or if you were single."

Doing those things inside the relationship might be what saves it, because the relationship always needed two individuals to be present. That's a big part of what devotion means to me, and it's what my book is about.

Where to start

When I asked Dawn what she'd say to a woman who is where she was, she hesitated. She'd much rather tune into the specific woman in front of her than speak to everyone at once. But she had answers.

Connect with your body, for you. Your own pleasure, for your own sake. If that feels wrong, sit with the part of you that believes it's wrong. Imagine the little girl you were sitting on your lap, and let her tell you whatever she needs you to hear. (Your inner child, Dawn clarified, not your daughter.) Put one hand on your heart and one hand on your womb. Breathe into your body and listen. There might be nothing at first. That's fine. Keep listening.

Let your emotions be real. If you want more pleasure and more desire, you have to learn to accept anger. You have to learn to accept grief, rage, terror, fear, anything that comes up. Let them be real and let them wreck you. They won't actually take you over. "They're gonna burn away the lies," Dawn says. As children, we lie to ourselves to feel love from our parents. Mother wound work, father wound work, call it whatever you like. It comes down to showing up for yourself and meeting yourself every single day.

Start with pleasure, before you feel turned on. For the woman who looks around her life and feels excited by almost nothing in it, Dawn's answer is direct: "You don't need to feel turned on in order to go use a vibrator and tune into the sensations, because the pleasure comes alive in your body." She plays with a vibrator more than anything else, and she has a variety of them. When you start choosing your body, your body speaks back. "You want a shortcut? Do that."

This is the place where pleasure comes before desire, and for a woman relearning her body, that's the right order. Pleasure wakes the body up. Your own wanting grows out of a body that's awake and chosen. (If you're looking for somewhere to start, Dawn's favorites are the Nora, Lush 4 and the Domi 2 from Lovense. That's our affiliate link, and it includes our discount.)

Speak up. This last one is mine, and Dawn doesn't give herself enough credit for it.

Getting loud

Dawn started speaking up for the things in her life she wanted to be better than they were. That's how she honored herself, and how she rebuilt trust in herself. A woman has to trust herself to feel her desire, especially inside a long relationship.

When you keep abandoning yourself, telling yourself you want what you don't want, that you're turned on by things that don't turn you on, doing what you don't want to do, living a life you don't want to live because you don't think you have any other options, your body stops believing you. And a body that doesn't believe you won't hand you its desire.

So Dawn got loud. Loud about the things she wasn't okay with anymore, including things about me she wasn't going to tolerate. My laziness. My lack of drive and motivation. Ways I showed up long before anyone who listens to this podcast or reads my writing ever knew me. I wasn't the same man I am now. Some of it was really hard to hear. It was also accurate, as much as I hated to admit it.

My weight was a big one. I had gotten very overweight, and she finally told me she wasn't turned on by my body. She'd danced around it for years. Eventually she decided she just had to say it, and that she couldn't let herself care that it would hurt, even knowing how much it would hurt her to hear the same thing from me.

When a woman speaks a truth like that, something like I was turned on by your body before, I'm not now, and I'd be even more turned on if it were better than it was then, she gives herself a gift. She spoke up for herself. She gives him a gift too. I was carrying about 80 pounds more than I do today, and I was doing all kinds of mental gymnastics to justify it. Parts of it I was genuinely struggling with, and I didn't know how to find my way out.

People say the truth hurts. The part of her truth that hurt me was the part that needed to get hurt, because it was the lie I'd been telling myself. Once I got honest and said, "You know what? You're right," it didn't hurt me. It hurt my ego and my self-protection. And it let Dawn start reconnecting to her own pleasure, partly because I got in better shape and became more fun to look at, and mostly because she had honored herself.

That was only the beginning. She got loud with me many more times, in a lot of ways, and it had to happen. She learned to choose herself no matter what was going on, even in the middle of a trigger. I can hear what you're saying and what you want. This is where I'm at. It wasn't comfortable for her in those moments, and it was honest, and it's a big part of how she got to where she is now. Every time she felt something and spoke from it, her body showed her a little more of what was hers.

If you're holding a truth back to protect him, you're holding back part of your own desire along with it. Resentment kept quiet is a brake. Saying it, with as much care as you can manage, is part of getting your desire back.

I teach that a woman's feelings are always 100% accurate to something. They may not be rationally tied to what happened five minutes ago, but they make complete sense. Sometimes, like with my weight, they were honest responses to something real in me. Other times Dawn was certain in the moment that what she felt was about me, and it turned out to be about something going on inside her. She still had to let it out. It was just as important that she felt it out loud.

My piece of that was learning not to take it personally when it wasn't personal. Dawn would add that there's always something in it for both people, and I agree. It goes both ways, too. She's had moments where she was the calm one in her body and I was the one coming apart. We've both had our moments.

Both, for a lifetime

You can have a relationship with the kind of sexual intensity you had at the beginning, inside a relationship with the depth and care and love that only time can provide. Those two things can live together. That's what Dawn and I are here to tell you, because we're living it.

What's in this post is maybe half a chapter of my book. Infinite Devotion: How Love and Desire Grow Together for a Lifetime comes out Tuesday, November 10. It takes you through our whole story as we've lived it, along with what we learned, and I wrote it to give you something like a legend for the map, so you can find your own way to this in your relationship or your next one. If you give me your email here, the first chapter will land in your inbox on Sunday, November 8.

And if you want to walk this with other women and with us, Communion begins in January.

Listen to the full episode: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | All episodes

Part one, for the men: Why Won't My Wife Have Sex With Me?

Mentioned: Communion | The Gasoline and the Match | Receiving To Give | Lovense (affiliate link) | The Infinite Devotion book

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