#107 Q&A: Mismatched Libido & Anxious-Avoidant Sexual Dynamics
Mismatched libido in a relationship is a challenge that a lot of couples face. In today’s episode, I’ll be answering a listener's question of how to navigate mismatched libido in a relationship, particularly in an anxious-avoidant dynamic. I’ll guide you on strategies to break the anxious-avoidant spiral, by initiating open dialogue and finding a middle ground between both partners.
Mismatched libido in a relationship is a challenge that a lot of couples face. In today’s episode, I’ll be answering a listener's question of how to navigate mismatched libido in a relationship, particularly in an anxious-avoidant dynamic. I’ll guide you on strategies to break the anxious-avoidant spiral, by initiating open dialogue and finding a middle ground between both partners.
We’ll cover:
It’s not going to be 100% aligned all the time
How sex shows up for anxious and avoidant attachment styles
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Use the code PODCAST50 for 50% off the Sex and Attachment Masterclass
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
You might also like…
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
In today's episode I am answering the listener’s question of how to navigate mismatched libido in a relationship and particularly in anxious, avoidant kind of dynamic. So this is something that I've touched on before on the show, but I haven't very recently and it is such a common experience and I think unfortunately one that doesn't get talked about anywhere near enough. And so, so many people end up feeling really lonely and isolated and convincing themselves that it's just them and everyone else is having really great sex and a really thriving sex life and they are alone in their struggle.
[00:01:04]:
I can tell you from the privileged position of hearing a lot of people's stories all the time that that is far from the truth and so many people are struggling with this. So with one partner wanting sex more than the other and all of the things that can flow from that the shame, the conflict, the sense of rejection and unworthiness and worrying about the relationship not really knowing how to connect internalising that taking it very personally. All of these things are so much more common than you would realise and I think, as I said, really important to talk about so that we can destigmatize that a little and hopefully empower ourselves to feel like we have more agency in how to talk about it and how to approach finding a solution. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. And as I said, we'll be looking at it with a bit of an attachment overlay because often sex and attachment are spoken about in isolation. When really if attachment is looking at the way that we relate to and experience intimacy and what fears we might have around that, it makes sense that sex would bring those wounds to the forefront in very profound ways. And that has certainly been my observation and my personal experience as well. So that's what we're going to be talking about today.
[00:02:19]:
Before we dive into that, I did just want to flag that one of my Master classes on my website is called Sex and Attachment and it's over 2 hours. Just on this topic, I've created a discount code for you. If anyone listens to today's episode and feels like they could use a little bit more of a deep dive on this topic or you're just interested to learn more, you can use the code podcast 50 or One Word and we'll link all of that in the show notes to save 50% on that Masterclass. That's less than $50 that it'll come to for you. So yes, as I said, if you're interested in learning more about sex and attachment, which I think most all of us should be because it's such an important area of relationships, definitely go and cheque that one out. Okay, so let's talk about this mismatched libido and anxious avoidant sexual dynamics. Even as I say that it's such a big topic I don't even know where to begin. Maybe we can start by acknowledging that mismatched libido is incredibly common.
[00:03:15]:
If we think about libido as being this combination of our desire for sex, interacting with all of the reasons why we wouldn't want to have sex at any given moment, most often that's around stress. So our brain is going through this process of basically tallying up reasons for and against having sex. And some of us are really sensitive to the reasons against so that if there's any slight reason against having sex, we have no interest in sex, and we really don't want to go there, whereas some of us really are quite open to having sex most of the time, and we don't place a lot of weight on the reasons why we wouldn't want to have sex. And so when we've all got these complex equations going on with all of these different inputs and our levels of openness to sex at any given moment, is it any wonder that mismatched libido is so common? Of course it is. Right? It's so personal when and under what circumstances we feel like being intimate with a partner. And so when we've got two people with their own sets of equations and circumstances, it's rare that it's just going to organically line up all of the time. So mismatched libido is something that most people will encounter at some point in some season in one or more of the relationships in their life. So it's really not something to be ashamed of.
