When the guy has a headache

Article from Psychology Today that discusses what is the not talked about latest problem in the bedroom. More and more often, guys are losing their libido, and women are feeling rejected. I’d say no way, but there are more articles if you do a little digging, even Time Magazine wrote a piece.

The problem is the people who study this stuff don’t really know what is going on. Men won’t talk about it the way women admit they don’t have any desire- because the social stigma says that guys are supposed to walk around wanting sex all the time. Admitting you don’t would make you less of a man. Further, guys won’t talk to their wives/girlfriends about it.

Sixty percent of the women surveyed said they wanted sex just as much, if not more, than their husbands. The majority of low desire men are unwilling to discuss this issue with their wives and resist seeking help from doctors or therapists. They also won’t talk to their buddies about it. (It’s hard to imagine a guy walking into a locker room, telling his friend, “I really wish my wife didn’t want sex all the time. I hate that she thinks of me as a sex object. And another thing…why can’t we hug without her thinking we have to have sex? She just has a one-track mind.”) Men’s unwillingness to openly discuss this matter leaves women feeling exasperated, lonely and hopeless.

And because of the dynamic that guys are normally the ones to initiate, and girls are the ones who agree or dissent, often nothing develops in the bedroom, and all activity stops. The woman feels sexually rejected and unattractive to the man and stops attempting.

The survey also suggested that there is less sex in marriages when the husband has low desire than in marriages where women are the ones who say, “No”. That’s because, in our culture, men are expected to be the initiators and when it is the wife who initiates but gets turned down frequently, she is more likely to give up than her male counterpart.

And the reason men feel less desire? More than likely the same reasons women do:

Men, it seems, turn off to sex for many of the same reasons that their wives do- emotional disconnection, underlying resentment or unresolved problems, depression, stress and so on. In fact, one of the most common reasons men reject their wives’ advances is that they feel their wives are critical or bossy. Nagging simply isn’t an aphrodisiac.

I wonder if this will lead to more women looking for activity outside of the house to fulfill their desires? Probably won’t help the already terrible divorce rate. It is interesting to the see the stereotypes get completely inverted. I wonder what impacts that will have on society’s views of the genders in a few decades.