Let’s say two people are in a relationship and they have different libidos. Now let’s say one of them gets cranky if they haven’t had sex in 24 hrs so the other one gives in and has sex more frequently than desired to satiate the cranky partner. At what point, would you say, this starts to cross over the boundary from healthy compromise to dubious consent?
Followers?
you’re having sex when you don’t have a desire to.
that’s a problem.
your partner is having sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with them, and doing it anyway. the fact that their partner is not giving enthusiastic consent doesn’t bother them, or they’re choosing to put that aside as long as they get to fuck.
that’s also a problem.
to sum: in my opinion, all of this is a problem. it might be a small one now, but it’s going to grow into a much bigger one if you don’t start communicating directly about your mismatched libidos. i’m talking resentment city, on both sides.
take action, and take care, not to go there.
What @daniredux said. And I like that she broke it down without judgment. When there is a libido mismatch, it’s no one’s “fault.” It is simply a mismatch in levels of desire. It’s what the two people do with that mismatch that matters. And yes, sometimes what one has to do with that mismatch is part on good terms.
Gonna take the conversation in a slightly different direction, but let me say right up front that acting cranky and entitled to sex is a non-starter. The rest of this post is about examining how you can wind up in that situation and why clear conversation is so important to relationships in the face of all kinds of (inevitable!) interest imbalances.
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Can’t find the reference but there’s a cool behavioral economist’s analysis of a relationship study from around 10 years ago that’s so relevant to the whole “libido imbalance” thing.
Imagine you’ve got two college-student partners who love each other deeply and must spend the summer apart. Both are busy and, remember, both are totally committed to each other. The first partner starts to miss talking to the other every second day. The other partner starts to miss talking every third day.
The question was how often does the second partner call the first? And the answer turned out to be never! Because the first partner’s “threshold” for missing their partner always triggered first, the second’s “missing you clock” was always reset.
Turns out there were numerous interesting consequences, including the first person feeling like the second was losing interest and the second feeling like the first was “needy.”
I really ought to see if I can find that original study, but somehow or other they tracked people over several years and gathered enough data to determine what happened when the call-every-two-days partner found themselves in a relationship with a call-every-day partner. As you can imagine, suddenly the previously “needy” call-every-two-days partner was the “distant, aloof, and annoyed-by-neediness” partner… who never called.
You can see this in pretty much every partnership (romantic or otherwise.) Including the canonical “you never clean the kitchen” argument. When one person’s “time to clean the kitchen” is even just a plate or bowl different from the other’s, the first one can become the “nag” and the other the “total slob.” Even though most of the rest of us might see them both as total neat freaks.
Then we get to libido it gets a lot more perilous.
Oh, and by the way, let’s recast the original anon’s Ask into something a little less coercive-sounding and perhaps a little more familiar to people who’s spent time in relationships.
Let’s say one of them gets horny and amorous and loving and physically seductive every two days and the other’s horniness/satisfaction “battery” takes three days to “recharge.” How long does it take for relationship issues to start to materialize? How long before “is sex all you ever think about?” and “maybe they’ve lost interest because they’re seeing someone else” start to crop up?
Let’s throw a couple of interesting monkey wrenches into the mix to see how this all shakes out
- The “high libido” partner discovers Tumblr and starts resetting their every-two-days “battery” by edging and masturbating themselves to satiation, such that the every-three-days partner becomes the more “needy” one.
- The every-two-days partner who’s come to believe they’re “insatiable” (with 100% agreement by their former every-three-days partner) eds up with a new partner who’s got a sex-every-day “recharge” cycle?
- The every-two-days partner likes sex to last half an hour; the every-three-days partner wants sex to last for several hours. Extra credit if the second partner gets “cranky” when the first partner is unable or unwilling to continue.
3A. Now which partner has the “higher” and which the “lower” libidos? - Both partners have the same “recharge” rate but they’re also both kinksters and one of them wants there to be spanking every time and the other only every three or four times. (Extra confounding credit if the “lower libido” partner is the one who wants spanking every time.)
The bottom line through all this is that whether it’s phoning each other while you’re apart, or cleaning the kitchen, or breaking out the trapezes, it’s absolutely inevitable that one party or the other will end up feeling like they’re pulling all the weight, that the other is growing “distant,” that one is “obsessed” and the other “has lost interest,” and so on.
Even though by every objective measure they’re both 100% healthy people with no significant psychological issues and hearty libidos who are head over heels for each other.
The downside of this is welcome to the human condition! As my favorite of Murphy’s Laws puts it “never got to bed with anyone crazier than you.” (Which, since it goes both ways means no one should ever go to bed with anyone, right?)
The upside is this is why even in the most compatible relationship clear communication is basic hygiene. It’s also important that it begins even when you’re in the dazzled infatuation period where we’re more inclined to say “no, no, it’s ok to leave your dish there, I’m not a complete neat freak about keeping the kitchen clean, hah-ha…” Because if you don’t start there then you’ll still have that habit when it’s waaaayyyy past time to say “I know you love my prostate, honey, but my ass is still sore from last time.”
Just putting it out there that a) mismatches are inevitable in any serious relationship, b) a lot of the time they’re structural and thus inescapable, and c) clear, early communication can help the mismatches from becoming irreconcilable. Though, sadly…
One last point: sometimes those differences really are irreconcilable! And that’s why my (borrowed) first rule of breakups is: honor the person you met, not the one you broke up with, because chances are extraordinarily good that you’re both still wonderful, amazing, loving people who just weren’t made for each other.
In other words, to answer the original anonymous ask, the question isn’t so much about crossing the line into demands and coercion as recognizing that you need to have a very serious and possibly painful relationship conversation.
