Suzanne Noble discusses mismatched sexual desire in long-term relationships, drawing on her own experience of leaving a partner. She addresses fears about aging and loneliness, emphasizes why intimacy matters, and recommends relationship counseling, sexologists like co-host Zoe Kors, or workshops to help couples reconnect.
Chapters
What do you do if you're in a long-term relationship and one person in the couple really wants to have sex and the other person really, really doesn't? That's something that comes up more and more frequently in the comments that I receive, and I know speaking personally that in my own relationship it was an issue and I decided to leave. I was much younger then, and I can appreciate that as we get older those choices become more difficult especially as we consider how we're going to deal with being old. Who's going to look after us? Who's going to care for us? Whether we can actually deal with the loneliness that sometimes comes from living on your own, especially if you haven't done that either ever or for a significant period of time. I don't really have an answer for this, but I know that intimacy in a relationship is really important, and without it, at least for me, it doesn't really constitute what I would consider to be a relationship. We're just friends who happen to be living together. And obviously, in some couples' cases, they're not even friends. But I do think that the first step is always to seek out help, to go and see a relationship counselor, to see a sexologist like my co-host on my podcast, Zoe Kors, or to, you know, to look at what other help is available and to see whether your partner would consider doing workshops with you and all the other kinds of activities that you can do to try and re-engage and bring sex back into your relationship if you can. Of course, there are people that go and do other things like see sex workers, have affairs, and you know, those choices are also available. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I understand why people sometimes choose to do that, especially because for me anyway, intimacy in a relationship is really important.
