Loss of Desire in a Relationship, Explained

Q: How many times a week is “normal”?

There is no frequency norm, and comparing yourself is one of the most effective brakes there is. What matters is that nobody owes anything, that saying no is easy, and that desire can be met rather than paid back.

Q: Do you need to “spice things up” to bring desire back?

Rarely, and not first. A prop or a new setting is false novelty: new on the outside, the same on the inside. What brings desire back is loosening the brakes, finding fresh air through gardens of your own, and growing together through shared newness, even a tiny one.

Why does desire fade when everything is going well?

This is the question couples therapist Esther Perel asked head-on in “Mating in Captivity”: why do so many couples who love each other, respect each other, and get along well watch their desire fade? Her answer is a paradox. A couple holds two appetites that don’t eat the same food. Love feeds on closeness: the familiar, safety, predictability, a refuge. It wants to curl up. Desire feeds on distance: the pull toward, the unknown, movement, discovery. It wants to stretch.

The consequence: the more successfully a couple builds its love, with gentle fusion, comfort, and total transparency, the more likely it is to put its desire to sleep, with no one to blame. Desire is a movement toward something not yet fully possessed, known, or secured. To stretch, it needs a gap to cross. And a successful life together erases that gap, piece by piece: the “we” that swallows the “I” (“we don’t like that,” “we go to bed early”), total transparency with no shadowy corner left and no surprise, and the “I know you by heart” moment, when you respond with tenderness to a version of your partner who no longer exists. Nobody desires their own arm.

What kills desire is not routine. It’s ceasing to be two people.
Adapted from Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity

Is it normal to no longer feel desire spontaneously?

Yes, and that is the second thing to understand, which comes from another researcher. In 2000, Rosemary Basson proposed a circular model of desire for established relationships. The old model is a straight line: first desire, then closeness, then everything that follows. It describes the beginning well, and everything after it poorly. The model that describes what comes next is a circle: you can enter it through chosen availability, with no desire beforehand, just openness to a pleasant moment. The pleasure of the moment arrives, with relaxation, complicity, tenderness. And desire starts up along the way, or it doesn’t. This is responsive desire, the appetite that comes while eating, every bit as legitimate as spontaneous desire.

The shift from one to the other over the years is how things work, not a breakdown. And believing the opposite creates exactly what it fears: when you watch for your desire (“it should be here”), you’re monitoring it, the monitoring becomes pressure, and pressure shuts it down. Desire at rest is information about tonight, never a verdict on the couple.

What looks like a dead engine is often a brake pressed down

The third piece is the most concrete. Erick Janssen and John Bancroft described the dual control model: desire has two independent pedals, an accelerator and brakes, each with its own individual sensitivity. Emily Nagoski popularized it in “Come As You Are” with a practical conclusion: desire that won’t start is rarely a dead engine, and almost always a brake pressed down. Fatigue, the mental load, unresolved tension, a body that gets commented on, a screen in bed, a door that doesn’t close.

And context decides which pedal gets pressed: the very same gesture, exactly the same, turns you on during a quiet Saturday and puts on the brakes on a Tuesday in the middle of an urgent email. That isn’t fickleness, not in you and not in your partner. Hence the strategy the MyLoveLab program sums up in four words: loosen first, stimulate later. The best thing you can do all week for desire often has nothing sensual about it: settling the tension that’s been lingering, taking screens out of the bedroom, or taking over a block of the mental load your partner carries alone.

The MyLoveLab test measures the Intimacy dimension along with six others, in 15 minutes. It asks no explicit questions: it looks at the climate, the way you talk, and safety.

Measure my Intimacy dimension

The soil before the seed

Sue Johnson, through emotionally focused therapy, established that emotional safety is the foundation of physical intimacy: the body only relaxes where the bond is safe. It reads the climate of the relationship nonstop. Can I say no here without getting a cold shoulder, be seen without being judged, get it wrong without a trial? And it doesn’t believe declarations, it believes repeated proof. Four pillars: a welcomed no, a respected body, imperfection allowed, coming back together after tension. Every no that is welcomed well is an investment in the yeses that follow.

This seems to contradict Perel: she talks about air, Johnson talks about ground. In truth you need both. Safety is the ground, air is the space. The enemy of desire is not safety, it’s false fusion: the kind where you stop saying what you prefer, show only what’s approvable, and have no garden of your own anymore.

What actually brings desire back?

