Hi lonelygirl. I am just now seeing this thread for the first time. I am in my early 50s and have never been married or had any relationships since college that have lasted longer than a year or two.

What you're describing about how you start to feel about sex when you're in a close relationship sounds exactly like the way I react.

I also want to say that I started having both medical and psychiatric health problems in my late 20s and spent most of my 30s and early 40s trying to get those under control. I think maybe I would have spend more time trying to figure out why I react the way I do if I had been healthier and had felt like I could have handled marriage and having children.

My childhood was different from yours. My parents were strict but usually fair. They were very loyal to each other but always seemed to argue a lot until they were in their 50s. They were married for over 50 years (until my father died.)

I wanted to give you the link to an article that I ran across about two years ago that seemed to explain some things for me. It's from Psychology Today and it's by Alain de Botton (some English guy.)

Twelve Rude Revelations About Sex

The parts of the article that were most helpful to me started about halfway into it, but there are good bits all through it. I've quoted some below:

In the intro to the article:
"(the author) makes the case that our (sexual) difficulties stem more from the multiplicity of things we want out of life, or the accrual of everyday resentments."

Some quotes from the article:

"Sex is not fundamentally democratic or kind. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love."

"Most innocently, the paucity of sex within established relationships has to do with the difficulty of shifting registers between the everyday and the erotic."

Section near the end of the article about the "accrued resentments" and how they affect our desire to have sex with our partner:

"Why are bread crumbs in the kitchen bad for sex?"

"We tend to forget we are angry with our partner, and hence become anaesthetized, melancholic, and unable to have sex with him or her because the specific incidents that anger us happen so quickly and so invisibly, in such chaotic settings (at the breakfast table, before the school run) that we can't recognize the offense well enough to mount a coherent protest against it.


And we frequently don't articulate our anger, even when we do understand it, because the things that offend us can seem so trivial or odd that they would sound ridiculous if spoken aloud: "I am angry with you because you cut the bread in the wrong way." But once we are involved in a relationship, there is no longer any such thing as a minor detail."

Anyway, to sum up for me, I think my problems come from accumulating resentments about small things plus finding it more difficult to feel erotic feelings for someone that I also grocery shop with, manage money with, etc.

Besides feeling silly about complaining to a partner about their leaving crumbs or something small like that, I am not good at dealing with anger and confrontations in an intimate relationship. I came by that honestly during my upbringing and never have really solved the problem.

My dad was a rager, so I grew up being very uncomfortable with anger. That's both being on the receiving end of it and being angry myself (what if I lose control like my dad did so often?)

It sounds like maybe you're with a good guy that you can talk to about what's going on with you. That's a huge plus.

I hope that things will get better for you. If you do find out that you're able to go to psychotherapy, couples therapy might be helpful too.

Okay, got to go. It's time to feed the cats.