Dr. Psych Mom and a host discuss what to do when your partner isn't genuinely interested in sex. They explain responsive desire, how to spot the signs, and why you should pause and ask if she's okay instead of continuing. Depression, SSRIs, pregnancy, and porn-shaped expectations all kill desire; the real fix is honest conversation about what's actually happening in your relationship.
Chapters
Here's a good one. Mr. James again says, Samantha talks a lot about responsive desire. This is a good one. But what if she will have sex, but she obviously isn't actually desiring her husband? In other words, she's just going with the motion. She's happy to do it for him, but she doesn't really desire it. And it's obvious. That's the key there. Her responsive desire isn't responding. So, um, you know, men that have more of a— I don't know if this is a proper term— emotional intelligence, they they're able to read a room and so forth, can pick up on the whole, this isn't what the wife would like to be doing at this moment. And when a man picks up on that, he's just like, oh God, now I feel like a total dirtbag. Basically, I'm— she's going through the motions just to— I know this is what he wants, whatever, go ahead. Oh, you want me to flip over? That's fine. And as soon as he picks up on that, he's just like, oh God, what am I doing? And it's an instant mood killer. And an instant whatever. So I always tell men, if you're getting that she's staring at the ceiling and looking whatever, and you don't feel like it's right, then by all means stop and go, are you okay? You know, you need to talk about something because you just seem really out of it. If there's— if you don't want to do this, we don't have to do this. And she's like, well, if— and then she'll say something effective. Well, if we wait till I want to do it, then we're never going to do it, mister. He's like, oh, ouch. You don't want to hear that from your wife. But That's what a lot of guys hear.
Sure. Yeah, there's just so much. I mean, it's so based on the age, the stage, the intention. If you just can't— if you get to a stage, or so let's say that the woman was very depressed and she got on SSRIs and she can no longer have an orgasm, which anorgasmia is a side effect, right? But she's doing well otherwise, and she wasn't doing well before, and she understands that it's important to have sex. Well, What do you want her to fake? I mean, does she want her literally to fake an orgasm? Probably not. If she does something with love, you know, there are guys who are like super, super, A, anxious, and B, have no idea basically what long-term monogamy looks like. So then they think everything's supposed to look like porn. A lot of those guys, by the way, do a lot better after they get off of porn because it's no longer crowding up their neural pathways about like a 20-year-old woman screaming in ecstasy when you take your pants off, basically. And like instead said, they are like, all right, this is nice. It's like a version— she's saying I love you, you know. So if she's happy to do it for him is the key word that indicates to me that his expectations may need to be reset, given maybe her age, meds, where her body's at. Maybe she's— maybe she's nursing, maybe she's pregnant. I don't know how old this dude is, you know. And so there's multiple variables. Now, if she is just laying there and not even responding and it's just like bracing herself for impact, then no, you shouldn't have sex like that. But many women do not— literally intelligent women do not understand that that is not okay. The guy— the same guys who use sex as a pressure release have trained women to think that sex is a pressure release. So they say, if I am gifting you my vagina for the moment, what else is there here? You know, and maybe the man himself, as a younger man— and I hear this a lot, by the way— men were just doing a 5-minute encounter when they were younger. They didn't know any better. They didn't have a smartphone or access to lots of porn and, you know, Reddit forums on kinky marriages. And so they did just roll over and penetrate her, and that was pretty much it. And she's still doing that now, 20 years later, but now he thinks that it ought to look very different after he's done with his multi-hour edging sessions on Pornhub, you know what I mean? So it's like a different feel. And she's like, what happened to the guy that just wanted to use my vagina? That's who I signed up for. We're not very like kinky, crazy people. So there's that much more than you realize.
Oh, sure. I mean, the whole— one of my catchphrases is you trained her to be that way, or she trained you to be that way over the decades of a marriage. And suddenly you're like, why are we this way?
Yes. And I do see the impact of a lot of porn on that, where the woman is like, he has changed. You have no idea what it's like to be in bed with him. I don't know where he's getting it from. I assume he's getting it online, but he's a totally different guy. It's terrible.
You know, now here's a very, here's a very blunt, crass, not nice take on this, James. If that is in fact your situation, and you're looking down at a wife who would much rather be knitting than doing that at the moment, and she's pretty blunt about it, some women are not very nice about it. And that sincerely bothers you, then you need to weigh, I guess, against all the other stuff. How much does it bother you? Does it bother you to the point of, I think it's girlfriend time, or I think it's divorce time, or let's sit down with the wife and talk about different alternative relationship dynamic time? Then go for it. But what I find for a lot of men is they go, oh no, no, it ain't that serious. I'm not about to cross that bridge. That's an anxiety-producing thought. No, we'll just I'll just piss and moan for the next 30 years. I'd rather go down that route. It's like, well, then apparently it's not that important to you because that's what it takes.
