Mission: return desire

What, is there any reason today? We already did this over the weekend … Maybe we’d better watch TV? Such thoughts may occur to us after three, five or ten years of living together. And it is already hard to imagine that once we could hardly wait for a meeting, kissed for hours on end, and from one touch of a loved one, goosebumps ran through the body.

Of course, tenderness and affection remained. We still love to sit side by side on the couch, give each other gifts, decorate the house or have fun with the kids. But the first sensations seem irrevocably gone — as if we have passed them on to new generations of lovers. Maybe this is how it should be? And the hero of Dovlatov’s «Reserve» was right, who said: «Love is for youth. For military personnel and athletes? Before making a final verdict, let’s try to figure out how attraction works and what we really know about it.

Rise and fall

“Sometimes we kind of forget to make love. This can go on for weeks,” smiles 42-year-old Piotr. It doesn’t seem to bother him at all. “One day we will come back to it. And it’s all right! — picks up his 40-year-old wife Anna. We say to ourselves: “Cool, it started again.”

Our sexual motor cannot always work at full capacity, explains psychotherapist Larisa Shtark: “We get tired, we get sick, we can be sad and irritated. The main thing is not to make a tragedy out of this. Waking up one day in a bad mood, we are unlikely to decide that life has failed. It is the same in a couple: it happens that one partner does not have enough time for the other, he does not have the strength or he is stressed. But tomorrow or in a week everything can return to normal.”

Libido fluctuates naturally: at some point, sexual hunger intensifies, and sometimes we do not feel it at all. “I am the daughter of the south,” says Aizhan, 35. — I hibernate in the winter. But every summer by the sea, in the sun, when I swim and ride a bike, the desire returns to me. I am regaining my body. Feel my calves as I walk up the shore. My movements are flexible like those of a wild cat. And I have a brutal appetite for love games.

Sexual temperament can change over the years, like Vlad, 45, and Marina, 38. At first, in their pair, he was the leader: «I had to restrain myself so as not to pounce on her, and she needed time to warm up.» But gradually the initiative passed to Marina. “Now she rarely has enough once, and I need a rest. I like to give her pleasure, but now I rarely share it with her, ”says Vlad.

The threat to mutual attraction is not change, but our own attitudes, says Larisa Shtark. “If a woman marries for the sake of having children and the program has already been completed – especially after the second child – the desire disappears,” she explains. — For men, the obstacle is different: some of them are afraid of feelings and the inevitable trials that come with long-term relationships, and often choose to flee to a new partner. But as a result, this leads to frustration, superficial self-satisfaction, which quickly becomes boring. In these cases, you have to deal with the belief system and family scripts, so the techniques of sex therapy will not help for a long time — you need a psychotherapy that can resolve deep contradictions.

Want all the time

“We have been married for six months, we love each other madly, we have already tried everything in bed,” says 32-year-old Raisa. But I’m starting to worry about what’s next. I got married later than many friends and I listen to their complaints all the time: their husbands stopped paying attention to them, they keep photos of other women on their computer … I console them as best I can, but I myself don’t want to even think that our enchanting sex turn into something everyday and the beloved will be inspired by someone other than me.

One of the reasons for frustration is that we are used to comparing our feelings with those experienced at the very beginning of a relationship. But this is a flight for a ghostly goal. “The brightness of first impressions is provided by physiological and biochemical changes in the body,” explains sexologist Ekaterina Alskaya. — So conceived by nature, so that two people distinguish each other from the background of others and create a couple for procreation. But in this mode, the body cannot work all the time. Gradually, the production of hormones subsides, intimate relationships become rarer: two or three, maximum four times a week. Most likely, there will not be such an effect as at the beginning of a relationship, it will remain in memory as the best time spent together.

The loss of fresh impressions is compensated by the joy of recognizing, studying a partner. We can finally relax and feel safe next to our loved one. We no longer waste energy on appearing in front of him in the most advantageous angles, we do not try to guess his reaction to any careless word. We can finally tell him about our fantasies, offer to experiment. All of this can be an advantage.

