He used to look at you. Now he looks at the television, or the phone, or the ceiling. You get into bed and he is already turned away, or asleep, or saying he is tired in a voice that closes the subject. And you have started doing the thing that women in this culture are trained to do. You stand in front of the mirror and you find the reason. The weight. The age. The body after the kids. You have decided, quietly, that he does not want you because there is something wrong with how you look.
I am going to tell you why that is almost certainly not it, and I want you to hear me, because the mirror is the wrong place to be looking.
It is almost never your body
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When a husband stops initiating, the body is a decoy. I have sat with hundreds of couples where the wife was certain it was her appearance, and I can count on one hand the number of times that was actually what was going on with him. What is going on with him is fear.
Here is what I see. A man who feels constantly evaluated in his marriage, who has come to believe he is failing you in a hundred small ways, does not bring that belief to bed and leave it at the door. His nervous system shuts his desire down as an act of self-preservation, because sex has become one more arena where he might fail. The performance review has followed him under the covers. And the one place a man cannot bear to feel inadequate is the one place he stops going.
So he turns away. Not because he is repulsed. Because he is frightened of disappointing you, and turning away is the only way he knows to not fail.
The man who came to bed instead of Sexy Figs
My wife and I met at Esalen. Hot springs, dancing, an electric, no-effort connection. I had a persona in those days, and I call him Sexy Figs. He was confident and playful and unburdened by fear, and she fell for him.
Then came real life. Two kids, a mortgage, a practice to run. And the person who comes to bed now is not Sexy Figs. It is a tired, snivelly, vulnerable man who is scared of being a disappointment. For a while I did what your husband is doing. I turned away, made excuses, blamed work and tiredness, because it was easier than letting her see how unsure of myself I had become. She read that as her. It was never her. It was me, hiding.
Why asking makes it worse
You have probably asked. Do you still find me attractive. Are you turned off by my body. Why do you not touch me any more.
I know why you asked. It is the most natural question in the world. But to a man in the state I have just described, that question is not a question. It is the exam he has been dreading. It puts a double dose of pressure on a system that is already tripped, confirms his belief that he is failing you, and sends him further into the screen and the silence. Then you feel more unwanted, so you ask again, or you go cold, and the same thing happens the other way round. I call this the Waltz of Pain. Two people who want each other, each doing the exact thing that makes the other one hide.
The roles that kill desire
There are two shapes I see in nearly every couple where desire has gone.
The first is roommates. Somewhere along the way you stopped bringing your real selves home and started managing a small corporation together. Who is picking up the kids. What is for dinner. You are polite and efficient and nobody has touched anyone’s heart in months, and you cannot desire a colleague.
The second is parent and child. One of you corrects, manages, reminds. The other complies or rebels. And here is the thing I say in the room that lands every time. You cannot desire a parent, and a parent cannot desire a child. If you have been running his life, or he has been running yours, the bedroom went quiet for a reason, and it has nothing to do with your waistline.
What to say tonight
Not a plan. One thing. And it is not a question about your body, and it is not a request for sex.
You are going to drop the mask first, because somebody has to, and say what is actually true. Sit beside him. Feet on the floor. Something like:
I am not bringing this up to test you or ask for anything. But I have noticed we have become like roommates, and my chest goes tight, because I miss feeling close to you. I am scared we are drifting. I do not need us to fix it tonight. I just wanted to tell you I miss you.
Then stop. No but. No so is it me. What you have just done is take the exam off the table. There is nothing in that for him to fail. There is just a woman he loves, telling him she misses him, and that is the one thing a frightened man can move toward.
If he is reading this over her shoulder
She is not asking for a performance. She is asking whether she still matters to you, and your turning away, whatever it is protecting you from, is landing on her as a verdict on her body. You do not have to be Sexy anyone. Put the phone down, put a hand on her back, and say: I have been hiding from you and it was never about you. I got scared of disappointing you. Watch what happens.
What I tell the woman in that chair
Your body is not the problem. Your husband’s fear is, and his fear is fixable, and the way it gets fixed is not by you becoming more desirable but by both of you becoming less frightened. When the exam is gone, desire comes back through the side door, quietly, as two unpolished people who have stopped hiding from each other.
If you want help with the words for tonight, that is what I built Figlet for. Tell it what happens when you get into bed and what you have been telling yourself in the mirror. It will show you the cycle you are both in and give you the one line that is not a question about your body.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
