Q&A: Why Don’t I Like Sex?
Website: (International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health) isswsh.org
Find an American Board of Certified Sex Therapists therapist
Book: The Married Guy’s Guide to Great Sex
Full Transcript
A lot of women are asking the question, “Why don’t I enjoy sex?” There are a lot of reasons this can happen.
First of all consider relational issues where there’s underlying conflict with your spouse, you don’t feel safe, and you’re not communicating. Women do not compartmentalize sex. It’s part of their relationship, it’s part of their emotional safety, and so if you don’t feel emotionally safe, it may be very difficult for you to enjoy the physical aspects of sexuality.
Another complicating factor is that women are very complex. Our bodies are far more complex than men’s. Our sexual response is more complex than a man’s, and so often neither the husband nor the wife really understand how a woman’s sexual desire works, or how her body works. The good news is that you can very quickly learn about the female sexual response and the complexity of her body through some of the resources that we’ll link to below.
You also have to look at the impact of sexual trauma, and experts would estimate that between one out of every three and one out of every four women have been sexually traumatized or assaulted before the age of 18, and so that’s an awful lot of women who are entering into their sexuality with their first experience being traumatic, of being objectified and being hurt, and that doesn’t just go away. It’s something that you need to address, unlearn, and retrain your body in in order to actually enjoy sexual intimacy.
And then a final aspect that often keeps women from enjoying sex is that sometimes if you were raised in a religious setting, or sex was always talked about only as sin, women can feel very shameful about their sexuality. And so they have a conflictual feeling like, “I want to enjoy this with my husband, but I just can’t understand that this is good, or this is something that God would want me to enjoy”. And again that’s a journey of learning it’s a journey of discipleship. We have lots of resources at Authentic Intimacy that can help you on that journey because God really did create sex to be pleasurable not just for men but for women as well and so it’s worth pursuing that kind of passion.
