Why Great Long-Term Relationships Still Struggle With Sex

You’re still in love with your partner and committed to a fulfilling life together, yet something feels off. The chemistry that once felt effortless now feels unpredictable or absent. You care deeply for each other, but you are completely out of sync sexually. If you’ve ever wondered why sex feels so hard when the rest of the relationship is fine, it isn’t necessarily a sign that you’re failing. It’s more likely a sign that stress, emotional disconnection, or old conditioning are quietly shaping your desire.

When this tension lingers, sex starts to feel loaded. You might find yourself making excuses, feeling pressured, or waiting to want sex the way you used to. Attraction becomes something you analyze instead of something you feel, and you may begin to interpret a lack of desire as a personal rejection. Meanwhile, routines take over, the same old scripts repeat, and the emotional safety you need to feel open begins to erode.

In this episode of The RISE to Intimacy Podcast, I reveal what is actually happening beneath the surface when desire becomes mismatched in long-term relationships. I explore how the mental load, trauma, and toxic cultural messaging impact your connection. You’ll learn the vital difference between spontaneous and responsive desire, why feeling "seen" is a prerequisite for arousal, and how you can begin rewriting your sexual script to find that spark again.

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1:33 – Why fluctuating desire is often a signal for conversation rather than a sign of failure

4:27 – The hidden impact of stress, mental load, and survival mode on erotic energy

5:58 – The difference between spontaneous desire and responsive desire, and why it matters

7:55 – Emotional connection as a prerequisite for physical intimacy for many partners

10:07 – Why asking “What does emotional connection mean to you?” changes everything

12:21 – The powerful role of social, cultural, and religious conditioning in shaping desire

15:42 – How shame around pleasure can quietly suppress sexual expression

18:21 – Trauma’s influence on agency, boundaries, and sexual safety

20:10 – Practical shifts that help couples reconnect without pressure or performance

Mentioned In Why Great Long-Term Relationships Still Struggle With Sex

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Full Transcript

Welcome to The RISE to Intimacy Podcast. I’m your host, Valerie McDonnell, and for over a decade, I’ve worked as a sex and couples therapist because intimacy used to feel really overwhelming for me. I felt a lot of pressure to perform, I was disconnected from my body, and I often felt like desire was out of reach for me.

But through my own trauma work, I stopped checking out of my body and started feeling connected to it again. I learned what it’s like to experience intimacy without fear, without shutting down, and without numbing out. Now I’m on a mission to help you do the same thing.

This podcast exists because trauma doesn’t get the last word. You can learn how to calm your body, change the story you’ve been carrying, and rebuild real connection, first with yourself and then with the people you love. Let’s begin.

So what’s really going on in a long-term relationship when someone loses interest in sex? Often people will say to me that they’re still in love, that they both want to have sex, but they are just completely not on the same page. Many times when they come to me, they might not have been having sex for months and sometimes years. As sex therapists, we call this desire discrepancy. This means when your sexual desire is misaligned with your partner’s. It is the most common thing that couples come to sex therapy for.

Some of the most common things I hear from these couples are, “I’m tired,” or “I’m too stressed out to have sex at the end of the night,” or “I don’t feel close to you, so it’s really hard to want to have sex.” Also, people talk about feeling pressured around sex or even feeling like it’s an obligation or an item to check off their to-do list. I’ll also hear things like, “You know what, I do make excuses to not have sex because I really don’t know what I like, and I don’t know how to ask for it without feeling embarrassed or ashamed.”

It’s easy to have desire when you’re in a new relationship because typically we’re on our best behavior. We’re watching things that we say. We’re paying attention to maybe what we wear, what we smell like. We might be doing new activities or just be more up for doing new activities. We feel like we have this type of energy that, after being in the same relationship for years with the same person, that type of energy can fade.

Now, it doesn’t have to fade completely, not at all. But you should be open to the idea of realizing that, based on any given time in our life and what else we’re dealing with, our sexual desire is going to go up and down. That isn’t an indicator that you need to break up or that something is wrong. It’s really just a sign to you to have a conversation about it and make sure you don’t wait years before you actually go and seek help. You should start seeking help soon if you’re not sure how to manage it together with your partner.

But if we do find ourselves in a place where our sexual desire has waned off, or we notice that our partner’s has, we also might find ourselves engaging in typical roles or scripts in sex, meaning somebody typically initiates. We might start considering only something like penetrative sex as the only form of sex versus being open to other ideas or just being curious about what our partner might want. We can also get into the same routine when we are having sex, the typical way that we know our partner gets off or that we get off. We might stop engaging in things like foreplay.

Very commonly, we’re not engaging in aftercare, which is when sex is over, staying connected to your partner. It can be things like getting them a glass of water, helping them clean up, and just cuddling with them for a while before getting up and going on to the next thing in your night.

So going back to the common things I hear couples say in therapy when they’re talking about struggling with desire, or that their partner is, the first one that really does impact desire is stress, or feeling like you are taking on the majority of the mental load and possibly physical labor that all of us are engaged in on a daily basis. This can be caring for kids, managing the household, working, doing yard work, managing bills, etc.

So stress definitely interferes with arousal and attention, the type of attention you can actually give to your partner. Sometimes your brain is just simply in survival mode, going from one thing to the next. That place is really hard to access any type of passion or eroticism and therefore sexual desire.

Again, most of us are forgetting about foreplay once we’ve been in a long-term relationship.

Foreplay isn’t just the 10 minutes before the sex act begins. On a daily basis, you should be thinking about what are ways that I can maybe flirt with my partner or tell them I appreciate them, tell them that I’m thinking of them. There are many ways where you can nurture this type of foreplay. It doesn’t have to be super sexual. It doesn’t have to be “send me a sexy pic while you’re at work,” but it can be. But there are multiple ways you can do that.

So many people just assume desire also should be spontaneous and that that is always going to come first before they want sex or before they’re going to have sex, really. But especially in long-term relationships, there can be one or both of you who are experiencing responsive desire. So that means it’s going to show up when you’re feeling safe with your partner, comfortable, relaxed, and therefore your body and brain are open to connecting with your partner in an intimate way. When you’re able to relax and be comfortable in that space, then you have that energy for sexual desire to surface.

If you’re in a long-term relationship and you’re always waiting for either you or your partner to want sex before you think about initiating it in any way, you are probably going to be waiting for a really long time. This is not about pressuring somebody to have sex if they are telling you they don’t want to have sex. That’s not what we’re talking about. This is just about having an open mind and flexibility to the idea that sex doesn’t just always happen spontaneously for every person at every moment in their life.

Because sexual desire isn’t only going to be impacted by how you and your partner are relating to each other. Sexual desire is often impacted by health or mental health, again, how much you’re working or not working, things that may or may not be going on in your family that are also stressful, etc. So it’s not only about what’s happening in the relationship. We have to take the whole picture into account when we’re talking about sexual desire.

Some things that can help if this is going on for you or your partner are, of course, having the communication skills to be able to initiate a conversation about this. Ask your partner if there is anything that you can do to make their life easier today or tomorrow or going forward. Also, listen to what they’re saying. Validate that it makes sense to you that they’re feeling stressed out or overwhelmed by everything they just shared with you.

So when you can connect with your partner and acknowledge that what they’re telling you makes sense and therefore validate their experience, then you can go into a space of seeing if they would like for you to help them in some way and relieve that stress. But in that process, you’re not only helping them in that logistical way, you are also engaging in emotional connection and safety, which by itself can increase sexual desire.

If couples are emotionally disconnected and they continue to make comments like, “I don’t feel close to you, so how am I supposed to want to have sex with you?” they are talking about they do not feel safe enough. They might not feel seen and heard, which means when I bring something up to you that I’m unhappy about, or I want to change, or I’m scared about, you don’t join with me, you don’t hear me, I feel possibly dismissed or ignored.

Also, this comes up when we really are not making enough quality time for each other. Of course, we might both be working, have young kids, and have other outside responsibilities. But if we can find a way to prioritize our relationship, even just 30 minutes of quality time together a day, it is going to drastically impact your relationship for the better.

So emotional connection is so very important because for many of the people I see in therapy, they say, “If I’m not emotionally connected, I do not want sex.” So what are some ways that you actually can nurture emotional connection with your partner? The best way you can do this is to be able to ask your partner, “When you say you need to feel an emotional connection before you want to have sex, what does that mean to you? What does emotionally connected mean to you?”

Because this is something that I eventually realized as a couples therapist years ago, is that couples were consistently saying to each other, “I need to be emotionally connected.” Their partner was mirroring that. “Yep, I hear you. I hear you.” However, they were hearing it, but too afraid to ask what that meant.

They didn’t know what it meant. Therefore, they felt like something was wrong with them. But as I realized this, I started to ask the other partner, “What do you mean by that?” And many times that person sits there, “Hmm, hmm, actually, I’m not sure.” So first, it might be a conversation where you’re both discovering how you do feel emotionally connected to each other.

Is it having conversations that don’t include the kids or work or taking care of other family members or pets, etc.? Is it being able to sit in comfortable silence cuddling with each other? Is it being able to share with you things that I feel scared or anxious or nervous about and know that you will not judge me or think less of me or criticize me or try to immediately fix it for me? Or is it going and doing activities outside of the house, doing something new that we’ve never done, being able to travel with me, coming and watching me speak at this important event?

It can be so many ways, but we don’t know. Every person is going to have a different and unique way they want to feel emotionally connected to their partner. So the best way you can do that is be able to have that conversation, then really listen and start doing those things. But again, your partner is unique, so talk to them about it.

Another reason that people are really struggling with sexual desire, even in long-term relationships or despite that, is due to social and cultural conditioning. And I don’t think we place enough value on how much our social and cultural conditioning can negatively impact our sex life. For example, so many clients I work with grew up in a religious environment where, sure, there might have been some good things they learned growing up in that environment. But many of them also learned toxic messages around sex.

I’ve heard, “You’re either a slut or a prude.” You either are having lots of inappropriate sex, in other words, or you’re having no sex. I mean, that dichotomy just does not exist when we’re talking about someone’s personal sexual desire and how they decide to practice it in a consensual way.

I’ve also heard, “You only have sex after marriage.” I’ve heard, “You only have sex to make babies.” I’ve heard, “You have sex because it is your obligation as a wife to your husband.” I’ve also heard, “You have sex anytime your husband wants because that’s your wifely duty.” All of those are toxic messages.

Oh, and let’s not forget, I hear so many times how bad or terrible of a person you are if you masturbate. So what are we doing there? That is not a great message. We’re essentially saying you are not allowed to tend to your own pleasure. If it’s yourself, it’s consensual, right?

That is one step that I use when people come to see me who have never had an orgasm. One of the first steps is learning how to pleasure ourselves before we can engage in pleasure with another person. So if you grew up thinking that was a bad or wrong thing, certainly you’re going to struggle with noticing your sexual desire when you’re with another person.

As soon as another person enters the room with us when it comes to sex, pressure does go up. That is not always pressure that is the type of pressure that will just stop desire, if you’re a man, possibly cause you to not be able to have or maintain an erection. That’s still just this pressure that’s excited.

But due to these cultural and social and religious messages we’ve received as we’ve been growing up, we’re learning things like, “Men want sex and women provide sex or we withhold it.” You know, together we want. Terrible message. Also, that sex always ends in an orgasm and that that is the goal of sex. No, that is just not realistic.

Also, sex should be spontaneous and effortless. What? What are we doing there? Who taught us about sex? And if nobody did, certainly we’re learning it probably in places that might not necessarily benefit us once we go and have sex with a person.

Also, yes, again, this message of “You provide sex for your partner when they want it.” But that takes away completely from being able to notice our own pleasure. I’ve had many women I work with that said they grew up their whole life thinking that sex was bad. Again, that you are a slut if you did it, or that you were definitely going to get pregnant, or you were definitely going to get some type of disease.

So then when they get married to somebody that they’re very much in love with and might want to have a family with, and that person, in this case, this is going to be a heterosexual relationship, their male partner has grown up without those restraints and that sense of control and pressure around sex. They might feel very open and excited and free to explore sex with their female partner, who is wondering, “I am not supposed to do this thing up until yesterday when I married you. Now I’m supposed to flip a switch, and all of a sudden I can be a sexually expressive being who can be passionate and erotic.” It’s very hard. It’s so hard for people to do. So these messages are not healthy.

We should be talking about sex at a young age, but at very young ages, it starts with just having conversations around consent. Literally, your child is two or three years old, and you can start teaching them how they have permission to accept touch or not accept touch whenever it feels comfortable to them. There we go. That’s consent. You don’t always have to give the hug to Aunt Jane who came over for Easter again.

Sometimes with the clients who see me that say things like, “I make excuses to not have sex because I don’t really know what I like,” or “I don’t know how to talk about that during sex,” meaning I don’t really know how to ask for what I like. I also don’t really know how to say things like, “That doesn’t feel good,” or “That’s painful,” especially if I know we might be doing something that is my partner’s favorite thing, sometimes that is due to cultural messaging, and it can also be due to things like inability to identify emotions and express them.

However, a lot of times in this case, it is the message of, “If I express emotions or express my needs and wants, again, I might get criticized or judged or even blamed if something doesn’t go well.”

But also in this case, sometimes these clients might have experienced past traumas that are preventing them from being able to truly be in touch with what they do and don’t like with the trauma they have experienced, loss of control and loss of agency, that is something that needs to exist in the sexual space.

So when they experience trauma, and this is not just sexual trauma, like I’m just a good example. Me and my partner, at varying times in our lives, have both experienced low sexual desire due to trauma. My trauma, childhood sexual abuse. His trauma, combat trauma. So those are very different things that caused our PTSD.

