It’s reported that 20-30% of marriages have a higher-desire wife and lower-desire husband.
This means that while many women may wish their husbands requested less sex, there are also many women who experience the opposite. Sheri Mueller, LCPC, author of “I Want Him to Want Me”, joined Dr. Juli Slattery on Java with Juli to share insights, wisdom, and encouragement for the woman struggling in this area.
Prefer to listen? You can also listen to the full conversation here.
Juli (00:01.59)
Hey friend, welcome to Java with Juli. I am Juli Slattery, your host for this podcast. And this podcast is a production of Authentic Intimacy, which is a ministry that helps people make sense of God and sexuality. So if you read the title of this episode, you might be wondering, why do we need a specific conversation for higher desire wives when we’ve already talked about things like libido differences and talking to your spouse about the differences you have sexually? And I guess that’s a fair question, but I gotta tell you, as I travel and speak, more and more I am hearing the story of a marriage where the wife really feels like she’s got a higher desire than the husband. And what that leads to is kind of narratives where that wife feels like there must be something wrong with her, and the husband feeling like he must be broken for not wanting to have sex all the time.
So I think this is a very worthwhile conversation to have to come back to, to really help couples understand what to do if that’s your perspective in marriage. Now here to help me talk about this is a clinical counselor. Her name is Sheri Mueller. She is a co-founder of growthtrack.com. She and her husband started that ministry to provide resources for couples to strengthen really all aspects of their marriage. Sheri has written a book and I love the title. It’s, “I Want Him to Want Me”.
And it addresses the topic of a higher-desire wife and offers insight and advice to help women navigate this dynamic. So let’s jump into my conversation with Sheri Mueller.
Sheri, thanks so much for tackling this topic and for coming onto Java with Juli to share with us some of the things that you have learned on the journey of helping other women and in your own marriage.
Sheri (01:52.983)
Well, thanks for having me today. I appreciate the time.
Juli
Yeah. Well, you know, my daily job is to talk about sexuality. And so often when we talk about marriage and sex, we’re using the stereotype of it’s the husband with a higher desire, the husband’s initiating sex, the wife is having more difficulty getting into it and enjoying it. But the reality is that somewhere between 20 to 30 % of couples have the reverse dynamic happening.
So how did this first come on your radar in terms of something that you felt like needed to be addressed?
Sheri
It came on my radar actually about 10 years ago. And through the online ministry that my husband and I have called marriagetrack.com. We had run a series of articles with regard to women that may have higher desire levels, and we got quite a high response. So I wanted to come back, of course it took a little while, but to come back and validate and illuminate this issue because it often only gets a paragraph, maybe a short chapter in many Christian marriage books. And to start the discussion of what often is and can be for women a shame-filled discussion, something that they hesitate to reveal about their marriages.
Juli (03:26.508)
Yeah, why would it have shame attached to it?
Sheri
A lot of times the response that I hear is that it comes back to when we’re struggling in our sex life, that the responsibility for that struggle, women often take that on their shoulders. And it’s really not looked at as an equal struggle to work through together. whether sex life is good, that falls on the man that that’s a, that’s part of what he gets credit for. But when our sex lives are struggling, it doesn’t fall back on his shoulders. She usually looks at it being on hers.
Juli
Yeah, and you find that to be true kind of across the board, regardless of what the issue is?
Sheri
I have just in the responses that we receive through our articles, but I’ve also found that in practice as well. It’s just not something that women, particularly Christian women have felt comfortable to discuss.
Juli
Hidden shame is what I would call it, right? Usually that’s what shame is.
Sheri (04:38.038)
So it’s quite a bit.
Juli (04:45.026)
Right. So the curious part of me wants to dig into that. And that’s probably a topic for a whole ‘nother podcast of just why do women feel more of that burden. But I don’t want to get sidetracked because, yeah, this issue of the dynamic is so critical. Yeah one of the things that I’ve noticed that I feel like for women in this dynamic adds on the shame is this feeling like there must be something wrong with me. Like if I were sexy enough or beautiful enough my husband would desire me more, or even maybe I’m over sexualized. So have you seen that be something that adds additional shame?
