DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: My husband and I (he’s a straight man and I’m a bi woman) have been together for 25 years, and most of the time I see him as the best partner possible. Loving, kind, thoughtful, funny, and a wonderful father. Where things aren’t so great is our sex life.

Up until last year my sex drive was at an all time low. I was dealing with a misdiagnosed mental health disorder, and the medication I was taking meant my desire completely tanked. So having sex once every month or even less was fine by me. I wasn’t even masturbating, which I’ve always enjoyed, so it wasn’t like my lack of interest had anything to do with him. But things have changed and it’s becoming a big problem.

Now that I have a proper diagnosis and am taking the right medication, my sex drive has skyrocketed. Sex once a month isn’t enough. I masturbate every day, sometimes more than once, but I miss having sex with my husband. And it’s not just the physical act, but also the closeness and emotional connection that I’m looking for. But he doesn’t seem interested. At all.

I’ve tried everything I can think of. I initiate sex regularly, but the majority of the time he says he’s too tired. I’ve bought sexy lingerie, suggested we watch porn together (what kind is his choice), bought books, offered to do a strip tease, role play etc etc and nothing seems to work. At this point I’m not sure if it’s that he’s no longer attracted to me, that he really is too tired, that he’s getting it somewhere else, or that he’s unable to keep an erection (more on that shortly).

We’ve talked about this outside the bedroom when we’re both calm and he swears it isn’t a lack of desire or attraction to me. He says he’s especially tired at night, which makes sense because he works a physically demanding job. But I’ve tried initiating sex in the morning or on the weekend and that doesn’t work either. So I’m left with the last two possibilities …cheating or ED.

The last few times we’ve had sex he’s had trouble staying hard. I’ve given him oral, tried manual, stimulated everywhere I could think of, dirty talk, dirty movies, and no dice. The last time it happened I asked if everything was OK and he said that having trouble staying hard is just what happens to 50 year old men. But from everything I’ve read that just isn’t true.

He doesn’t want to see a doctor, which I find frustrating. I know that vaginal penetration isn’t the be all and end all of good sex, but not being able to get him off at all is driving me crazy. And yes, I miss good old fashioned screwing. But most importantly of all, there’s no cuddling, no physical connection, and now he’s sleeping on the couch.

I’m starting to think it really is me, or that he’s getting it elsewhere. He’s been working in a woman’s house over the last month and he’s been talking about her a lot…how nice she is, how smart, how much he admires that she’s raising her daughter alone after being widowed. Ok, so he also said he thought I’d like her, but the repetition of her virtues made me uncomfortable. When I flat out asked if there was anything going on he snapped and said just asking him that was insulting. When I pushed for an answer he said there was nothing going on, that he wasn’t cheating, nor would he ever. I’m almost sure that’s true, but there is a small part of me that wonders.

So what do I do? No matter why this is happening, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a sexless marriage. Leaving or cheating are not options…I love and respect him too much for that. Please help, because I’m –

Hot, Bothered and Missing my Husband

DEAR HOT, BOTHERED AND MISSING MY HUSBAND: This is a hard one, HBMMH, because… well, because there are a lot of possibilities here, and frankly it may not be any one thing. When we look at problems in our relationships and we start to list out potential causes, it’s very easy to try to pick a singular cause and assume that if we fix this issue then everything else will fall into place.

Except, that tends to be a false choice. It doesn’t have to be one issue at the exclusion of all others; many of those possibilities can be true. Or some of what we assume are causes are, in fact, symptoms; treating those wouldn’t actually fix the underlying issue. If, for example, your husband went on ED medication, that might mean that he can get hard, but if the issue is that he’s just not attracted to you any more, then he may get hard but still won’t want to do anything about it.

With that being said, the thing that leaps out at me  is  the absolute lack of intimacy; not just sex, but physical intimacy. No touching, no cuddling, and now he’s sleeping on the couch.

That, I think, is the biggest tell. But before we get to that, I want to dig in a little to root causes.

What I suspect is that this is a cascading issue that stems from the way your libido tanked on the medication. This is a really common issue with mental health care; even when you’re getting the right medication for the right diagnosis, a lot of psych meds will kill your libido deader than disco. This has caused a lot of problems with couples, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m a big believer in being willing to tell your doctor that the side-effects are intolerable and you need to switch to something else.

