Richard Hogan: What are the likely causes of a waning sex drive?

How we talk to each other during conflict impacts on intimacy. I hear this so often in my clinic

Richard Hogan: 'Don’t beat yourself up because you’re not throwing your partner around the kitchen as you make dinner, that’s just a health hazard. Maybe taking time to just be together would be a nice first step to rekindle intimacy in your relationship.'

Remember those early days of young romantic life, when you couldn’t wait to see each other?

Those distances that separated you seemed legendary. The night, school, homework etc. All gigantic obstacles to be traversed: You had to plead with your your parents to give you a lift.

The injustice of not being able to drive at 16. The days moving with aching slowness till you met again. Your parents trying to get you off the phone because you were on it for hours... ‘no you hang up!’ You could chat for hours about nothing. The sun seemed younger then.

Those magical sublunary walks dreaming of the world that would unfold ahead of you both. It was a time of firsts: first love, first exploration of your physical self, first time having your heart broken, and then more excitement as you fell in love again.

More aching, more sex. We all thought those days would last forever. Oh, the innocence and naivety of youth.

Google, that fountain of all knowledge, shows that ‘sexless marriages’ was searched three times more than ‘unhappy marriages’ and eight times more than ‘loveless marriages’. So, I am here to tell you all; it is common to live in a relationship where sex slows down as we move towards middle age.

I think people often feel like they are the only ones experiencing very common aspects of life because people don’t talk about them. We are Irish, and by god we don’t like talking about sex.

I don’t know how we ever got this far as a people. The population has steadily increased over the decades, so it actually seems like we might have been having sex all along. The shame.

We’re probably more comfortable talking about the lack of sex than the bounty of it in our lives. And if you’re talking about the bounty of sex in middle age, you’re probably one of those people who pretended to have babies that slept so well.

“Our little Sandra never wakes, goes to bed at 8pm and wakes at 8am, she just lies there waiting for us to come to her.” Liars.

Slow as we age

There are many reasons why our sex lives might slow as we age.

In men, that super-charged sex hormone testosterone, decreases by about 1% to 2% every year after age 40. Men have higher levels of testosterone than women and explains why they might be more sexually motivated than women. That doesn’t mean women do not have sexual desires and lust. Of course they do.

But lower levels of testosterone in men, might mean they are less interested in sex. It is biological rather than any disinterest in their partner. In my experience, a slowing down of sex can often provoke feelings of rejection.

Our bodies are constantly changing, and there is an entire industry out there designed to make us, particularly women, feel like our bodies should be perfect and unchanging, which makes us more insecure about being physical.

Comparison is no friend when it comes to how much intimacy we have in life. Watching programmes where people are ripping their clothes off as they make a spicy spag bol. Lifting a partner onto the stove that was just boiling a pot is not only dangerous but reckless!

So, when we watch these programmes and then our partner shows little interest in sex, it can make us internalise that as meaning there is something unappealing about our bodies. Which is not the truth.

Richard Hogan. Picture: Moya Nolan.

Another aspect that impacts on intimacy is how we talk to each other during conflict. It’s very hard to be intimate with someone after they call you terrible names that deplete your self-esteem and confidence. I hear this so often in my clinic, a person sitting there telling their partner how the names they call them hurt.

And yet their partner is wondering why intimacy has stopped. How we communicate to each other in those moments of conflict is incredibly significant for how we engage with each other when things are going well.

Damage of pornography

Pornography is often at the root of diminished intimacy. I cannot overstate this phenomenon and how it has damaged intimate relationships.

The pornified view of intimacy that is foisted on us all, is not real and presents a very distorted version of intimacy. I meet it so much in my clinic. Men stuck in pornography while their relationship is failing. Dopamine fires when we consume a hardcore image, this makes us feel good and programmes memory.

Therefore, the next time you become aroused you will go to where you went the last time to satiate that arousal. That is the genesis of a very isolated and loveless relationship.

I think we are setting children up to have issues with intimacy because of pornography and AI. Intimacy is a very important part of a relationship.

It is a healing and restorative action. Yes, we lose that maddening drive we once had. But that’s normal. Don’t beat yourself up because you’re not throwing your partner around the kitchen as you make dinner, that’s just a health hazard.

Maybe taking time to just be together would be a nice first step to rekindle intimacy in your relationship, then the hot stove.