In this episode of the Dad Starting Over podcast, host Ralph Brewer responds to a listener, Richie, who is frustrated that his wife’s libido has plummeted after being prescribed SSRIs for anxiety and depression. Richie also cites the strain of three young children, a full‑time job, and school commitments, as well as lingering stress from his veteran deployment, as factors eroding their sexual relationship. Brewer explains how SSRIs work and why they commonly cause reduced desire, difficulty reaching orgasm, or an overall sense of sex being a chore. He contextualizes the issue within broader marital challenges faced by veterans and parents, noting that children and work often diminish intimacy. The host advises Richie to initiate a calm, honest conversation with his wife, offering either collaborative problem‑solving (e.g., exploring medication adjustments, counseling, or joint effort to rekindle intimacy) or, if she is unwilling, to consider an ultimatum and decide whether to stay in the marriage. Brewer stresses the importance of avoiding accusatory behavior, recommends structured communication, and suggests seeking support from peers through the Help for Men Brotherhood, which provides forums, Zoom meetings, coaching, and resources. The episode concludes with a call for viewers to comment, share their experiences, and subscribe.
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For some people, unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that they have to choose between emotional mental health and a healthy sexual relationship with their spouse. They can't do both. Let's talk about it in today's Dear DSO submission. And you can submit your own story to deardso.com. Fill out the form, and if your story is a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see, or for the Dad Starting Over podcast listeners to listen to on the Dad Starting Over podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may listen to your podcasts. And if you are watching this on YouTube, do me a big favor, click on subscribe down below, click on like, share this, leave a comment, all that good stuff. You know what to do. It really helps me out a great deal. Thank you so very much. Now on to today's submission, which comes from Richie, and the subject line is Wife with Anxiety/SSRI. He says, my wife has always had a medium/low drive and has been prescribed SSRIs for anxiety and depression, which pretty much dried up our sex life. Along with the 3 kids, her full-time job, and her back in school, she says sex life is just not a priority. I have just begun working on myself and I have faced a few accusations of, quote, 'getting it somewhere else' and 'you're just doing this to leave me,' which I laugh off because it's not true at all. But it seems odd as I've never done anything like that. What are your thoughts on whether or not I just need to leave her behind or keep trying? I do love her and she's beautiful to me, but the bedroom department is just lacking and it's just not a priority for her. When she does turn it on, it's GREAT, he says in all caps. But it's so infrequent that it bothers me. I don't think she's cheating, but there's no way to know for sure. We've been together for 17 years, married for 15. I'm a veteran who deployed when we first were married, and there was a quite a rocky transition coming home, which nearly led to divorce. And then things were great until kid number 1, kid number 2, and kid number 3. And I just want to reignite that fire. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you so much, Richie, for a very common sentiment. You got a lot going on here, my friend. Thing number one that sticks out is the old veteran thing. I've said this many times, and it's no slight against our veteran brothers and sisters out there. There's something about the military world that lends itself to all kinds of marital drama, I guess you could say, for lack of a better word. And I say that as a military brat. My father was a US Air Force guy, career guy. I was born overseas, my mom's from overseas, it's— I live that whole life, so I know it well. So that's kind of like, it's not a strike against you, but it's something that kind of raises the old DSO eyebrow, like, oh, here we go. Um, thing 2 is, uh, your wife works, your wife— you got 3 kids. These are all things that kind of go against the keeping the spark alive thing in your average relationship. Most, dare I say all, of your average folks out there would say Yeah, kids are a detriment to the whole libido, finding time with each other, just getting in the way of bedroom activity. And some women unfortunately will report, as soon as I had a kid, the interest in having sexual interest, or sexual intercourse rather, with my husband just went from like a, oh, let's say like a 7 out of 10 down to a 2. And it takes a lot of work to get there, she will say. And some women are cognizant enough to know like, wow, that really, If I had to look back, it really was ever since we had a child. Something like a mechanism within their brain, their body has just kind of shut down. And they recognize like, that's not so good. And they get, you know, they go maybe to hormonal therapy or regular old therapy, whatever it may be to get over the hump and get back to their old self again. But most will report, I'm never quite get back to what I was pre-kids. There's something about the, something that happens in the human body, you know, post-pregnancy that really changes you. Some not so good ways, some good ways. The other thing, which is something that you're harping on here, you put it in your subject line, you put it right at the beginning, and for good reason. This is a, the big elephant in the room, as I often say, the SSRI. For those that don't know, this is a commonly prescribed classification of medications that are given to people with anxiety and depression problems. SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. To help explain, basically your brain uses a chemical called serotonin that helps you regulate your mood, your sleep, and your emotion. Normally though, what happens is your brain releases the serotonin and it quickly wants to reabsorb it. And what these SSRIs do basically is say, "Not so fast with that reabsorbing or reuptake of the serotonin again." It blocks that. Selectively. It just says, let's, let's, let's everything