Sheri
Well, absolutely. A lot of times it also ties back to how do we feel about ourselves, our worth, our beauty, our desire. It always has a tendency to come back to that part of ourselves as women that we don’t have confidence in.
Juli
Yeah, boy, all the insecurity and we all have it, but it shows up differently in different dynamics. So let’s start with that. Like how does a woman get to the place where she is seeing her marital dynamic in terms of the sexual relationship is not something that needs to have shame attached, but something that she just needs to navigate and she and her husband need to navigate. Like how does she make that switch?
Sheri (06:16.184)
Well, there’s usually a great deal of hesitancy to even begin the conversation or the communication with our husbands about this topic. It can be met with, certainly with anger or with avoid… other types of avoidance. Certainly, you know, a refusal that, you know, everything that’s a struggle for us right now. Well, that’s on you. So it’s not an easy discussion to begin to work through, but it’s a worthwhile one, particularly if it’s done with loving care and with empathy, and certainly not done in the bedroom. So this is take me out for coffee discussion, or sit at the kitchen table. And, hey, I’ve got something that’s worrisome to me, it’s been a concern to me, is it something we can, you know, begin to filter through? And certainly, it may be multiple discussions. Resolving it may not just come down to one.
Juli
Mm hmm. Yeah. And when you talk about like, even approaching that topic, men are so sensitive about sexuality and typically the guy will, is going to have his own shame around this. Like, he’s been digesting the cultural messages that if you’re a real man, you should be ready all the time and you should want sex. And so I would imagine that even broaching this in a loving marriage is a really threatening conversation for him.
Sheri (08:02.862)
A very threatening conversation. And it’s certainly, you brought up cultural narratives and we’re, know, both the wife and the husband are sitting with those going through their mind and probably going through their discussion because you should always be ready and willing for the man or you should always be the initiator. And the keywords that I sit with there where shame shows up, ‘should’, you ‘should’ you ‘should’ you ‘should’. A truly manly man will always pursue me and a husband who fails to respond you know then it comes back to why is he failing yeah and usually again we’re coming back around to her.
Juli
Right, right, and even that word ‘failing’, you know, like, and what I think what makes this dynamic more tricky is, you know, when we look at the research, it indicates that somewhere around 90 % of couples have some desire mismatch. But when it’s the woman who has the lower desire, she can still engage with sex. It might not be pleasurable. It might take her time to get in the mood.
But with a man, if a woman initiates and he’s not responding, that’s obvious physically. And it really puts him in the position of fearing that failure or fearing that exposure. So it seems like that dynamic would make this a lot more complex than if it’s the other way around.
Sheri
Well, in many situations, where stories have been shared with me, the dynamic of one failure, one physical failure on the man’s part, and all of a sudden, not only is there a higher fear level for him, but there becomes very much a higher fear level for the wife. And now what do we do now?
Sheri (10:19.218)
And a lot of times that one failure… It’s interesting how normal that can be. That a man’s body is not always going to respond to every encounter. One failure kind of has a tendency to mean it’s never going to work again. And we tie our sexuality just to that one physical response in our marriage.
Juli
Yes.
Sheri (10:47.094)
We’re missing out on a whole lot.
Juli
Well, and also even the word ‘failure’, like we would never say that a woman ‘failed’ to get aroused, you know, like we wouldn’t use that word. So, you know, even that is culturally laden with about performance. And so when you go to bringing this dynamic up with your husband, you’ve got all that overlay of shame and expectation and, you know, the word ‘failure’ and fear. How do you even broach it with words that kind of invite vulnerability and safety instead of playing into all the feelings and narratives that have made this so challenging?
Sheri (11:34.136)
It’s very interesting to me how at times – the best way I would describe it – unskilled we are in our sexual communication with each other. And we certainly use very cultural words. But the Bible very much gives us very different descriptions of ‘longing’ and ‘closeness’, and ‘connection’, ‘desire’. Those words are super important to express that I do have a longing for you. I do have a desire for you. God has given me that for our relationship for our marriage for you. And it’s something that my heart and my body wants in terms of our overall connection as a couple.