[00:04:34]:
It's just part of navigating relationships, is that you're likely to have to negotiate a little on this because it's unlikely you're going to just start and finish at the same point, pardon the pun, but you're not going to be 100% aligned on that all the time just because you're different people with different experiences. So recognising that libido is not something that's objective in terms of what is normal, right? And ask anyone, any experts in the field of sexuality, there's no objective metric for what a normal amount of sex is or what a healthy amount of sex is. A standard libido is wanting sex x amount of it's not like that. It's really what's normal for you and what allows you to feel like your sexual needs are being satisfied and is not causing you any distress. So if you're having sex three times a year, but that is perfectly fine for you, then that's your normal and that's fine. Whereas someone else might need to be having sex three times a week minimum to be feeling like their sexual needs are being met. And part of being in relationship with someone is negotiating your needs to the extent that there are divergences and finding ways to meet in the middle or find ways for both of you to get your needs met. To the extent that there are vast differences in your needs that feel like you can't bridge the gap, then maybe you're not compatible, right? But before we get to not compatible, let's look at some of the ways that this might show up in relationship and particularly why it might be present in anxious avoidant dynamics and why it might cause particular distress in those dynamics.
[00:06:08]:
So, for anxiously attached people, sex is often used as a barometer for the overall health of the relationship. So if my partner wants sex and we're having sex and they seem to be sexually satisfied, then I feel safe and reassured and wanted and desired and all of those things. And that's like a big tick in terms of I can relax because there's nothing wrong, right? I use sex as the litmus test for whether the relationship is going well overall and because anxiously attached people tend to struggle with unworthiness and fears of being undesirable and also jealousy or fears about potential infidelity or just outside threats to the relationship, sex feels like a really important glue to hold things together. And so, to the extent that there's any change in the sexual dynamic or their partner pulls away sexually or loses interest sexually, even if just for a period of time, the anxiously attached person is likely to take that and spin it into a really catastrophic story. So the interpretation is likely to be very severe. There's something terribly wrong. They've lost interest in me, they don't find me attractive anymore, they're falling out of love with me, they're seeing someone else, there's someone else they're interested in and that's why they don't want me. All of these things are likely to go to existential threats to the relationship just because that's what we know anxious folks do.
[00:07:29]:
And so what often happens and why this can be such a predictable cycle is that at the start of a relationship between an anxious person and an avoidant person is there'll often be a lot of sexual chemistry and intensity as there tends to be in most relationships, certainly here. And then as the relationship progresses, becomes a little more serious and a little more stable and steady, the avoidant person will often start to pull away and they often won't really have a solid understanding of why that's happening for them. They might just have this inexplicable loss of desire or reduction in desire and attraction. And for the avoidant person they might start to make meaning out of that and go oh, maybe this means it's not the right relationship. What is often happening is that for avoidant folks, they don't really know how to desire someone that they love and someone that is a comfortable person who they have a level of intimacy and vulnerability with. For most avoidant folks, I think it would be fair to say that more casual sexual encounters are going to be more comfortable than more intimate ones. And that's kind of just the opposite for a lot of anxious people who go the more intimacy the better. But for avoidant folks, sex is vulnerable for all of us and it's really how we relate to that vulnerability that can change how we respond to that, to the idea of sexual intimacy.
[00:08:50]:
So for a lot of avoidant people, they won't really know how to have sex in a vulnerable way with someone that they love and so they can start to experience this withdrawal. And when that happens, the anxious person responds by testing escalating, upping the ante, trying to figure out if it's just all in their head or whether something really is wrong. So they might try and initiate more frequently, might try and be more affectionate with their partner to see whether they pull away or whether they're open receptive. And so the anxious person gets to work on gathering information and trying to test their hypothesis. And oftentimes the avoidant person feels that additional pressure pulls away more because they just feel overwhelmed. And then the anxious person goes well yes, I was right, they are pulling away, something really is wrong. And then it spirals and spirals because as one person escalates and the other pulls away and there's no actual open dialogue about anything, it's just both people living in these fear stories and whatever their self protective mechanisms are that just happen to be in direct opposition. So that's kind of a dynamic that I've previously termed the anxious avoidant sexual spiral.
