QUESTION: My husband and I had great sex until we had children, but being a hands-on mom and running my business from home meant my focus turned elsewhere. Now I’m 48 and my three kids are at school, my mojo is returning. But my husband says I’ve been lukewarm for so long, he’s had to suppress his libido. What can I do to revive his interest?
ANSWER: Desire is rather like the tango: it takes two people to lift, inspire and sustain it to a dizzying pitch. If one person in the partnership withdraws their vitality, the other will falter.
So it’s easy to understand your husband’s place of retreat. There’s nothing like repeated erotic rejection to make a person feel unattractive. And once they feel unattractive, it’s hard to kindle enthusiasm.
You’ve been turning down your husband’s advances for some years, which means he’s retired, hurt, to his emotional trenches - a sort of inner man-cave. You can’t expect him to dismantle all his defences overnight.
You need to slowly coax his retreated libido out of him. Without meaning to, you’ve dismantled your husband’s sexual confidence and now you need to lovingly rebuild it.
I really don’t mean to sound judgmental. Like most women with small children, I understand all too well how easy it is to focus on offspring and work. Most families I know can’t maintain their mortgages and grocery bills without being a dual-income household, and working mOms in particular find their emotional reserves become dangerously depleted.
But when a woman (or man, come to that) diverts physical energy from her spouse to her kids, it puts her marriage in peril.
What’s needed here is a bit of old-fashioned courtship. Many people believe wooing is a man’s business, but sometimes women need to do the spadework.
Your husband has felt neglected for a long time, so you need to focus all your energies on making him feel desirable again.
This is all about opening up a generous emotional space for the man you love, where he can feel safe. Your children won’t suffer if you prioritise your husband over them for a change.
Find a regular weekly time when you can dispatch them to your friends and relatives and create dating space for the two of you. Work on small moments of erotic intimacy, try to remember all the things you did before the children came along, and reintroduce them to your repertoire.
Make pilgrimages to bars you both liked, play the music you danced to when you met, watch films that take you back to your courtship. And why not try some new moves? Ask yourself if there’s anything you have never done in bed that you would like to try now.
This is all about breaking down barriers, one by one, and recreating the kind of intense focus that was once second nature.
Indeed, the very fact that you’ve had great, uncomplicated sex in the past is what gives me grounds for optimism.
Couples who once enjoyed that kind of chemistry tend to keep the seeds of that passion deep within - they just need watering and nurture.
Daily Mail