Sex drive in neutral

Dear Sasha,

My girlfriend has suggested I write you an e-mail. I am a 22-year-old lesbian, my girlfriend is in her thirties and we have been together in a monogamous relationship for four years. Most things in our relationship are just peachy, but we have had one issue come up over and over, to the point where it is stressing me out and making my girlfriend unstable. We have radically different sex drives.

I’m sure my GF would like to have sex every day, though she has settled for a lot less! I, on the other hand, am content with twice a month. Obviously our ideas of what is enough are very different and it’s a point of conflict. We have tried to set specific time aside to “hang out” and have sex but this sort of planning just fills me with dread and anxiety. I have promised to go see a doctor to rule out a health problem, but really, I just think I have a low sex drive. Surely those are natural/normal too? And if that is the case, what can we do to make us both happy?

Dear No,

I’ve just turned my office upside down looking for that book that says you need to want to have sex with your partner X amount of times a week or you have a health condition. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere, along with the one that resolutely proclaims homosexuality a treatable perversion.

No, but seriously, let’s look at some basic issues here: first of all, acknowledging that this is about variant sex drives and not a relationship where the spark has gone out of it for one partner more than the other.

Your girlfriend’s self-esteem is very tied to how much partner sex she has, so much so that she has made you promise to go and see a doctor, write an advice columnist and set aside time to connect. All this must feel like a lot of pressure to you, and looking at it so plainly, her agenda seems more selfish than sharing but it’s easy to see why it’s not the one being called into question. All around us, people attach desire and desirability to frequency. But when you get involved with someone, are you by virtue owed a certain amount of sex? And if your sexual identity is really contingent on having a lot of it, then is a monogamous commitment with someone who has always been perfectly content doing it every two weeks really the best model to pursue with them?

There is nothing wrong with either of the ways you express yourselves sexually, the problem is simply that you’ve chosen to merge your desires using an ill-suited paradigm. Look at the foundation of monogamy and you’ll see it never promised to address the intricacies of disparity. One reason you are having this “problem” is because sexual fulfilment is now (happily but not flawlessly) considered a birthright and our culture’s most established relationship model is having a hard time adjusting to that fact honestly.

I just finished reading a book by a relationship therapist named Michele Weiner-Davis called The Sex-Starved Marriage. The book is written with straight couples in mind and tackles the issue of developing divergent drives rather than established ones but I’m curious to know what you would take from it. I have very mixed feelings myself. Weiner-Davis is the perfect voice for the American talk show circuit and self-help shelf, with her shirtsleeves crisply rolled and her own 30-year marriage still intact after much struggle, but in the upsell festival that radiates from all self-help gurus, she recommends her other books and Web site throughout The Sex-Starved Marriage. She even suggests buying a couple of the one you’re already holding, making it difficult not to feel that she really needs to commit to her ideas in the same way that has brought so many televangelists to their knees (actually, more pulled them up from them). I’m really interested in hearing from other couples, who may have used this book successfully, or not, and I’ll be sharing more of my own thoughts on it next week.

In the meantime, if you’re locked down and not getting laid, you might as well have a laugh. Has anyone else seen comedian Louis CK’s bit “The Saddest Handjob”? Sheer brilliance awaits you at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWhSfln1O4k.

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM