Men’s health centre

When the thrill is gone

Generally speaking, magazine articles about how to improve your sex life - especially in a marriage or a long-term relationship - advise candles, hot baths and soft music.

That may be because these “better sex” stories are a staple of women’s magazines. I don’t know about you, but candles always make me think of a church, baths are something my mother made me take, and soft music reminds me of going to the dentist.

However, how do you regain the passion in your relationship when you feel it’s slipping away? Is it too late to bring it back?

“A lot of people get to that point and have to decide what to do about it,” says sex therapist Louanne Cole Weston. “Novelty is sexually interesting to most people - not always to the point that they will act on it, but the idea has a little bit of a thrill to it, for men or women.”

Novelty or predictability: Which makes for a better a sex?

In dealing with people who have been married or together for a while, Dr Weston has found that familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then at least too much familiarity. “Sometimes with a long-term partner, a person feels like they know every freckle on that other person’s body,” she says. The solution may lie in exploring the unfamiliar - though not necessarily.

“For some people, predictability is very exciting,” cautions Dr Weston. “You have to figure out if you’re a ‘surprise’ or ‘predictability’ person. If you’re a surprise person, asking your partner to surprise you is a good first step. If you’re a predictability person, and there is something predictably bad or neutral about your sexual experience, getting some changes in there can be a positive thing.”

Too much togetherness can kill passion in a relationship

Those same women’s magazines often offer intimacy as the tonic to save your foundering sex life. You’ve drifted apart, the logic goes. Take interest in his life, his work, his spare time. However, there is a fine line between being cared for and being crowded - and the latter is definitely a turn off.

“Sometimes too much closeness stifles desire,” says Esther Perel, a marriage and family therapist and author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic. “Separateness is a precondition for connection. When intimacy collapses into fusion, it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire," she tells us.

Don’t call each other 10 times a day, she says, and don’t ask each other about every little thing. “These questions turn intimacy into surveillance.”

Dealing with alienation and anger in a low-sex relationship

Sometimes a man’s lack of desire is really about something else. “In those situations there is often something going on that is unexpressed or unknown,” says Dr Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and the author of Open To Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life.