How the history we build together can start shaping what happens next.

Pam is 69. Mike is 71. When they met 11 years ago, they could barely keep their hands off each other. Now they have not had sex for two years.

That sounds like the story. It isn’t quite.

Pam still finds Mike attractive. Mike says he still desires Pam. What Pam misses is also a version of herself. Sex had brought out something playful and imaginative in her. Small gestures from Mike still matter because they tell her she is wanted. Mike, meanwhile, describes a body that no longer behaves as it once did. Viagra can help him have an erection, he says, but it cannot create desire. Their last attempt at sex was difficult for him and painful for her. He would like Pam to touch him more, even when the touch is not sexual. The Guardian

Two people. Eleven shared years. Plenty of affection. And already the obvious question — do they still want each other? — is beginning to look too simple.

Wanting someone, showing it, having sex, initiating affection and feeling wanted are not the same thing. And relationships do not stand still while we try to understand them.

When life gets very good at asking for certain versions of us

On the podcast Marriage Therapy Radio, another couple describe a very different marriage. They have been married for 16 years and are raising two adopted neurodivergent children. Their life has also included menopause, moves, renovation and the relentless executive work of keeping a family functioning.
The wife has a phrase for what she has become inside all of this: “the mother machine.” Her husband talks about missing fun and connection.

There is nothing especially dramatic about that sequence. That is why it matters. A long period of life can keep asking two people to organise, remember, earn, transport, repair, care, cope and solve. They may become extremely competent at meeting the demands in front of them, without either person ever deciding to stop being playful together.

Life can simply get very good at requiring something else.

That does not prove anything about sexual desire. It does raise a larger question about relationships: what happens when shared conditions repeatedly call forward some versions of two people and leave less room for others?

You can be doing everything necessary to keep a life going and still one day wonder where part of the relationship went.

There is another difficulty. The two people may not have experienced those years in quite the same way. One thinks, “I was working that hard for us”; the other remembers absence. One thinks, “I was giving you space”; the other remembers being left alone. One thinks, “We were exhausted, but basically fine”; the other had begun wondering whether this was simply what the relationship had become.

We were in the same marriage. We were not always having the same experience of it.

That need not mean one account is true and the other false. I have unusually good access to what I meant. You have unusually good access to what it was like to receive it. Both can contain real evidence and still be incomplete.

When a kiss stops being only a kiss

A couple speaking with Esther Perel make this visible in an extraordinarily ordinary detail. They had been together for 20 years, married for 17, and had four children. Their difference in sexual desire was substantial. He would like sex very frequently. She described very little need for it. They had read books, watched videos and been through individual and marriage counselling. They understood more about why sex mattered differently to each of them. The difficulty remained.

Then she described what had happened to kissing.

For a long time, she had stopped doing much affectionate touching because it no longer felt neutral. A kiss at five in the afternoon could create an expectation about what would happen at ten. If she turned him on, she expected him to want more. It became easier not to start the kiss than to create a sequence she did not want to complete.

The kiss itself has not changed. Its history has.

She is no longer deciding only whether she wants to kiss her husband now. She is also responding to what experience has taught her that this kiss may become later.

After enough repetitions with someone, we can start responding not only to what is happening, but to what we expect will happen next. Research on couples supports parts of that process: expectations of rejection can alter how people behave during conflict, while daily studies show that the way sexual rejection is experienced — reassuring or hostile, for example — matters to what both partners feel afterwards. Rejection sensitivity research

The past can enter the room before either person has done anything this time.

That is useful. Long relationships depend on prediction. You want to know the person beside you will turn up, remember what matters, recognise the look across the room and understand when something is wrong. But the same history that makes intimacy possible can also make surprise harder.

A sigh can already mean “here we go again”. A question can sound like criticism before it has finished. Touch can carry an expectation. A refusal can become evidence of a much larger rejection. Each person starts adjusting to what they think the other will do next, and those adjustments become new evidence.

Leaving some room for what you don’t already know

There is a reason the references to play in these stories matter. Pam misses the playful version of herself. The husband of the “mother machine” misses fun.

Play is not a cure for declining desire, and “have more fun together” would be painfully inadequate advice for many relationships. But play does have one interesting quality: its outcome is not fully decided in advance.

A stupid joke, doing something neither of you is good at, a conversation with nothing to solve, or touch that is allowed to remain touch can create a moment in which the old forecast has less control over what happens next.

There is some experimental evidence that couples doing interesting, self-expanding activities together can experience greater desire and relationship satisfaction. That does not mean novelty reliably restores wanting. It does suggest that relationships are affected not only by what two people feel, but by the kinds of encounters their lives still make possible. Self-expansion research

Perhaps that is the more modest value of playfulness here. It can create room for new evidence. Something different may appear, or it may not. Both outcomes matter.

Understanding the pattern does not guarantee restoration.

Jesse Gold has written about loving her husband while sexual desire repeatedly disappeared for her, not only in that marriage but in earlier relationships too. Therapy helped her understand more. What eventually arrived was closer to peace and resolution than the return of the wanting she thought she was supposed to recover. Jesse Gold, The Ethel

That matters because context can help explain what happened without requiring a preferred verdict afterwards.

Explanation is not a preferred verdict.

Perhaps Pam and Mike will rediscover something at Burning Man, as they wonder in their interview. Perhaps their sexual relationship will remain part of their past. Perhaps they will find other forms of closeness. Neither of them knows. The Guardian

But by now, “Do they still want each other?” feels like the wrong-sized question.

A long relationship carries bodies that change, roles that accumulate, memories of what happened last time and predictions about what will happen next. We need that history. It is part of how people come to know each other so deeply.
We may also need some room in which the next encounter is not completely written by it. Perhaps a long relationship needs enough history to know one another, and enough room to still be surprised.

The past deserves a place in the room. It does not automatically deserve the final word.

Further Reading

• Pam and Mike — This Is How We Do It, The Guardian

• Marriage Therapy Radio — “A Peek in the Therapeutic Process”

• Where Should We Begin? — “He Wants It Everyday, She Wants It Never”

• Muise et al. — self-expansion, desire and relationship satisfaction

• Downey et al. — rejection sensitivity in close relationships

• Jesse Gold — “I Adore My Husband. But I Really Don’t Want to Have Sex With Him”