The problem is that sometimes this initial issue can spiral outwards and carve a groove that it’s hard to get out of.

Now keep in mind as I lay my suspicions out: I am absolutely not blaming you for what’s going on — I am just describing what I think is a likely process that lead to where you are now. This is more about how your husband responded to the situation, and it doesn’t seem like he covered himself in glory here. But to be fair to both of you: you found yourselves in difficult circumstances, and the common advice is not only frequently unhelpful, but wildly inconsistent. In fact, it tends to vary drastically depending on who has the higher libido.

As it stands, it sounds like you and he made the best decisions you could under the circumstances with the information you had at the time… even if the outcomes are far less than ideal

You don’t say how long that your libido had been in the tank, but I’m willing to bet that this is the root cause. If your sex life had been robust before you went on your medication and it suddenly fell off a cliff, then I can see a point where your husband started to, for lack of a better term, give up. For all that (some) men like to position themselves as creatures of logic and clear thinking, the truth is that we’re emotional as hell… fragile, even. When we feel undesired by our partners, it can be really difficult to keep a level of distance and recognize that it’s not about us. Even when we know intellectually that your disinterest in sex has an external cause, it can be hard not to take it personally. There can often be the nagging voice of the jerk-brain saying “well… what if it is you, after all?” That can be incredibly damaging to one’s self-esteem because it feels so incredibly plausible. And because that doubt whispers in your own voice, it is very easy for that to create a crack that can spread and grow.

Alternately, there may have come a point where he just resigned himself to the fact that this relationship was no longer sexual, and he was just going to have to accept this. That can be equally as frustrating and cause folks to pull back. Men, in particular, are prone to equate physical intimacy as a prelude to sexual intimacy, and so it’s all too easy to fall into a rut of thinking “why bother cuddling if it just means I’m going to be left frustrated?”

And while yes, we need to normalize casual physical intimacy being decoupled from sex in general… if that’s been his mindset, I can see why he’d pull back physically too. It’s not helpful, it’s isolating and it makes the whole situation worse… but I can understand the why of it.

If things had gone on for long enough that this has become what he thought was his new normal, then expectations change, frustrations grow and it gets hard to pull back from things. Now that you’ve gotten the correct diagnosis and treatment, your libido is back, but he may still be in a place where his has tanked just because he’s been thinking “well what’s the point?” for so long that it’s hard to shift gears again. While he may not want to admit it, he may be feeling a certain amount of resentment and anger about that low period and he hasn’t worked through it. Hell, he may even realize that the way he feels isn’t fair to you. He may know, intellectually, that this was a case of medication and not about you or him. But again: emotions don’t listen to logic, especially when it feels personal.

And that could manifest in other ways. Remember what I said about how fragile dudes can be? That hits us in a lot of ways, including erectile dysfunction. Dicks are divas, and when s--t is even slightly off — including emotionally —  they tend to throw a fit and refuse to work. If he’s been feeling unwanted or rejected (which, again, is not what you were doing, nor is it fair to you) for a while, then he may be having a hard time getting things to work again. Doubly so if his job is physically draining.

And ED can be a mindf--k of its own; when you feel betrayed by something that used to be so reliable, it can cause its own anxiety, making you feel like less of a man. And since guys have been taught never to engage with our emotions, it’s easier to try to avoid potential triggers than it is to actually deal with the issue. Talking to a urologist would mean having to admit to the problem and that can be a world of NOPE, even though doing so would actually, y’know. Solve his under-inflated boner.

Then of course, there’s the other woman. It definitely sounds like he’s got a crush on her. This, in and of itself, isn’t a big deal. Crushes happen regardless of relationship status or satisfaction. All getting a crush on someone means is that you’re a primate with dopamine and oxytocin receptors. Now, with any potential feelings of rejection and frustration and the way the sexual component of your relationship had fallen off, it’s certainly possible that this crush feels a little more intense or tempting than it might have been before. It’s very easy to look at a relationship of years or decades, with all of the natural ups and downs and find that crush to be much more interesting because it’s so shiny and new, without all the dents and dings that come in every relationship. There may well be a part of him that keeps thinking about what it would be like to just cross the line and go for it.

