I am a low libido male and I have struggled with dead bedrooms for about 15 years now.
I have taken loads and loads of abuse because of it over the past 15 years. I’ve had past girlfriends physical hit me because it made them feel so bad. I’ve had girls verbally abuse me. I had a girl cheat on me out of spite and another girl threaten me constantly that she will cheat as a way to get me to sleep with her. I had girls tell their entire family and friends that I’m a homosexual because of my lack of sex drive.
I’ve been called a pussy, not a man, pathetic etc.
Meanwhile, I have basically no guy friends I can talk to about it because most of them don’t understand it.
Every time I watch TV I get shown guy after guy being portrayed as the complete opposite of me and I constantly feel like I am not “man” enough.
I constantly fantasize about how if the situations were reversed and the girl was the one with the low libido it would be way more “accepted”.
The hardest part about all of it is the fact that it all feels so out of my control. Low libido is usually a symptom of something, it isn’t like I choose to have a below par sex life.
Unfortunately what happens is after years and years of verbal and rarely physical abuse in past relationships, sex has become the complete opposite of what it used to be for me.
Now there are all kinds of strings attached to it and I’ve completely lost touch with what I actually like about sex because for years I had sex because I HAD TO not because I wanted to.
Every time I have sex the only thing I am thinking about is how much the whole relationship is riding on this (no pun intended) and I better perform well or she might leave me. I don’t even get to sort through all of my personal demons enough to actually enjoy how good the sex feels, I’m too focused on the wrong things.
I also developed performance anxiety because tons of times I had sex when I wasn’t horny and didn’t perform and then took verbal abuse which just reinforced the performance anxiety. I get pissed thinking about how much easier it would be to be a low libido female because they can just fake it a lot easier than I can. It is hard to fake that I’m horny because she can PHYSICALLY SEE THAT I’M NOT DOWN THERE.
As silly as it sounds, I feel like as a guy I need to be horny for sex to happen because If I don’t get an erection then sex literally can’t happen so I feel like when I’m not horny all eyes are on me to get it up. Just one of the many screwed up thoughts that have developed over the years.
The other terrible part is the guilt.
I’ve had several relationships destroyed and I’ve seen 3 girls get their confidence torn to pieces all over something that I couldn’t really control (Or at least felt like I couldn’t control it).
The frustrating part is that I was attracted to all of them, just not in a horny way as often as they would like. Then after abuse I would stop being attracted to them all together and it had nothing to do with them physically, by that point I had lost attraction because of the way they treated me over my low libido.
The frustrating part is it took way too long to find what was wrong with me. I had very low testosterone levels when I got tested last year which contributed to my sex drive.
Now I have so many mental barriers that I need to break through that were created all of these years.
Every single time sex is initiated I completely freeze like an abused animal would when you go to pet them. Usually I catch myself doing it but by then it had been a couple minutes and the mood is ruined by then.
I’ve been to counseling many times and while it is nice that I am able to talk about my issues, it doesn’t really give me any direction as to how to solve the actual problem. I hate knowing that I am to blame for something being wrong with a relationship especially because I’m so thoughtful and confident in every other part of my life.
The hardest part is deep down I feel like I just want to be accepted for who I feel like I naturally am. Girls don’t accept who I am because it makes them insecure and guys don’t accept who I am because they don’t understand it. But at the same time I think is this who I am? or is this a defect and it actually isn’t ok for me to have a lower libido?
Deep down I know that it isn’t ok for me to want sex as infrequently as i do, especially when it makes my partners feel so bad. But at the same time I kind of get jealous because I feel like my partners are allowed to want sex as often as they want but because their libido just so happens to be on the high side, they are considered normal and I am basically the freak who needs to go seek therapy and change everything about myself.
To be fair, a lot of these thoughts are left over from before the testosterone discovery. My wife has been a little more understanding because she knows there is actually something physical going on and I can’t treat it because we are trying to have a baby (Testosterone Replacement Therapy makes you infertile). But these feeling don’t just go away just because things have been better recently, there is still some destruction left behind from the last 14 years.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.