[00:09:57]:
And you can probably imagine why if you've experienced it, I've experienced it, it's hard and it's really, really easy to internalise their stories of what's wrong? What have I done? Has something happened? Why do they not find me attractive anymore? What do I need to change about myself in order for them to desire me? Again, as is often the case, we take someone's behaviour and we make it about us and then we try and solve the problem by solving ourselves. And needless to say, that's really painful because usually it doesn't work and then we just feel like we failed and there's something really inherently wrong with us and the relationship. So all of that to say, there's a lot at play here and I think the first step in making any sort of headway here is can I depersonalise this? Now, I'm not going to tell you to not be impacted by it because I know that's not realistic and I can't even do that myself, right? Because it hurts and it's really easy to take that personally and to feel hurt by it. And that's I think totally fair enough. But we want to just interrupt between hurt and there's something wrong with me where that story starts to take root. That's what we want to interrupt and just soften away that story rather than feeding that and going, okay, this is uncomfortable, or this is painful. How can I change myself or do things differently or start frantically over functioning to try and get this person to want me? Because that's really kind of overstepping on where our responsibility lies. And we tend to then, as I said, feel like a failure if and when that doesn't work, which it usually doesn't.
[00:11:36]:
So can we hold on to the primary emotion of oh, this feels uncomfortable, this feels scary, I feel rejected, which is not good, I feel embarrassed. Even all of those things really normal. But can we just nudge in between that and the stories that spring from it and try and be really careful there so that we don't add more suffering to what is already a painful experience? I think when we can do that, we can also tend to those emotions more skillfully and we can share with our partner from a place that is self honouring and honest without being really, really charged with all those stories that we've been crafting and spinning around in our head. So being able to say to someone, look, it's really important to me and I really value when we're intimate and I've noticed that recently you've been less open to that. Is that something that you'd be willing to talk about? Is there something going on for you? And really being open minded and curious rather than projecting all of the fears and the hypotheses that you might have as to what's going on for them, seeking to understand. And if they are reluctant to have the conversation, you can kind of say, look, I get it. I get that this is really uncomfortable. It's not really comfortable for me either, but it's important to me.
[00:12:51]:
We don't have to have the conversation right now, but we do need to have it because it's important to me that we nurture this part of our relationship. And I really want us to be able to do that in a way that feels safe and good for both of us and here's what I'd need in that respect. So really being firm but compassionate in the way that you approach the conversation with your partner and emphasising everything that I've shared with you, that it's not something to be ashamed of. Mismatched libido is super common and stress is such a big part of it. So having a little more awareness around what goes into our experience of sexual desire, what we call libido, and tinkering with the variables. So if I know that being really tired at the end of the day is not conducive to sexual desire, then maybe you need to reverse engineer your environment to be trying to initiate sex at other times of day when your partner is likely to be more conducive. Or if you know that when you guys don't have enough space and privacy, then that makes you more stressed than allows for an enjoyable experience. Right? We need to get really clear and specific on what factors contribute to and detract from our experience of desire in a way that allows us to get really pragmatic and just help ourselves out rather than being very passive and then hoping for a miracle and then feeling awful when things aren't going the way we'd hoped.
[00:14:20]:
So I think we need to dispel this idea that sex should be really effortless and romantic and easeful all the time and really go, okay, if this is something that we're prioritising in our relationship, like any other thing, any other type of quality time, then we need to prioritise it and stop just waiting for it to happen or to improve or whatever. That's not going to happen on its own. So going if this is something that we both value about our relationship, then we're going to need to be really active participants in that process and in making it really great. And again, some people will have resistance to that. Your partner might be of the view that it shouldn't be hard and that it should just come easily and that there's something wrong if it's not really natural and easeful. And I think you've just got to say to them, look, I understand that that's the messaging we've gotten, but I just don't think that that's true. And I think that that can be a defence mechanism that people come up with. It's like, oh, it shouldn't be this hard and that's why I'll just kind of run away and go find someone else where it'll all be easier and I'll just get to start from scratch.