Is he cheating? I dunno. It’s certainly possible; the non-denial denial sounds like the sort of wordplay that folks engage in when they don’t want to lie but don’t want to tell the truth either. It’s slightly more likely that he’s had some sweaty jerk-off fantasies and that’s as far as it’s gone. But I can’t say one way or the other about whether he has slept with her or just really wants to.

(To be fair: his wanting to sleep with her is, again, separate from his relationship with you. Regardless of whether things are good or bad and regardless of gender, humanity is a novelty-seeking species, including in sexa partners.1 Monogamy just means we choose not to sleep with other people. It doesn’t say that we won’t want to.)

So with all of this in mind, what do you do about it? Well, it sounds to me like you and he need to have a series of Awkward Conversations… and preferably ones that’re facilitated by a sex-positive marriage counselor. Of course, just bringing up the topic of going to counseling is going to be an Awkward Conversation in and of itself. My recommendation is that you both carve out time to talk, time when you won’t be distracted or have to run off to do other things. Sit down with him and ask him to let you speak without interruption until you’re done so you can get it all out. Explain that you’ve been worried about bringing this up because things have been uncomfortable lately and you want to make things work between the two of you again. Let him know that you understand how frustrated he had to have been while you had the wrong diagnosis, how you want to rebuild the intimacy you two had before and that you feel like talking things through with a counselor to guide things would help. This way you two could make sure that you’re both being heard and understood and find a way to get your relationship back on track and be happy and intimate again.

Then, give him space to ask questions and to share his side of things and how he’s feeling. Give him the same respect of letting him speak without interruption or questions until he’s done; it may be hard for him to figure out the right words to say or even how to express how he’s feeling right off the bat. Letting him work through it without your jumping in — even if there’re long pauses to think — will make it much easier for him to figure out what to say and how.

Then find a sex-positive couples counselor and make an appointment. If you need help finding one, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists has a referral directory to help you find someone in your area. Talking things out with a trained third party will help you both work through issues, give voice to the way you’ve been feeling and help you work together to find solutions. And it may also help your husband decide to talk to his doctor about his ED issues… assuming that those don’t resolve on their own as you all work through things.

This is all a difficult place to be in, and you have my sympathy. There may be some difficult conversations ahead… but hopefully you and your husband will be able to work through them and come out stronger on the other side.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m gonna apologize beforehand but it’s one of those “I have this friend…” questions.

I’m a guy and this friend is a girl. Her boyfriend broke up with her after a very serious 2 year relationship (living together and all that stuff). The dude was very f--ked up and turned my friend from a happy-go-lucky girl into a depressed, drawn-back husk of a woman.

She is on the road to recovery but every 3-4 months that guy gets in contact with her and tells her all about how he misses her and he can change and so on, they get back to together and after 3-4 weeks leaves her again, completely destroyed.

She knows he’s bad for her but she has gone back to him several times even after breaks as long as 7 months. My question is how I can help her getting over him, so she can lead a happy life again.

Emotional Life Guard

DEAR EMOTIONAL LIFE GUARD: There are few things worse than a toxic ex. You know the ones; they’re abusive pieces of s--t, emotional vampires that drain the very life out of their significant others – and by extension, the people around them – turning them into shattered remains of the person they used to be and leaving it to the victims’ friends to pick up the pieces afterwards. And just when you think that they’re out of your lives forever, they come right back like a zit before prom and ruin everything once again. You’d think that in a just country this sort of behavior would be punished by 20 minute of special alone time with the Chair Leg of Truth, which is wise and terrible.

But since that is denied to us, we have to muddle on as best we can and deal with what we have in front of us.

The fact is, your friend is in an emotionally abusive relationship and she’s caught up in the recurring cycle… and her ex knows just how to keep pushing her buttons to bring her back around. As long as she’s willing to buy into the lies that he’s feeding her – that he can change or has changed, that things are different now, that it’ll be better than it was before – she’s going to keep coming back. It’s even worse when she knows that he’s bad for her; there’s nothing like seeing the train wreck coming and knowing that you can’t do anything about it.

And unfortunately, you can’t, ELG. As tempting as it might be to track the guy down and have a lovely discussion with his kneecaps, the only person who can break this cycle is her.

Helping friends in emotionally abusive relationships is a tricky matter. You can present her with the facts – that you’re concerned for her, that you see how upset he makes her and how much it changes her, that he doesn’t treat her with the respect or honor she deserves – but she’s not going to want to believe them. Or worse, she may believe them but still say “yes, but…”

You can refuse to be complicit in her relationship with him; you won’t hang out with the two of them or refuse to talk about him… but this will mean she may not be able to bring herself to talk about the abuse with you and end up facilitating his attempts to separate her from you.  

