Why Doesn’t She Want Sex? 1: Body-Hate

When I left science and engineering to work full-time in grief support for bereaved parents, I studied SEXUALITY.

Why?

Grief puts a huge amount of stress on a relationship, and this stress falls heavy on intimacy. Grief, sex, and relationship: if you’re extraordinarily lucky, your therapist will be really good at ONE of those three things. Most specialize in NONE of them. In order to best support grief, I studied sexuality, relationship, life-transitions, and pelvic health. I’ve built myself a very special little niche with only me inside of it, which gives me a unique perspective, distinct from many other sexperts on the scene.

I tend to see everything as multifaceted, and I have a hard time simplifying my responses to seemingly simple questions.

Like, Why doesn’t my wife want to have sex with me?

There’s so much heart-ache in that question. It isn’t just, “why doesn’t she want sex?” It’s also “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with her? Does she still love me? What has happened to our marriage? Is it always going to be like this? Is our intimacy just over? Do I have to choose between the closeness I crave and the woman I love? Please help.”

So rather than try to answer this in one soundbite, I’m breaking it into TEN REASONS (that aren’t anyone’s fault) why your wife might feel shut down to sex, and what to do about it.

Reason #1: She Hates Her Body.

Many women have been judging their bodies since puberty — even childhood!

And the irony is, back then, when it started, this insidious poison of self-hate, was the only time in her life that her body actually conformed to the glorified profile of “maiden.” We were told by a thousand little insults in our youth that we were not good enough, and it’s all downhill from there.

Growing old as a woman means more big changes at every turn. Pregnancy, motherhood, menopause — each stage of life seismically shifting the female body, and each round of changes is confronting. Each round of changes affects how we see ourselves sexually, too.

The extent to which our bodies change and change and change again can not be overstated. Boys go through puberty one time, and then settle into a body they can, in many ways, count on for the rest of their adulthood. There is no such settled place for us women. Existence is up, down, and back around again. Just when I began to come to terms with one unconvetional beauty standard, my small breasts, I had a baby, and suddenly they were DD overnight. Like a cautionary tale to be careful what you wish for. These changes are confusing, and often physically painful. It does not feel good to go from AA to DD in a matter of hours. Then back to empty AA when the baby is weaned. It took a couple of years for my skin to catch up to my mammary glands — for many women, the skin doesn’t go back. We have no control over this. It’s dumb luck of genes and whether the collagen fairy blessed us with more or less elasticity.

But look, breast size and perkiness is just skin deep. It’s aesthetic. There are even deeper reasons a woman might not like her body. I see this all the time in my bereaved moms, and felt it myself when I was in the throes of grief. In those days, I verbally abused my body.

“You built a broken baby.” I told it, over and over and over again. “I hate you. I hate you. You built a broken baby. You did this.”

It wasn’t fair, of course. Babies build themselves from the pieces we provide. And yet, there’s this compulsion to blame after trauma.

No wonder so many grief moms don’t want to give their bodies pleasure. No wonder so many avoid sex altogether and so many who have sex, do so procreatively, where she is the vessel and he is the sperm-donor. That is the opposite of intimacy. It takes a lot of bravery to open when you’re so raw, and so, so many women are not up to it in the early days of grief.

Grief is raw. Sex is raw. Sometimes it all feels too much.

Women who judge their bodies may or may not realize they’re doing it. Body-hate is SO normalized as to be almost universal.


How can a husband spot body-hate in his wife?

• She only wants to have sex with the lights off or avoids positions where she feels visually exposed.

• She throws complements back in your face, snipping at you for daring to admire her body.

• She judges other women, comparing her body, her stretch marks, her wrinkles to theirs (either favorably or unfavorably — judgment is judgment).

• She is easily disgusted and ashamed by totally normal aspects of having a female body, like body hair or normal bodily odors or having her period.

That’s right, I’m saying that if she enjoys oral pleasure but won’t let you go down on you because she hasn’t shaved lately, she is judging her body in an unhealthy way and it is messing with her sexuality.

Look, there are many dissertations on how we got here. Media, culture, childhood bullying, etc. etc. etc. I don’t care how we got here. I just want to get her out.

Body-shame is insidious, and tough to get rid of.


I prefer to work with it and around it. Usually that’s good enough. Sometimes we do get rid of it. Other times we don’t, but we take the teeth out of it.

When a woman comes to me with body-shame, here’s my basic scaffold for her:


Parts-work gets right to the heart of the meanness to figure out how it’s serving her. We can not get rid of any part of her, not even the ones that are harming her. But we can form a new relationship with it and enlist its help in something that builds her up instead of cuts her down.

Physical practices (Taoist energy practices, for instance) nurture a connection to the body that doesn’t depend on analytical thinking. I want every woman who hates her body to touch her body. I am here to support her in the vulnerability hangover of it.

Most importantly, we need to shift her perspective out of the performance of sexy and into the experience of sensuality. Sex is NOT about how we look. It’s about how we feel. Train her to feel and everything changes.

Now, for what you can say to her when she puts herself down?

“Hey, that’s my wife you’re talking about. You may not like her body, but I love it and I won’t let you say anything bad about it.”

Hold that line of dignity and love for her body until she is able to go there herself.

Stay tuned for 9 more reasons your wife may be shut down to sex which don’t have to be anyone’s fault.