And a lot of times those words are not used. are sexual language doesn’t really meet a place of God’s design at times, in terms of what I hear used, not only certainly through articles, but also through the counseling room, you know, it’s showing a couple that there is another way. And a lot of a lot of times they’ve never discovered another way.
Juli
Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I think you’re absolutely right. Like we we have to shift our paradigm in how we even describe the purpose of sex. And so in some ways what I hear you saying is instead of going to your husband and saying, I’m unsatisfied with our sex life. Why don’t you want to have sex with me? It’s honey, I feel like in the last few years, like there’s something lacking in our connection. And, you know, I want to be intimate with you.
Juli (13:32.908)
I want to be connected to you and somehow sex seems to be getting in the way of that instead of something that’s fostering it.
Yeah, so I don’t know if you would like… Yeah. What happens then if you’re met by resistance? You know, what happens then if a wife prays about this, says, I want to have this conversation with my husband, as gentle as she can, she’s expressing the desire for connection, and immediately he’s defensive. He shuts down the conversation or he starts blaming her as you suggested.
Sheri
Much so.
Juli (14:11.05)
How does she keep moving towards trying to address the issue instead of just shutting down?
Sheri (14:20.044)
Not unusual for there to be a great deal of emotions involved in that place. And if we become as women, we become reactive instead of responsive to what we’re seeing in our husband. Certainly it’s not unusual when we receive defensiveness, we’re going to often give defensiveness back. And that’s really going to be counterproductive to even being able to bring the conversation up a little bit further down the road. Certainly I know there’s a great deal of worry and there’s fear that we’re never, keyword, we’re ‘never’ going to get better. We’re ‘never’ gonna walk through and be able to get through this. But it starts, like beginning the conversation, it starts him thinking, you know, and he’s like, maybe I’ve got to give this a little bit of consideration.
And that’s… Interestingly, in writing the book, there was a situation that I’m happy to share about myself and that my husband, Jim, was really struggling through the winter months a couple of years back in Chicago. And it’s often in Chicago, it’s called the winter blues. Yeah. But the real name for it is seasonal affective disorder.
And he was just really, really down, down emotionally and down physically. And so I began the conversation. It’s like, Hey, I’m noticing that you’re having a really hard time this winter. Is there something we can do and talk about here? And we maybe make an appointment to go see the doctor. And he sat on that for a while. He’ll readily admit he sat on that one for a while.
But he wasn’t feeling better. And so we made a decision together to go and meet with several doctors and work to get to the bottom of it. But I had to bring it up, I would say, about every two to three weeks. I’m like, honey, can we come back and talk about this a little bit more?
Sheri (16:39.564)
So it took some digging, it took some come to Jesus meetings with some doctors. And in that process, I can’t say that I wasn’t frustrated, that I wasn’t upset, that I wasn’t feeling rejected. I was. But in that process, I also had to do some advocating with the doctors, with Jim. We certainly, I had some come to Jesus conversations with doctors.
The sad part is in men’s health, especially here in the United States, things are not done overly well. And they’re not well informed. I would say and I’d encourage any couple if you’re given a medication, whether it’s for you or for your husband, ask that really tough question of how will this medication affect libido? Because so many things that are given for depression, or for anxiety, affect libido.
Juli
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sheri
And that’s a tough question and it’s an embarrassing question to ask a doctor, but it’s an important one. So, and we have to work to get him feeling better and to get his energy back and to get him through that season. But as you well know, from October till about April in Chicago is that’s a long season of winter blues.
Juli (18:07.338)
It is. Yeah. I live near Cleveland, so I get that. Yeah. I think you get even more sunshine probably in Chicago than we get here in Cleveland. So I understand what that’s like. But Sheri, a lot of what you shared, I think is helpful in terms of don’t expect this to be one conversation. And it may even be that when you first broach the topic, you’re not even looking for a response, but you’re just saying, hey, listen, I know this is emotionally charged, like I just like for you to take some time to think about it. We don’t have to solve it now. And if he does begin to get defensive, just going back to, yeah, I understand. Like, I know I have things that I need to change to. My desire is I want to be on the same page with you. I want to work towards connection, whatever that looks like.