Trying to force the issue will only make things worse; she’ll be on the defensive and feel pushed closer to him while he explains to her that she can’t trust you guys, he’s the only one who cares for her and understands her, he’s her only real friend… which will pull her away from you and wrap her further into his net.

Until she’s willing to accept that she’s being abused emotionally and that the relationship is toxic to her and those around her, the cycle is going to continue. And as hard as it can be for you to hear, there really is no way for you to MAKE her realize this.

The best way you can help your friend is to be the friend she needs. She’s going to need your support, especially when the cycle peaks when he dumps her again and she’s full of self-recrimination and loathing. She’ll blame herself for allowing herself to be abused. She’s going to need you to be as non-judgemental as possible; even as the cycle continues and she goes back to him again, she will need your love and support even more than before and trying to criticize her for going back or guilting her out of it will only make things worse for the both of you and she may well feel that she can’t come to you when she needs to.

What else can you do? Occupy her time. Get her involved in activities outside of her relationship with the abusive d--kbag, ones involving her friends and loved ones; spending time with the people who care about her will help rebuild her self-esteem. Keeping busy and distracted will also help with the downtime in the cycle when she’s more likely to believe his spiel about how he’s changed. Encourage her to talk to a therapist or to find a support group; if she recoils from the idea, offer to go with her or frame it as help with recovering from the breakup rather than her ex’s behavior. Many people remain in abusive relationships because they don’t want to accept that THEY could be a victim of emotional abuse; abuse like that happens to other people, there’s no way she could be so stupid as to fall for it.

As tempting as it may be, avoid playing Cupid. It may seem like finding her a new, better boyfriend would be the perfect solution to the problem, but it can backfire spectacularly. Problems with the new relationship could very well be what spurs her to go back to the abuser instead.

And above all else, be there for her. Remind her – over and over again if you have to – that none of this emotional abuse is her fault. It’s her ex that’s the problem, not her. She’ll need to know that not only is she not alone but that there are people who care for her, who are always ready to listen when she needs to talk and who will be there to help her when she needs it.

Hopefully soon your friend will realize just how bad things are and will finally break out of the cycle for good. Until then, be her friend and remind her that you’re there for her whenever she needs you.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Please help me. I am all torn up over staying with my girlfriend or not. We’ve been dating just over 6 months, but despite how much I like her and how well we fit together I have had doubts for much of that time. She is also my first good and real girlfriend.

As soon as I realized how well we got along and how much she liked me, I got scared. I was expecting to have to date several women and hone my skills and attitudes like you teach before I would meet such a great girl. We just got together over the internet right at the time when my life situation got good for me to have a girlfriend, like the Universe lined up for me or something. I was not ready to find myself in a good relationship so soon, because I was looking forward to the hard work and experience of dating many different girls. I feel like I stumbled backwards over the finish line, rather than running the full quarter mile oval. I’m really scared because I am afraid of hurting her, just as I’m afraid of being false to myself.

A good friend/mentor and my counselor both say that building up romantic experience is better than settling down with the first good person to come along. What I did not tell them when I sought their advice, tho, is that I am also motivated by physical beauty: I want to work hard and date beautiful women that would normally render me stupid. My current girlfriend is pretty, but less than hot. Her Whole Self still turns me on, but I cannot shake the curiosity and desire for other body sizes and shapes. What you said before stuck with me, “settling down is settling for.” If I can work to improve myself to date hotties, why not? I’d like to believe there are hot women out there who are also sensitive and caring and click with me.

One of my family said to me that I since I have so many doubts for so long that I ought to free her to find someone who is ready to love her more completely that I can.

I hope my backstory is clear, and that I have provided balanced good and bad qualities of my current nature. My question to you is which voice in my head to listen to and believe: the one that urges me to keep aiming high to develop myself as a man Good With Women (currently I am only good with woman), or the one that says I am being shallow and falling for culture’s pressure of beauty and status and that I ought to just stay with the good thing I have.

