Intimacy Block #4: She is Drained
Of all the answers to the question, “Why doesn’t my wife want sex anymore?” this may be the most important for men to thoroughly understand:
Answer #4: She is protecting her energetic resources.
It is easy for a woman to be kind, loving, playful, and turned-on (to life or to sex) when she’s got energy. It is so, so hard when her well has run dry. She is the same woman you married. She’s just thirsty because of lifestyle drought. She doesn’t have enough precious energy to meet her own needs, let alone water the garden around her. So she has gone into full protective mode to try to hold on tight to every little drop of energy that she can.
“Feminine energy” may sound woo. It may even sound sexist. So if that’s not your thing, think of it very concretely. In one perfectly decent model, energy = hormones.* Women’s natural chemical state is cyclic, rotating through many concurrent, asynchronous cycles. There’s the daily cycle of rest and waking. A monthly cycle through the menstruation years. There’s the reproductive cycle: pregnancy, birth, postpartum. And there’s a lifetime cycle: maiden, mother, maga, crone.
You can think of “energy” as a sparkling spring of life-force that ebbs and flows, a cadre of archetypes enacting an epic saga, or a finely balanced network of endocrine glands responding to what life throws their way. Any model works.
If you prefer the most scientific, concrete take, it’s very important to know this about women’s hormones: even as men and women have the same hormones (in different amounts and proportions), the way a woman’s hormones act in her body is slightly different from the way a man’s hormones act in his. Women’s hormones are especially vulnerable to stress because our adrenals turn our progesterone into cortisol when we are under duress. Stress depletes us chemically. This is NOT to say that men do not suffer from stress. We all suffer from stress. This is just to say that a single sleepless night may not crush a man’s sex drive, but it will obliterate a woman’s sex drive. Do not expect a tired woman to have sex, especially if she is under chronic stress or mid-life or older when her baseline amounts of hormones are low to start with and easy to use up.
I see two major impediments to a woman’s free flow of hormones/energy:
Phase of life. This is healthy and natural and does not necessarily need to be tweaked or changed. Our homrones rise when we hit puberty, cycle through our monthly cycle, and diminish with age until the ovaries quit altogether (menopause) and we must rely on trace-amounts of sex hormones produced by our adrenal glands to weather us through the rest of our days.
Chronic stress. The stress response is not the problem. It’s a healthy response to stressful circumstances. Problems arise when ALL your circumstances are stressful even when your are fundamentally safe. When the stress state is chronic in the body, we may do ok through our youth when the ovaries are flowing prolifically and able to keep up, but as we age, as our flow slows down to a trickle, we can not endure the same stress levels without serious fall-out in sexual health (and, frankly, all health).
Let’s look at this like a chemical engineer. The flow of hormones (life force energy, sexual energy) depends on the inputs and outputs. We can increase her reserves by decreasing output flow or increasing rate of input. Decreasing output means reducing stress.
Much attention is (appropriately!) given to new motherhood and the intense burden on mom’s energy resources. It sounds like: “I’m touched-out.” Babies and young children require so much energy. There isn’t energy left over for basic self care, let alone partner care. This is biologically appropriate given the incredible needs of human children, but it is a bummer for a marriage while it’s happening.
The most common advice is for Dad to help (decrease her output). When you come home, take a deep breath breath and dive right into parenting without asking any questions on how to do it. Tidy throughout your day. Keep track of what groceries are needed and replenish them. If finances allow, organize and hire a housekeeper. Protect your wife’s resources with your own. If she resists because she’s a perfectionist, then it’s time to embody some leadership and draw a line of competence around yourself. Watch youtube to learn domestic skills. Insist that she give you the space to participate, even as the learning may include some stylistic differences from her way or some failures as you learn. You get to show up and learn even if it temporarily stresses her out to relinquish control.
As important as this advice is, it isn’t everything. I have seen plenty of cases where a dad takes on a generous share of work, and nothing changes for his wife.
In this case, she may need a paradigm shift.
What if sex doesn’t have to be a favor she does for you or a way she takes care of you? What if sex gets to fuel her with pleasure? The entire construct of sex in the marriage can get an overhaul so that it becomes something she knows will help her, not something she fears will drain her. This is how we increase her inputs of energy.
We have to start by freeing up her “no” so that she can say it without guilt and you can hear it without any hurt. This may seem counter-productive, but a free and easy “no” is necessary to make room for a true “yes.” Take the guilt and insult out of it and so much possibility opens up.
We then work directly with her body.
Nervous system regulation exercises to help shut down any leakage of energy and put her body in a state where it is possible to feel good. Whether she uses this to prepare for sleep, for better digestion, or for intimacy, it will help, and over time, shift her baseline towards balance.
Taoist and Tantric energy practice build her reserves of energy (even in menopause!)
I can’t always promise to turn a woman’s desire from responsive into spontaneous, but a true responsive desire is a beautiful opening to great intimacy. It isn’t effortless, but it is beautiful and it works.
If you’d like to learn more, let’s talk.
*A special note for my cancer patients. Many women who get beast or ovarian cancers are put on a drug like tamoxifen to completely eliminate sex hormones, especially estrogen, for the rest of her life. Please do not consider my “feminine energy = hormones” metaphor complete and exclusive. That is just one model (the one that resonates best with most science types). And yes, because you don’t have your hormones and aren’t allowed to take mainstream steps to build them again (like HRT), your challenges with sexual energy may come on suddenly and feel intense. Do not lose hope. The chemical metaphor is just one way to look at it and you are no less worthy and capable of love and pleasure than anyone with plentiful hormones. Instead of substituting “hormones” for “energy” try ATTENTION. We can circulate attention in the body no matter how old we are or what treatments we’re on. To do so impacts our sexual energy favorably regardless of menopause, medically induced or otherwise.