When someone's baseline interest in sex is low, it is understandable for sex to feel like a burden. It's sort of like being asked to eat when you're not hungry or sleep when you're not tired- without the craving, it just doesn't feel like it makes sense.
From that vantage point, it's also easy to understand the intensely negative feelings someone with a high libido feels when sex is not happening. The feeling of being starved and functioning at a lower capacity than one might were that need for sexual enjoyment and the release of orgasm met more consistently is not a good time.
And while I would never dismiss the challenges inherent in the basic management of libido as unimportant, it seems sometimes couples who are at odds on the topic can become fixated on this element of the problem. A lower desire partner feels consistently pressured to "eat because their partner is hungry" and begins to resent the other's appetite. On the flip side, the other feels like they're regularly going hungry in the presence of a delicious buffet (A buffet of your favorite foods that magically won't cause you to gain any weight no less!) from which they're being callously turned away.
Now, I can't stress this enough- neither of these positions is wrong, neither person can be faulted for feeling burdened. It makes all the sense in the world!
One of the first things I tell couples for whom mismatched sex drives is a source of pain and conflict is that,"You are not the problem for wanting less sex; and you are not the problem for wanting more sex; the problem is that you are both hurting because you want sex differently."
But before we can discuss practical solutions for increasing, decreasing, and generally managing those appetites in a way that feels loving, kind, and generous, we have to understand, process, find a way through the mess of emotions that chronic misidentification of the problem has created.
Your partner is almost certainly not an unfeeling, unloving monster who wanted you to constantly feel the deranging pangs of hunger caused by sexual starvation. Nor are they sex crazed sociopaths who "only want one thing" and don't care how they get it.
You've both been feeling disappointed, sad, insecure, anxious, misunderstood, judged, criticized, and alone. If you can imagine the full weight of those emotions, piled in to mountains, weighing on your partner's soul, you can begin to feel the compassion and curiosity that will make possible the difficult work of building a sex life both of you can be happy with.
And now, even though I thought I wrapped that up nicely, I want to acknowledge that I still worried that I had not and so felt the need to add this...
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