Am I being stupid for wanting to drop a pretty good relationship and person for the sake of dating more people and building up my social insecurities? Is staying put the cowardly-comfortable way to avoid the stress of learning how to meet and date more women? Should I stay with her and train myself to be content? What is the most righteous thing to do? I so want to be one of the Good Guys.

Thank you, Doctor.

Bird In The Hand

DEAR BIRD IN THE HAND: Look, can we be honest here? You’ve already made up your mind. You’re just asking me for permission to do what you  want to do, which is to break up with your girlfriend and start chasing hotties because you think you can do better.

Which, hey, fair enough. You can break up with someone for any reason at all. Of course, ruining a perfectly good relationship because you want to chase supermodels is a pretty s--tty reason to break up, but there’s nobody stoping you from doing it. There’s not some board out there that’s going to invalidate your break-up because you’re feeling insecure.

But I’m going to cut you some slack here – not much, because I think you’re being an idiot, but some – because I get the impression you’re pretty young and inexperienced. But that doesn’t mean it’s not on me to pound some wisdom into your head with the Chair Leg of Truth.

First of all: there is no schedule for how relationships are supposed to work. Sometimes you have to date around a lot before you find someone amazing and settle down. Sometimes you get lucky right off the bat. Two very good friends of mine met their wives in high-school. They’ve both been together for decades and are gloriously happy. Throwing away a relationship because it doesn’t go exactly according to the plan in your head is a stupid thing to do and a great way to needlessly hurt somebody.

Especially because – and I’m going to be blunt – this is almost certainly not going to be your last relationship.  To be perfectly frank, the odds of this surviving over time are low, even without you slamming your hand down on the self-destruct button.

Which brings me to point two: all relationships fail until one doesn’t. And while my buddies got lucky and found their partners in their teens, that’s pretty damn rare. The vast majority of people don’t marry their childhood sweetheart.Your first relationship not lasting until death do you part, mind you, is not by definition a bad thing. Like I said: all relationships end. That doesn’t mean that there was something faulty in them or that one of you did something wrong. People change and grow over time; sometimes that means that you grow apart through no fault of one’s own. Sometimes circumstances change. Sometimes relationships just evolve into something else. A relationship ending doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a failure; after all, if you’ve had a long, loving and mostly happy relationship with somebody, especially somebody you’re still on good terms with afterwards, that hardly sounds like a failure to me.

Point three: monogamy isn’t our natural state. You’re always going to be interested in f--king other people. So’s she. That’s just how humans work; we love f--king. We love f--king so much, that we’re one of only two land-mammal species that have sex outside of estrus. This doesn’t mean that monogamy is bad or wrong, just that it’s difficult. All monogamy means is that you’ve agreed not to sleep with other people. It doesn’t say a damn thing about not wanting to, and being attracted to others doesn’t say anything about the state of your relationship.

Point four: just because you’re in a relationship with somebody doesn’t meant you stop developing or improving as a person. You don’t suddenly have a license to slack off and quit taking care of yourself just because you have a girlfriend. You can still grow, you can still improve your social skills and become a more attractive, dynamic person. The only difference is that you’ll have a partner who, hopefully, is supporting your growth and cheering you on.

Point five: It’s on you to decide what you want from life and the types of relationships you want to pursue. If you want to find someone to settle down with, that’s a perfectly valid choice. If you want to have many different sex partners because that’s just how you roll, that’s fine too. You may want an open relationship, or a poly triad or some other permutation. That’s all well and good. But it should be because that’s who you are, not because that’s how you think you should be or how society tells you that you should be. And I suspect part of your problem is that you’re buying into the idea that you need to be dating somebody who makes your friends jealous.

Real talk time: Being with somebody who makes you happy, who turns you on, who gets you and makes you laugh and helps you feel amazing is more important than dating somebody so hot that people wonder where to find the crossroad where you sold your soul. And frankly, part of how you build up your relationship XP is by being in relationships.

I think throwing someone who makes you happy aside in hopes of finding her-but-hotter is an incredibly stupid thing to do. By not appreciating what you have and focusing only on what you might be able to get is a recipe for being miserable, because you’ll always be looking for the next upgrade. After all, there’s always going to be someone hotter you could, in theory, be bangin’. You’re not looking to settle down yet, and you’re not going to be tying yourself to her forever. Learn to savor what you have for however long you may have it, rather than always looking to the horizon and thinking “yeah… but maybe I could still get Kat Dennings.”

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com