[00:15:24]:
I think that that's just a defence mechanism that allows us to move away from vulnerability and convince ourselves that with the perfect person it'll all be easy. And of course, we know that that is unfortunately a myth. So I hope that this has given you at least a starting point. Obviously this is a huge discussion. I have had a few episodes previously around sex and sexual communication and sexual dynamics. You can scroll back through the archives if you want to listen to more on the podcast or as I said, the sex and attachment masterclass is very much a comprehensive deep dive on this issue and you can use the code podcast 50 to save 50% on that masterclass which we will link in the show notes. Or you can find via my website. Otherwise I really hope that this has been helpful and if it has, please do leave a review or a five star rating.
[00:16:11]:
I really do appreciate so much your ongoing support of the show and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again sooner.
#106 Retroactive Jealousy: Navigating Discomfort With Our Partner's Past
Retroactive jealousy is one that focuses on the past, fixating on other partners or stages in your partner's lives and being threatened by it. In today’s conversation, I’ll dive into how such jealousy stirs immense stress, but more importantly, we share insights into building healthier, more resilient relationships.
Retroactive jealousy is one that focuses on the past, fixating on other partners or stages in your partner's lives and being threatened by it. In today’s conversation, I’ll dive into how such jealousy stirs immense stress, but more importantly, we share insights into building healthier, more resilient relationships.
We’ll cover:
Impacting our self worth
Looking for skeletons and reasons to not trust
If you should share the jealousy with your partner
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
You might also like…
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about retroactive jealousy, which for anyone who's not familiar with the term, refers to being preoccupied with jealousy about the past and particularly in the context of a relationship about your partner's past and maybe their past relationships. So this is something that a lot of people reach out to me about and I receive a lot of questions about. It can look like a comparison with a partner's exes or just obsessive preoccupation with what came before you and I think to the point where it can feel really all-consuming and can be really feeding a lot of insecurity. In the relationship and can really impact our connection and all of the other good things that we would want to be cultivating in our relationship in the present moment.
[00:01:18]:
It really can take us out of the here and now and create so much stress in our bodies and in our relationship with our partners when we're obsessing about things that may or may not have happened in the past. So I'm going to be talking a little bit about that today, why you might experience that and some ways that you can process it and work through it. And hopefully that will give you a little bit more context. For it and allow you to feel a bit more supported and able to work through those things as and when they arise rather than just panicking or spiralling or feeding all of those obsessive thoughts in a way that ultimately doesn't get you what you're wanting. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before I dive into that, I just wanted to say that my building Trust Masterclass, which I ran recently, if you're someone who really struggles with jealousy and you want to be able to reframe the way that you relate to trust within yourself and in your relationship, that might be a good one to cheque out. If the content of today's episode resonates with you and you know that trust is an area that you could use some additional support in, then definitely cheque out the building Trust Masterclass as it's very much a deep dive on all things trust, both self trust and relational trust. Okay, so let's talk about retroactive jealousy.
[00:02:41]:
As I said in the introduction, retroactive jealousy is jealousy about things that have happened in the past. And particularly when we're talking about it in a relationship, it's usually referring to things that have happened in your partner's past. So maybe their past relationships or other chapters of their life that preceded your relationship and feeling really jealous about that. I think it's important to set the scene in this conversation and normalise that for all of us. I think we can have this irrational possessiveness to varying degrees, where we might not love the idea of our partner having been in past relationships or having had sexual partners or other experiences in their life that predated us, particularly if we're hearing about that in any detail. I think it's pretty normal to have a level of discomfort or something within you that isn't crazy about hearing about those things, doesn't love it. But I think when we're talking about retroactive jealousy in the context of this discussion, it's really more than that, right? It's not mild discomfort, it's really fixating on it, becoming quite threatened by it. So feeling like your partner's past is in some way threatening to your relationship in the present and all of the things that go along with that.