Sheri
It’s about working on it keyword ‘together’. Right. I describe it as it’s a we issue. It’s we. It’s not me against you. And that may not be the wording that we have a tendency to use when we’re feeling emotional about something that’s going on between us. But it is. It’s about we and it’s about working for that connection again.
Juli
Yeah. I wonder also how important it is to be encouraging your husband in other areas. Like if the rest of your marriage is relatively healthy, if you’re building your husband up in other areas, it seems like it would maybe be easier for him to have this difficult, vulnerable conversation in the arena of sexuality.
Sheri
Certainly, we can’t go wrong with adding the dynamics of appreciation, even for the really small things with him, for those small efforts, even for when he might say, Okay, I will make the phone call. Or will can we work together to make the phone calls to the doctors that we need to talk to? You know, I’m with you. And that can be and often is a very uncomfortable dynamic.
Sheri (20:19.956)
In the book, I call it the root canal. So that place is certainly one, that’s, uh doctor visits are certainly one of discomfort for a lot of men. And we have our girlfriends, we have our mothers, we have as women have a tendency to discuss things a great deal about our physical care and our mental health care. But for men, that’s often sadly seen as a sign of weakness.
And it’s so not a sign of weakness.
Juli
And I even find as a woman, it’s difficult to talk about sexual things even with my doctor. It’s like it’s just, we’re not used to doing that. It’s very vulnerable. We all need encouragement. It’s okay to talk about these issues. Yeah. So Sheri, there are a lot of reasons why a couple might find themselves in this dynamic.
Juli (21:21.314)
Sometimes it is simply a difference, like a normal difference in desire. But often there’s something else going on. Like I know I just talked to a woman last week who’s married to a man who’s on the autism spectrum and has difficulty with any kind of touch, like just really struggles with any form of intimacy, emotional or physical. There are other situations where you have a man who maybe has sexual trauma or even men who are engaging with pornography and find it difficult then to engage sexually with their spouse and they don’t want to, like they feel too ashamed to admit that. So there are situations where there’s an underlying issue that needs to be addressed. How does a woman even start to get the discernment to know, is this something I just need to accept in our marriage or is this something that we actually need to work towards kind of looking for a root cause for?
Sheri
Well, the book was to begin to help with discernment. And you certainly bring up some really good points with things that are often, again, not discussed or talked about. Do the reading, do have the discussion or even meet with a doctor on your own and have that discussion as these are things I’m experiencing in my connection, in my sexual disconnection with my husband. What are your thoughts about that? Even for myself, I didn’t even realize because even like as an example with ADHD, focus and concentration and the ability to maintain that even together during a sexual connection, you know, that can go off in a hundred different directions depending on the level of ADHD that someone may have. So to encourage to be informed, to work to educate yourself on these dynamics, I think that’s immensely important. There’s even been some issues certainly within our culture over the last several years with sexuality and gender identity and many things like that.
Sheri (23:43.584)
And that is even beginning to show itself up. in Christian marriages as well. And we hesitate to ask the questions, certainly out of fear. What will I discover if I really begin to do some digging and growing an understanding of what this might be?
Juli
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and so what you’re alluding to is you could be married to a man who struggles with same-sex desire or attraction And has trouble being aroused by his wife and he doesn’t know how to tell her that. Well, that’s even to have that suspicion in our day and age like that can feel very threatening to a marriage.
Sheri (24:22.038)
Yeah, very much so. It does. And certainly that discussion has come up. It’s come up quite a bit in the last year or two, certainly within the media. There’s even a story I share with a couple. I was watching a program one morning and there was an interview on the Today Show with a Christian couple that had walked that journey together.
Yeah. And what that meant for their relationship and their family. So it’s becoming more prevalent. And so the keyword that still comes to mind is ‘awareness’ as well.