else back in, I guess, presumably. I'm no scientist, just going by what I know after doing this for so many years. But it says serotonin, not so fast. Let's just inhibit the reuptake of that. It's not a make you happy pill. It's a let's, let's let serotonin do its thing a little longer and maybe that will help regulate mood type of drug. For some, they don't really notice much of a difference beyond just some really not so good side effects. For others, it is the drug that basically keeps them above ground, if you know what I mean. They really need it to function and to live a healthy lifestyle. The side effect that your wife is experiencing, presumably with the lowering of libido or sex drive, is a very common one for people that are on SSRIs. I don't know the mechanism at play there or what's happening, but both men and women report this. Men often report erectile dysfunction after SRI. A lot of men and women report, um, they can get in the mood but they can't complete the act. Getting to the orgasm at the end is like next to impossible. So sex becomes almost like a chore to them, like, oh God, I gotta— I would love to get to the finish line, but I just can't, so why bother? So that's one way that this may manifest itself in what looks like a low libido, while others say just the thought of doing it, forget it, it's just gone. That's sad, but this is pretty common. In fact, I did a video here not too long ago where a guy said that his wife basically told him, "I have to choose either my sanity, my emotional health, or a sex life with you, husband, and I have chosen my emotional health. Sorry." And it sounds like your wife, if you sat her down, I don't know if you've done this, and said— and by the way, you know, all the therapists throw out things like communication, communication. And they're right, if it's done in a healthy way. What I've seen is that a lot of anxious men, and you are exhibiting signs of that, you know, thinking that your wife is cheating on you and all these other things, and you're ignoring the fact that she has a job, 3 kids, and she's on drugs, which are notorious for lowering libido, and you're jumping to something like, "Hey, I wonder if she's cheating on me?" It shows that you have an anxious insecure streak in you. And what a lot of men who are anxious/ insecure do is they will take on, you know, they'll hear all these people saying, "Communicate, communicate, communicate." and they will just emotionally vomit on their partner and throw a lot of accusations. I know you're cheating on me. Let me see your phone. And blah, blah, blah, and on and on and on. And it's a massive turnoff to anybody who's secure or potentially an avoidant partner. So it's just not good. But there's a healthy way of doing it, which is basically— I'll abbreviate it here. I've done many videos on the healthy version of the talk. In essence, this is not sustainable, what's going on here. I love you, wife. I want to work on this. Are you willing to work on this with me? Perhaps there's some kind of thing we can work on where we can maintain the SSRI or something similar to that and reignite our love life together. Now, if your wife says, no, I have no interest in talking about that, I have no interest in putting forth effort into reigniting that part of our life, what we're doing now once every few months or whatever is good for me, or if she says something to the effect of, I've been to the doctor, I've talked about this, and we have come to the conclusion that I have to stay on the SSRI for my sanity, my emotional health, for my life. And sorry, husband, if that gets in the way of our love life, but what do you want me to do about it? I mean, if you get one of those two answers, which basically is like, suck it up, dude, what do you want me to tell you? You have the very real and difficult choice to make. Do you want to stay in this relationship and just say, eh, it is what it is, no biggie, I got 3 kids, let's just work through this and which basically means suck it up, dude. Or are you going to tell her, it's either this or no more marriage? From what I've seen, that really is the only way to resolve these issues. This is how serious this is to me, wife. I'm talking about the disintegration of our family unless we work on our issues. Usually that's enough to get a woman to go, okay, what is it you want? And she'll begrudgingly go, fine, we'll go to the counseling, we'll do this, I'll read the book with you, whatever it is you want to do, roll her eyes, whatever. But sometimes that gets the momentum going. And a year or 2 years down the line, you're like, thank goodness we had that big talk because we're so much better now. That's the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is she says, you know, flips you the middle finger and says, see you in court. So life ain't fair, dude. You either face your demons and say, this is really important to me, we're going to fix this, or you learn to live with it and do what a lot of men do. Which resort to things like pornography, affairs, sex workers, living a life of celibacy and slowly getting more and more depressed. I don't know what to tell you. There's no magic formula here, my friend, other than good old-fashioned communication. Or if you want to call it an ultimatum, which is not a bad word. Ultimatums work. All right, brother, but thank you for reaching out. And I suggest, if I may, like I do in almost all these videos, you need to talk to some other gentlemen about this, men that have been in your shoes. And may I suggest our brotherhood group, the Help for Men Brotherhood at helpformen.com, or jump right to the join page at helpformen.com/join. We get together in private discussion forums which are very active. We have live Zoom meetings. We have a whole bunch of those. We record them all so you can listen back to them. We have over 1,200 hours of meetings that have been recorded. We have all my books at no, no extra cost to you. One-on-one coaching is available with myself as well as other guys on the team. We get together in person, just all kinds of good stuff. So check it out, the Brotherhood at help4men.com. All right, thank you so much for reaching out. I do appreciate it. Very common problem. And guys, what do you think? Leave a note in the comments. Are you dealing with this as well? How have you dealt with it? Thanks for watching.