[00:03:59]:
So feeling like you need to gather all of the information and know all of the details and maybe stalk your partner's exes or compare yourself to them. Find all of this data on them so that you can assess. The level of risk, which I think is a good warning sign that there's more going on there for us when we notice those behaviours come up. I think that's where it goes from being a normal, understandable level of discomfort to okay, this is really being driven by some fear and insecurity in me. And what might that be about? Can I get a little curious? So I think there are a few different possible causes of retroactive jealousy or reasons we might feel that way or struggle with that in our relationships. I think an obvious one is unworthiness and insecurity. So I think this particularly arises where we feel very threatened by a partner's exes. And I can't tell you every single time I put up a question box on Instagram, I will get at least five questions that are about comparison with exes.
[00:05:03]:
How do I make my peace with the fact that my partner had these exes and these relationships and thinking they're prettier than me? And how do I not feel bad? How do I not compare myself? Why do I need to be convinced and reassured that my partner loves me more than they ever loved their exes? All of these kind of quite obsessive, controlling thoughts around needing to be better than or different than and being persuaded of why we are more valuable than as if we are in direct competition with the past. And I think that to try and rationalise that is not really engaging with the fact that it isn't rational, right? Of course it's not really rational. In most cases it's quite emotional. But for whatever reason, we've got this story that we are unworthy or there's something wrong with us or we don't have enough to offer as a partner. And so our partner's exes might emerge as our competition because we have evidence of the fact that our partner was attracted to them, that they might be our partner's type, so to speak, that they had a relationship. So, okay, my partner loved that person at one point. Why am I better than them? Am I better than them? And if not, how can I be better than them? How can I make them worse than me so that I feel safe and secure in my relationship? And I think that again, while we can have self compassion for our unworthiness and whatever might drive us to those sorts of thoughts and patterns, I think we really need to recognise that at the relationship that we're in, our partner is in that relationship because they want to be in that relationship with us. And so it's not really useful or relevant to be obsessing over their past relationships because it's just extraneous to what is right now in the present.
[00:06:54]:
And I think that really, as I said, what that tells us is that we have some work to do on our self worth. Because I think if you were comfortable and confident in who you are and what you have to offer, kind of your value proposition as a partner, then all of that other extraneous stuff becomes much less relevant. And you can trust in the fact that your partner loves you and is choosing you and wants to be with you because of what you bring to the table. Right? Rather than thinking that you are unworthy and feeling very threatened by things that may have happened in the past or your partner's past relationships. I think that the other thing to add there is this can be exacerbated if a partner's ex is still an active part of their life. So if they still have an ongoing relationship, maybe if they were broken up with and they didn't want the relationship to end, maybe it took them a long time to recover. I think it's understandable that you might have some fears around what if they still love them, what if they want to get back together with them? All of those things, right? Again, I think are fairly normal fears to have. But ultimately we do just want to bring ourselves back to the present and be grounding ourselves in what we can see and the evidence that we actually have, which is that our partner is choosing us and that we are in relationship with them and reminding ourselves of all that we have to offer.
[00:08:20]:
And really doing that work on building self worth as well, which I think as I said, is a big part of it. I think the other kind of expression of retroactive jealousy outside of feeling threatened by past partners or past relationships, you might feel threatened by past chapters of your partner's life. So they might not be so much romantic experiences so much as like if they had a wild time in their twenty s or they used to party really hard or go and have all of these experiences that feel threatening to you in some way. Whether it brings up fears that they used to be out of control or that maybe they struggled with certain substances or any number of other things that feel like skeletons in their closet, I think that we can feel kind of uncomfortable with that because it feels so out of our control. And I think this is probably true for what I was saying earlier around the exes as well. This retroactive jealousy is we know that jealousy is a response to feeling like there's some sort of outside threat to the relationship. And I think when something is in the past and it predates our relationship with that person, our information is always going to be imperfect. So there's a lot of uncertainty, there are a lot of unknowns and that can lead us to feel very out of control and like we don't have the situation under our control and that can feel intensely vulnerable.
