Scarleteen

hi everyone,

i'm having a bit of a dilemma in my relationship and am looking for insight on the matter. i've been with my boyfriend for a year and a half, and we even spent the last two semesters dorming together at our university. the experience of living together helped us identify rough spots interpersonally and we've been able to work on or resolve a lot of them, but a persistent issue has been my reduced interest in sex. before we lived together, we were effectively long-distance, since he attended a different school in boston and his home is even further away, so we would have sex every time we saw each other and it was a lot of fun. once we moved in, it tapered off significantly until we only did it maybe once a month. it just stopped seeming appealing or fun to me. he's mentioned it a number of times as something he wants to work on because he feels like it means i stopped being attracted to him due to how suddenly i stopped seeming interested in sex once we had moved in together. despite his feelings, he's never tried to be coercive or anything of the sort, and has backed away sexually as well.

i've been giving a lot of thought to this issue now that we've moved back home for the summer -- and i think it's really multifaceted and has a lot of contributing factors. to begin with, we're both bottoms, but i've always taken on the role as the top in our relationship because i wanted to please him however i could. i think this is where sex started feeling like more of a chore or something i did just to make him happy even though i wasn't getting what i really wanted out of the experience. secondly (and this is something i just thought of tonight), i don't think i feel desired by him in the way i've felt in all my other sexual experiences with other people. i don't doubt that he loves me, is attracted to me, and wants me sexually, but he doesn't ever express his desire for me in ways that i interpret correctly, if that makes sense. part of this could be that he's significantly less sexually experienced than i am, and so maybe i'm setting my standards too high, or it could just be something that doesn't really feel intuitive or organic for him to do. my past sex partners have made me feel desired by initiating sex and foreplay in a passionate manner and taking the initiative in our activities, and that's not something i get with my boyfriend. i'm just at a loss for what to do because the both of us deserve to have fulfilling sex lives, but i'm not sure that our sexual compatibility is conducive to that.

Hi phantomdog,

I'm actually going to address your last point first, because it's one where the solution might be pretty straightforward. If you haven't already done so, could you talk to him about what things you think would help you feel desired? And, in that conversation, see if there are things that would help him feel desired as well? While certain ways of expressing desire and affection can be people's "defaults," we can also learn to incorporate others or make a conscious effort to demonstrate ones that resonate with out partners.

I think it could also help to look at the dynamics of sex in a way that actually breaks down things like "bottom" into even more specific elements. Things like top/bottom can be helpful in understanding or describing certain sexual dynamics, but they can also end up creating boxes where there don't need to be any. So, you two could talk about what elements of being a "bottom" actually appeal to you, and see if there are ways to reframe the sexual activities you both enjoy so that nobody is the top OR the bottom. Does that make sense?