Rediscover the gap without manufacturing absence

A temptation shows up once you’ve understood that desire needs distance: play at being far away, make yourself hard to reach, provoke a pinch of jealousy. Engrave this once and for all: these strategies burn trust for a flash in the pan. The air that feeds desire is of a different kind: real autonomy, supported and transparent. A garden of your own, the Wednesday club, the Saturday swim, a friendship that’s yours, announced openly, with the broad strokes shared afterward. Perel describes it as the “middle distance”: that moment when you see your partner in their element, telling a story that makes the whole table laugh or fixing something with sure hands, and they become someone again. Not shoulder to shoulder at home, and not absence: the point where your partner is a whole person before your eyes.

Grow together instead of replaying the beginning

Arthur Aron showed, with his self-expansion model, that a couple’s boredom is growth that has stopped, not love that has run out: at the beginning, loving someone means discovering a world, and the brain ties that feeling of expansion to desire. Shared activities that are new and stimulating bring the spark back. Not false novelty that changes the scenery without changing you, the new restaurant where you have the same conversation again, but the kind you come out of a little different: doing something together that neither of you has ever done, even something tiny, where you’re equal beginners. Seeing your partner in unfamiliar territory slips past the map of “I know you by heart.”

Take care of the first two minutes of the reunion

Every day, life hands you for free the moment that desire strategists look for everywhere: the reunion. At that instant, the gap has just done its work, you’ve been separate. And what do we almost always do? A “hi” without looking up, and logistics right after. The first two minutes belong to the bond: look up at the figure coming back, a touch, a question to the person. The logistics can wait a hundred and twenty seconds.

Stop the counter

When the dip goes on, a quiet poison sets in: debt. A counter (“it’s been seven weeks”), deadlines (“this weekend, we should”), and every tender gesture turned into a possible down payment, the cuddle you dodge for fear it will “give ideas.” Both people suffer. Desire is something you meet, not something you pay back: stop the counter out loud, together, and relearn touch in tiny steps, with the rule said out loud, “come here, just this, promise,” and the promise kept.

When should you seek help?

Early, and without drama. There are two doors, and you push them open as skills, not as confessions. The doctor, when the body stays quiet for a long time, when there is pain, or when a medication, a pregnancy, or an illness has come into the picture: desire has a biology, and it can be checked. A couples or sex therapist, when the pressure-withdrawal cycle has set in, when each of you is suffering on your own and can’t manage to talk about it, or when the dry spell has lasted for months. Any pain or coercion is a matter for a professional, never for a couple’s exercise. And nothing gets forced: “no” and “not now” are complete answers.

The Intimacy and desire dimension of the MyLoveLab program works through all of this in ten levels: how your desire works, your brakes, the soil, staying yourself under your partner’s gaze, bringing desire back, breathing, getting through the dry spells.

Explore the Intimacy dimension

Frequently asked questions

Does a drop in desire mean I no longer love my partner?

Almost never. The silence of desire rarely speaks about love. Most often it speaks of a brake pressed down (fatigue, mental load, unresolved tension), of ground that is no longer safe, or of a gap that has vanished because the “we” swallowed the “I.” These are three things you can work on.

How many times a week is “normal”?

There is no frequency norm, and comparing yourself is one of the most effective brakes there is. What matters is that nobody owes anything, that saying no is easy, and that desire can be met rather than paid back.

Do you need to “spice things up” to bring desire back?

Rarely, and not first. A prop or a new setting is false novelty: new on the outside, the same on the inside. What brings desire back is loosening the brakes, finding fresh air through gardens of your own, and growing together through shared newness, even a tiny one.

My partner no longer wants sex and I feel rejected. What can I do?

First, don’t read their desire at rest as a verdict on you: responsive desire, which comes along the way, is how established relationships normally work. Then, defuse the pressure, even the invisible kind: a whole evening with no expectations, a gesture with no follow-up, with the rule said out loud. The pressure-withdrawal cycle stops with a single open door.

Is the MyLoveLab program explicit about sexuality?

No. The register is sensual, never explicit: it works on the climate, the way you talk, safety, and the movement between closeness and separation, not on practices. And its absolute rule: nothing gets forced.

References

Perel, E. (2006). Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. Harper.
Basson, R. (2000). The female sexual response: A different model. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 26(1), 51-65.
Janssen, E. & Bancroft, J. (2007). The dual control model: The role of sexual inhibition and excitation in sexual arousal and behavior. In The Psychophysiology of Sex. Indiana University Press.
Nagoski, E. (2015). Come As You Are. Simon & Schuster.
Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold Me Tight. Little, Brown.
Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C. & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273-284.
Metz, M. E. & McCarthy, B. W. (2007). The “Good-Enough Sex” model for couple sexual satisfaction. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 22(3), 351-362.