[00:09:43]:
So when there are all these unknowns, these blanks, our brain will often fill them in with really catastrophic interpretations rather than just looking at the facts at hand and recognising that that's not really relevant to right here, right now. The relationship that we're in with the person as they are today, we can obsess over looking for cobwebs, looking for skeletons, looking for signs that something dangerous or bad is lurking that we're unaware of and that we're going to be caught off guard. And so I think that when we can get really hyper vigilant around someone's past, it's often that part of us that struggles to trust, that is looking for evidence that something bad's going to happen, the other shoe is going to drop. What is it that I'm missing? What are you hiding from me? All of those thoughts that are often coming from that place. And so, again, while we can see that and it's always this interplay of how much we are willing or able to trust and how trustworthy the other person has proven themselves to be, I think if it is retroactive meaning it's not based on your current experience of this person. We do have to take a level of responsibility for that possibly being our stuff more than it is theirs. Because I don't think that you can punish someone for their life before you and the fact that they had a life before you. That doesn't strike me as fair or reasonable.
[00:11:10]:
Now, I suppose that leads to the question of should you share this with your partner if you're experiencing retroactive jealousy, and I think you certainly can, you can share it. But I would say, as always, share it in full recognition of the fact that part of it is your stuff. I think that's a good rule of thumb, saying, I noticed that when I hear about your exes, it's a bit uncomfortable for me. I feel a little bit threatened or insecure. And I'm not saying that you've done anything wrong, obviously, but I notice that that gets a bit of a reaction from me, and I'm trying to work through that or something. You can share it to the extent that you want to let them in on your experience and give them a little more context for why something is hard for you, but at the same time I don't think you want to be shoving it in their face and going, tell me why I'm better than her. I've again had questions from people who've described situations to me where they frequently ask their partner for reassurance that they love them more than and differently than they love their ex and explain to me all of the reasons why you want me and not them. And I think that that kind of dynamic is not healthy and it's not fair.
[00:12:27]:
And if we're in that, we really need to own that. That is our fear that's driving the bus there and we need to really prioritise working on our self worth so that we're not so obsessed by and consumed by these imaginary threats to the relationship that aren't even present day realities. And I think that as I said, when we are in that level of just obsessive intrusive thoughts about the past, that it's probably a warning sign for something else, whether that's within the relationship or within ourselves or some combination of the two. Usually we're just in threat mode and so we're going hunting for confirmation of our fears. And so again, I think we can take those feelings of jealousy and the fears that go with them and maybe the behaviours that they're driving as feedback for what's underneath it and go okay, something needs my attention here and how can I offer myself something, some work, a conversation, some self compassion? But how can I use this as feedback for what's going on for me and actually tend to the underlying fear or wound rather than just obsessing over these surface level things and feeding that loop and keeping myself really stuck in an insecure place that's ultimately harming me and my relationships. So I hope that that has been a helpful, albeit brief introduction to this topic of retroactive jealousy. And I do want to say, as I said at the start, if it's something that you experience or have experienced, it is pretty common. But obviously, and I've said this before on the topic of jealousy more broadly, jealousy is a very fundamental human emotion.
[00:14:16]:
It's part of the human experience. But obviously it can be taken to extremes and some of us can experience jealousy to degrees that really do get in the way of our relationships and just consume so much of our mental and emotional energy to the point where we feel really just totally exceeded our capacity. And so I think that if this specific flavour of jealousy is one that you struggle with. You don't need to shame yourself for it, but it is something that you might want to pay attention to and get really curious about and ask the question, what is this really about for me? Where are all of these perceived threats coming from? And what would I need to feel or think or believe in order to not feel so threatened by the past? What am I making my partner's past mean about them or about me or about the relationship that is feeling so threatening and causing me to think and act in this way? So getting a bit curious and doing the work around that, because I think that you'll be much better for it if you can reach a place of relative peace with the past, rather than feeling like you need to control it or eliminate any risks to do with your partner's history. So I do hope this has been helpful. As always, very grateful if you can leave a review or a rating. It does help me so much in continuing to get the word out about the podcast, but otherwise, I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys.
[00:15:46]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deep on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again soon.