Why So Many Women Lose Their Sex Drive—And How To Reignight Your Sexual Desire

(By Wendy, Pharmacist & Founder of Conscious Play Co.)

I remember sitting on the couch one night watching a sex scene from the show Lost Girl when suddenly something awakened in me. I could feel that familiar pull again—that heat, that longing, that version of myself I thought had disappeared years earlier. I felt excited and energized, but that feeling was quickly replaced with sadness.

Before I go further, let me provide a bit of context. I went through a long period in my life where I believed that I had lost my sex drive. But this single scene proved me wrong and made me realize that my sex drive wasn’t actually gone. So, why did my initial excitement fade to sadness?

I felt sad because deep down, I already knew what was going to happen next.

I would approach my partner wanting to reconnect, we would talk about being intimate later that night, and then life would happen the way it always did. One of us would get distracted finishing work, cleaning the house, or the kids would need something. We would both end the day mentally drained and emotionally exhausted. By bedtime, intimacy would feel impossibly far away even though we still loved each other deeply.

That cycle repeated itself more times than I wanted to admit so I eventually pushed away what little desire I had left.

At the time, I genuinely thought something was wrong with me. Why was sex and intimacy so easy for others but not for me? Where did my sex drive go?

I knew my desire didn’t disappear because I had stopped loving my partner. We had a beautiful marriage in many ways. We were best friends, deeply committed to each other, raising children together, building a life together, functioning well as a team. If someone had asked me back then whether we were happy, I would have said yes without hesitation.

What I didn’t realize was how slowly desire had faded into the background of my life. How slowly we were shifting from lovers to something that felt more like roommates.

Why Women Lose Their Sex Drive in Long-Term Relationships

For me, the shift happened gradually and I didn’t realize that it was occurring. Life just became fuller, busier and heavier.

We had children, demanding schedules, endless responsibilities, and then eventually the pandemic hit. During that time, I worked in a medical ICU surrounded by constant sickness, fear, and death. I remember coming home emotionally depleted in a way that sleep didn’t fix. I wasn’t just physically tired—I felt numb. Like I had disconnected from parts of myself in order to keep functioning and continue taking care of everyone around me.

At home, I was also carrying the invisible emotional weight so many women quietly carry every day: childcare, planning, anticipating needs, emotional labor, household management, trying to keep life running smoothly while simultaneously feeling like I was unraveling internally.

Looking back, I think the best way to describe that season is this: I wasn’t really living. I was surviving. I felt like a robot – I would wake up, take care of everyone else, push through the day, go to sleep, then repeat the following day.

And the truth is, desire struggles to emerge when you’re in survival mode.

I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions women hear about intimacy. We are taught to believe that desire should appear spontaneously no matter what is happening in our lives. That we should somehow feel naturally open, sensual, playful, and sexually available while simultaneously carrying chronic stress, overstimulation, exhaustion, emotional labor, and constant responsibility.

But our bodies do not exist separately from our environment, so when a woman experiences low desire, it isn’t dysfunction—it is information.

What Is Responsive Desire?

One of the most freeing things I ever learned came from Emily Nagoski and her work on responsive desire.

Many women are not walking around spontaneously craving sex at random moments throughout the day. Instead, desire often appears after emotional connection begins—after relaxation, affection, touch, and emotional closeness. After the nervous system finally feels safe enough to stop bracing against the world for a moment.

That realization changed the way I viewed myself completely. For years, I had been waiting to suddenly feel “in the mood” while living a lifestyle that was actively suppressing desire at every level.

I had unknowingly created an environment where my body rarely felt relaxed, emotionally connected, rested, or supported enough to access desire naturally.

Once I understood that, I stopped criticizing myself and asking: “Why am I broken?”

I changed my perspective and started asking: “What is my body trying to tell me?”

That question changed everything.

How Stress and Emotional Overload Affect Desire

I underestimated for years how deeply stress was affecting me physically. At the time, I didn’t even realize how stressed I was!

When your nervous system spends all day activated—solving problems, multitasking, caregiving, anticipating needs, managing schedules, responding to children, cleaning, working, emotionally supporting others—it becomes incredibly difficult to suddenly transition into openness and pleasure at the end of the night.

This is especially true for women who spend most of their day in caretaker mode.

You cannot spend twelve hours feeling needed by everyone around you and expect your body to effortlessly shift into erotic energy five minutes later. It’s incredibly difficult! This doesn’t make you dysfunctional. It makes you human.

One of the most practical things that helped me was intentionally creating decompression time before intimacy instead of expecting myself to immediately switch modes.

This sounds deceptively simple, but it genuinely changed things for me.

Instead of rushing from chores, emails, bedtime routines, and social media directly into intimacy, I started building intentional transitions into my evenings.

So what did this look like? Sometimes that meant taking a long shower alone with no interruptions. Sometimes it meant sitting quietly with music for fifteen minutes before reconnecting with my partner. Sometimes it meant reading something sensual instead of numbing out online. And sometimes it simply meant sitting alone in silence long enough for my body to realize it no longer needed to stay in high-alert mode.

The goal was to help my nervous system feel safe enough for desire to emerge naturally. Whenever I tried to force intimacy, my body would not respond.

Understanding Your Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs

Another thing that changed everything was realizing that desire is affected by far more than physical attraction alone.

Many women know what turns them on sexually, but they have never stopped to examine what emotionally and mentally turns desire off.

For me, feeling emotionally supported and appreciated throughout the day dramatically increased my openness to intimacy. Feeling overwhelmed, overstimulated, emotionally disconnected, or solely responsible for the household had the opposite effect.

I believe that we actually have a lot of turn-offs that we may not be aware of.

To help you get started on your list of turn-offs, here are a few of mine: Being too cold or too hot, fighting with my partner, unintentional sexual pain, exhaustion and feeling obligated to have sex.