At different times in our lives, we have both been in relationships where we struggle with desire due to things like dissociating or not knowing how to manage overwhelming emotions, not knowing how to say what we do and don’t want or what does or does not feel comfortable to us due to that feeling of being blamed, criticized, or not having our boundaries honored in the past.

So there can be multiple reasons why, if you have experienced trauma, it can be from multiple different reasons, but you might be struggling with sexual desire. In that case, it is really helpful to get some outside professional help to learn some of those skills.

So with all of these reasons that I just talked about, that people come and see me and say that they’re struggling with sexual desire or wanting to understand better why their partner is, or really just coming to see me and say, “Hey, I want to have a better sex life,” which of course that can mean many things, but in this case, there are multiple ways we can start trying to make movement and progress around you and your partner being able to reconnect and have the sex life that you both really want.

The first one is learning how to understand what you do and don’t like when it comes to sex, the reasons why you are not wanting sex or your partner isn’t wanting sex. In that case, it’s going to be some education and rewriting these toxic narratives that you or your partner has grown up and received around sex.

So in addition to that, we want to be able to understand what we do and don’t like. That’s first going to come with things like identifying emotions. We are also going to learn how to tolerate our emotions and therefore have the ability and the capacity to actually talk about them with our partner. A lot of that is going to help with stress management and also managing anxiety, while also being able to finally get comfortable enough to go into a space to start working on identifying emotions and the processing of them.

Also, we’re going to have to learn how to process any resentments that have already come up. We want to talk about fear of rejection and ways that you and your partner can manage giving a no to sex in a way that doesn’t cause disconnection, but can even continue to create connection with you when you both can state a no or a yes and honor each other’s needs in that moment, knowing that you also have a plan to come back to each other later.

We’re also going to want to be on the same page with our partner about what sex means to them, what sex looks like to them, and also how they would like to engage in things like initiation and foreplay and aftercare.

If all of that sounds overwhelming, then the first thing you need before being able to do any of that is a way to effectively communicate with your partner. If you feel like you’re just winging it at any given time when you’re stressed out or your partner is, or when you get triggered, or when you’re anxious, or when you feel like you want to talk to your partner about something that isn’t going well in the relationship, if you feel like you’re constantly winging it, there is a way to have a framework to initiate these conversations and to be able to remain calm enough to have the capacity to coherently talk about them with your partner so that they can help you feel validated around what’s going on with you and then engage in some type of problem resolution with you.

At the end of all that, you should also have a way to stay connected with each other. So if things get tense, even if you continue to talk, you are helping each other’s nervous systems feel calm afterwards. So you’re not staying on high alert after any conversation.

If you and your partner are struggling with sex feeling routine, you can absolutely rewrite your sexual script. This is something that I do in sessions with my clients. So there are ways to have conversations that can help you discover new ways to connect both emotionally and sexually. They can also help you feel like there’s not pressure around sex and changing your idea of the goal of sex being orgasm, but instead engaging with curiosity in a mindset of wanting to learn more about your partner’s body and what does turn them on or what doesn’t.

So what I want you to take away from this episode is that you can have exciting, fun, and pleasurable sex in a long-term relationship. Just because you’ve been together for years doesn’t mean that sex has to be boring or routine or non-existent. There are many ways you can keep that sexual spark alive.

They include working as a team to manage things like stress and the multitude of responsibilities that we all have in our adult lives. Learning how to stay emotionally connected with your partner. Learning a way to communicate effectively with your partner so that things get resolved and they don’t end feeling like you just swept them underneath the carpet, because in that case, usually resentment starts forming and settling into the relationship.

Also, being able to be a safe enough partner that your partner can be vulnerable with you and share what they do and don’t like when it comes to sex, what does turn them on and get them aroused. Also, whether or not they are having orgasms and if they want to try to have orgasms in new ways and how comfortable they are with having sex where orgasm isn’t the goal.

So many ways you can do this. If you would like help doing this, please head over to my website. It is risetointimacy.com. I have many free resources, lots of blogs you can check out, and you can also see how to work with me with private coaching or check out my digital course. Thanks so much. See you next time.

Thanks for listening to The RISE to Intimacy Podcast. If today’s episode resonated with you, know that healing is possible and you don’t have to do it alone. If you’re enjoying the show, please leave a rating and review for us at ratethispodcast.com/rise. It really helps others find us.

I’m so grateful for all your support. You can learn more about my coaching packages for individuals and couples at risetointimacy.com. Remember, sex therapy isn’t for people who are broken. It’s for people brave enough to look beneath the surface.