Juli
Yeah. With all of these situations, from my perspective and what we do at Authentic Intimacy, it’s so important to redefine what the goal is. And I don’t know if this is kind of where you are as a therapist too, but if the goal is, you know, we have to be having intercourse, we have to be having great sex, we have to always feel chemistry between us, then a couple who finds themselves in this dynamic for whatever reason, even begin to doubt should we stay married, but reframing the goal as how do we work on loving each other well and building intimacy and sexual intimacy even given some of the challenges and limitations that we face is a very different objective. So I don’t know if you want to speak to that?
Sheri (26:00.438)
So we often are narrow. We shortchange ourselves. How about that one? Intimacy. Yeah. That our connection can only either be emotional or sexual. And there’s so much more to intimacy. As you have often shared too Juli, and in that place, there’s more to it.
Sheri (26:29.902)
There’s more to to touch and there’s more to physical connection than just the act of intercourse. When you’ve been married many, many years, as Jim and I have, you’re going to go not only through ups and downs – and that’s normal to go through ups and downs in terms of your physical connection – you’re going to go potentially through surgeries for women and or for men.
There’s been quite a bit of increase for men, particularly with prostate diagnosis, and all of that is going to affect your ability to have intercourse. But what about the dynamics of outercourse? And a lot of couples haven’t even heard the word outercourse. What does that mean? And so it’s exploring and learning and having touch in different ways and finding ways to have satisfaction outside of intercourse. And not many couples have heard that word or heard how to explore those things together.
I was asked not too long ago about what does God give us permission to use in the bedroom? And He gives us permission to use things to satisfy each other, but without shame. So if someone is deeply uncomfortable and says, no, I’m not comfortable with that, or the use of battery operated devices, then we have to go with being careful and loving and not, again, coming back to dynamics of shame together. And so we narrowly, we can narrow, be very narrow.
That word doesn’t want to come out this morning. But we can certainly shortchange ourselves with regard to what sexual intimacy really is about.
Juli (28:29.294)
That’s okay.
Juli (28:38.658)
So. Yeah. And I love that you said without shame, I think we really need to not only what am I comfortable with, but what are my convictions? And I would add to that that God’s design for sexual intimacy, whether it’s intercourse or outercourse, the two of you. It’s not to involve anyone else even in our imagination, but also is to involve the two of you. This is not a solo activity. But I think within that, it’s like, okay, if a husband isn’t able to have intercourse, or right now this is a challenging season, there’s nothing wrong with that couple saying, okay, how do we find pleasure together in other ways? Let’s be creative. And often, like you’re saying, we can so narrowly define what sex is or what sexual intimacy is that we don’t realize that God has given us different things that we can do and explore throughout the seasons of life. There’s gonna come a point with age, with pretty much every couple, where they’re gonna have to be creative and flexible with how they express sexual intimacy and build that.
Sheri
Well, very much so. Yeah. So the body doesn’t quite work the same as, you know, 58 as it did at 28. No, But our minds certainly want to believe that’s still a possibility.
Juli
Mm-mm. Yeah. Yeah.
Sheri (30:11.534)
Yeah, but there can also be a much sweeter intimacy at 58 than 28. I call it, in the book, call it the difference between Godiva chocolate and Hershey’s chocolate. And when in our early years of marriage, pretty much all you can afford is Hershey’s and there’s plenty of it in our early years of marriage. But I don’t know about you. I think I’d rather go with the sweetness of Godiva and that might not be as frequent, but it certainly is richer and creamier and sweeter and sometimes a lot more enjoyable than a Hershey’s bar.
Juli
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I love that. So let me just encourage those who are watching and listening to redefine what it looks like to work towards that cadaver chocolate. And sometimes it does mean having these kinds of dynamics that are very difficult, but they actually can be an invitation to go deeper with intimacy, to have the hard conversations, to seek the help you need, like to redefine what it actually looks like to connect and to be building that sweetness. Your book is a great resource for a woman who finds herself in that dynamic to actually have the tools to begin to do that. So thank you for writing it and thank you for what you’ve shared today.
Sheri (31:33.72)
Well, thank you so much for having me Juli.