Once I understood my turn-ons and turn-offs, I began to create an environment that helped facilitate intimacy instead of inhibit it. This also helped me communicate my needs more clearly.

I started saying things like:“I need a little time to decompress before I can feel connected. Can you put the kids to bed tonight?”“When the house is a mess, I have trouble relaxing. Can you please help me clean up after dinner?”“I miss feeling close to you outside of the bedroom too. Let’s put our phones down and just snuggle.”

Those conversations mattered because my partner wasn’t mind-reading my internal experience. She didn’t realize emotional exhaustion—not lack of love—was often what stood in the way for both of us.

Why Emotional Connection Matters So Much

Most modern-day intimacy advice focuses on performance, frequency, or quick fixes while completely ignoring the emotional environment women are living inside every day. This is especially true for the pharmaceutical industry – just take a pill and it will fix your sex drive! Yes, I did say that sarcastically.

You cannot continuously run on stress, resentment, emotional overload, disconnection, and exhaustion while expecting desire to flourish naturally. There is no pill or quick fix that will work in this situation.

Sometimes improving intimacy has less to do with “trying harder” and more to do with removing the things quietly suppressing desire in the first place.

One thing that helped tremendously was intentionally dating each other again.

Over time, many couples slowly stop nurturing their relationship because life becomes so busy and demanding. They become excellent coworkers, excellent parents, excellent logistical partners—but stop feeling emotionally connected as romantic partners.

So, how do you get back to dating each other?

This doesn’t mean that you need to create elaborate date nights or go on expensive vacations. Just put in genuine effort toward connection. Leave a surprise romantic note. Express gratitude towards your partner. Start to flirt again. Kiss each other without the expectation that it will lead to sex. Be playful. Share a new experience. Ask deeper questions about dreams and hopes. And most of all, put your phone down and turn the TV off.

Those small moments mattered more than I expected because intimacy stopped feeling like a separate task we were failing at and started feeling like an extension of emotional closeness again.

Unpopular Opinion: Schedule Intimacy (Yes, it helps!)

At first, this idea may sound boring, unromantic or even like another chore to complete. Society tells us that sex should be spontaneous, passionate and effortless. If that is true, then why do so many women have low sex drives? Why are there so many sexless couples?

Even I was a bit resistant to this idea because I wanted intimacy to happen naturally and spontaneously the way it used to earlier in our relationship.

But relationships change and evolve over time and waiting for the “perfect moment” usually means that intimacy won’t happen.

Scheduling intentional, distraction-free time together helped us prioritize connection instead of endlessly postponing it like we had been doing for years.

It is important to note that when scheduling sex no one should ever feel forced or obligated to have sex with their partner. This is about creating time and space for intimacy to happen. If one partner does not want to have sex, then I recommend telling the other partner what type of intimacy you do feel comfortable with. For example, “I am having trouble relaxing into the moment right now. Can we just hold each other and make out?” Oftentimes we need to re-establish safety and security in the relationship before progressing to sex, especially when couples have been distant for a while.

What surprised me most was that prioritizing intimacy didn’t make it feel forced or boring—it made it feel valued.  

To make scheduling intimacy more exciting I suggest flirting throughout the day. Sending a text like “I can’t wait to feel your lips on mine tonight,” or “I want to run my hands all over your body,” can create anticipation and arousal.

You Are Not Broken

There’s one thing I hope women take away from this conversation more than anything else:

You are not broken because your desire changed. Desire ebbs and flows throughout life and many outside factors affect it.

Stress affects it.Parenthood affects it.Burnout affects it.Emotional disconnection affects it.Grief affects it.Exhaustion affects it.Feeling emotionally unseen affects it.Living in constant survival mode affects it.

None of that makes you defective.

Sometimes low desire is your body’s way of asking for something your life has been missing for far too long: rest, support, emotional safety, playfulness, connection, space to breathe, or simply the opportunity to feel like yourself again.

For a long time, I thought I needed to “fix” my desire. What I actually needed was to stop living in survival mode long enough to hear what my body had been trying to tell me all along.

If this resonated with you, I’d genuinely love to hear your experience.

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Have you gone through a season where your desire felt distant or difficult to access? What do you think contributed to it most? Was there anything that helped you reconnect with yourself again?

I would love to hear from you. Sharing your experience may help another.

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P.S. This is exactly why I’m creating the Healing Attachment Toolkit—a resource designed to help women feel more emotionally secure, connected, grounded, and supported within themselves and their relationships. It’s coming soon, and I truly cannot wait to share it with you.

TL;DR: Practical Ways to Reignite Sexual Desire

If your sex drive feels low or completely absent, it does not mean you are broken. For many women, desire is responsive and deeply connected to stress levels, emotional connection, mental load, and overall stress levels and nervous system state. Here are some of the most effective ways to begin reconnecting with desire again:

• Create a 15–20 minute decompression ritual before intimacy so your body can transition out of stress mode.

• Reduce mental overload by asking for more support with household responsibilities and childcare.

• Identify your personal “turn-ons” and “turn-offs” outside the bedroom. Emotional support, a clean environment, affection, rest, and feeling appreciated matter more than many women realize.

• Communicate clearly with your partner about what helps you feel emotionally connected and what makes desire retreat.

• Stop waiting for spontaneous desire to magically appear. Many women experience responsive desire, which develops after connection, relaxation, touch, and emotional closeness begin.

• Date your partner again. Flirt. Laugh. Touch casually. Prioritize connection outside of sex.

• Schedule intentional, distraction-free intimacy time if life has become too busy for connection to happen naturally.

• Reconnect with yourself—not just your relationship. Rest, pleasure, alone time, playfulness, and emotional safety all matter.

With love,

Wendy

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