“If desire is driven only by a thirst for novelty, we, in fact, have sex with a fictitious image,” emphasizes Larisa Shtark. “It seems that the new person will be more interesting and fresher, but over time, we will be more and more annoyed by his real, living part, which does not fit into the fantasies about him.” But this part can be the most intriguing.

hold back the passion

Desire can pass into another quality, acquire other shades, open a new chapter of relationships, but only if we are ready to go forward ourselves. Habit and monotony lull feelings. And the changes are beneficial — a fashionable haircut, glasses, a new hobby … A detail that surprises reveals an unknown side in each of us. Sometimes it is enough to change the situation, to escape from what is familiar and therefore does not excite. 34-year-old Larisa lived with her husband for five years. “I didn’t notice that we began to desire each other less,” she recalls. We made love, but not as often, not as wildly…

We seemed to curl up in a bubble of tenderness, became each other’s favorite toys. But already without trembling in the legs, without lust. She needed separation in order to again experience an exciting attraction: “Dima was transferred to an office in another city, and for six months we met only on weekends, sometimes less often. When he was not around, I dreamed about him. I imagined that he would come back, look at me, hug me…

When we kiss, it takes my breath away and everything inside seems to melt … It used to be that we made love all weekend and continued to correspond about it in SMS messages. I forgot that feelings can be so sharp, and orgasms so fast!”

Restraint can become erotic doping. “Try to take affection out of the sexual context and touch each other during the day, just stroke, hug,” suggests sexologist Ekaterina Alskaya. — Make a romantic dinner with the condition that everyone feeds the other. Take a shower together, without sexual overtones. Do not rush things, let the desire accumulate. Veiled hints work better than explicit offers. Wait patiently and you will be impatient again.

Change to please yourself

“After seven years of marriage, I could not imagine that we would be doing this all day long, as before,” says 29-year-old Tina. — We went on vacation to Italy, as we wanted for a long time … We also spent our honeymoon there. Maybe the memory played a role … Or maybe the fact is that we were away from home and work, we could finally breathe freely. Or is the reason in these endless naked bodies in the paintings of the Renaissance, sensual sculptures, all this atmosphere of eroticism that surrounds you … «

Passion is mysterious, and this is its beauty: we can never know for sure what will be the trigger. In addition to a few general patterns, everyone has their own «receptors» of pleasure associated with personal history, examples, experiences.

Some excite tenderness, others need thrills. Sometimes we even cheat on partners, not because we don’t like them, but because we don’t like ourselves and want someone to convince us of our attractiveness.

Add a touch of narcissism

28-year-old Denis cheated on his constant girlfriend Diana. “There was such a fire in the eyes of that stranger that I couldn’t resist,” he explains. “But in the end I confessed everything to Diana. She could not forgive me for a long time, but we stayed together. I noticed that she changed her hair, began to dress more revealingly, flirting with other men — maybe to annoy me. Once I saw on Instagram (an extremist organization banned in Russia) her photo, where she posed surrounded by men … I lost my head — I wanted her so much.

When we start loving ourselves, others notice. Change jobs, sign up for salsa, star in an erotic photo shoot … Seeing yourself desirable again, worthy of arousing desire. The third — real or imagined — is needed more as confirmation that there is something attractive in us.

It helps us to feel our worth again. “We change over the years, but this does not mean that we become less attractive and sexy,” Ekaterina Alskaya sums up. — If you no longer like your figure, this does not mean that no one likes it. Perhaps someone nearby dreams of such a form as yours, but they have not even seen the former you, it lives only in your head. Look for what you like about yourself, what excites you, concentrate on it. Ask your partner to describe your best sides, to tell what he likes about you. Gradually, the list of what you like will become longer and longer, and the negative noise will die down. Your self-acceptance is the key to liberated sex.”

To become desirable for another means, in essence, to become desirable for oneself. Worrying about the fact that we are not as attractive and sexy as before is like mourning a perfume that has been discontinued. What for? Indeed, today the assortment is richer than ever.