Why Waiting for Your Libido to Come Back Is the Hard Way

Why Waiting for Your Libido to Come Back Is the Hard Way

I got an email the other day from a woman saying some version of what I hear almost every day. My libido is probably my biggest problem. She had been through an autoimmune diagnosis this year, she was doing all the things, all the lifestyle changes to get her libido back in the boat. Lots of things were improving. She just wished her libido would catch up more than a few days a month.

So many of us are living in that once I place. Once I stop breastfeeding and my hormones change. Once I have more energy and less stress. Once I deal with all the stuff blocking me. Once I get to the other side of perimenopause. Once I, once I, once I. And then our sex life will get back on track.

Underneath that is an even sneakier belief. That good sex only comes from a strong desire for sex.

Let me poke at that.

The Sneaky Belief

Does a great workout only come from a strong desire to work out? Or can I show up to the mat regardless of how excited I was to get there and still have a great workout? Does a magic moment with my kids only come when I am dying to hang out with them? Or does the magic sometimes show up on the days I drag myself to the floor to be present, and it arrives anyway?

A lack of motivation for something does not mean we do not want the result. And we can take that further. If my body does not crave sex, does that mean sex is something it does not want or need? Because that is the equation we tend to make. But here is the parallel. If my body does not crave nourishing food and movement, are those not still the things my body needs?

Motivation and desire do not always create action. They do not always create change. Habits do. Showing up does.

Now, I am a huge proponent of listening to your body. That is the whole premise of the Happy Vagina Project. And we have to be careful how we read the signal. My body craving sweet food is not a sign I should eat sweets. It is usually a sign something is off in my gut. My body not craving sex is usually not a sign that sex is bad or useless for me. It is usually a sign that I need to change how I am having sex.

Why We Fall Into This

A few reasons.

First, we are obsessed with libido and desire, especially for female bodies and bodies with uteruses. Sex in the movies is always a hot, passionate, five star meal. Smash faces, rip clothes, cut to two people panting on the floor, deliciously satisfied. We treat attraction as an outward aesthetic instead of an inward sensation or a subtle intention, and we only call it good sex if we are being pulled into it by an invisible magnet. But what about the quiet nudge toward it? Where is the quietly good sex? The sweet orgasm that feels like honey melting over your body? The desire that comes out of closeness and vulnerability and real intimacy?

Second, we have decided women's libidos are low. But low compared to what. Low compared to who. Low compared to a medical model whose baseline is male. That puts us in a deficit from the start, believing our libidos are inherently wrong or broken. Add becoming a parent, where the default expectation is that we will have no desire at all, and we spend our lives striving for a libido that works a certain way instead of learning the operating manual for the body we actually have. We are chasing a figment.

Third, it traps us in a binary. Either I am one hundred percent hot for my partner, or I am forcing myself to have sex I do not want. It gets very hard to see the middle path.

So we wait. Or we work really hard to fix the libido with pills and toys and creams and doctor's visits. Sometimes those things genuinely help. Often we pour effort into things that may or may not move the needle. And meanwhile the drought drags on, and you know where that story goes if we let it. Roommates.

They Do Not Wait, They Create

So what do people with vibrant sex lives after kids do instead?

They do not wait. They create.

They do not wait. They create.

They listen to the signals from their body and change how they are having sex in a way that creates the craving. They build the habit of showing up ready to make a good time and reaping the results of a great workout, without forcing themselves to do anything they do not want. This is not gaslighting ourselves.

Your sex drive is not a Loch Ness monster you have to pray to catch. It is a dimmer switch.

You can shift it up and you can shift it down. And there are a few steps the people with vibrant sex lives tend to follow. Let me walk you through them with a story from my own bedroom this week.

A little context first. I have three kids, a stepson and two younger ones. Sex has always been something I have struggled with. Orgasm has always been something I have struggled with. And motherhood messed with my libido more than anything I have ever experienced, for all the reasons I dig into in the first handful of episodes of this podcast. A thyroid disorder after my second baby did a number on my libido and my energy. After that baby I was so uninterested I genuinely wondered, do I even care anymore. As a sex coach, I have been able to use and refine my own tools on myself so I could get back to a sex life that is fun and playful and creative. That is what I want for you too.

Step One: Throw a Party Your Libido Wants to Show Up To

The first thing is to understand your own libido and what makes it tick. To know how to throw a party it actually wants to attend.

My husband and I have been working on this for a while, and we built what I call a pre launch checklist. It is just a list of the strategies we know support my body to go from zero, to interested, to all in. They felt mechanical at first. Now they are woven pretty seamlessly into how we do things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they do not. But we know how to coax my little wallflower of a libido out onto the dance floor. We have invested in that knowledge so we can reach for it quickly.

Step Two: Intention Over Desire

Most of us think the formula for great sex is attraction. I want to rip your clothes off, therefore I am aroused, therefore we have hot sex. That is one formula. But there is another.

I decide I want to connect with you, naked. Plus pleasure, the ways we create good sensations in each other's bodies. That equals connection. And that connection turns into all kinds of yummy, sensual, delicious sex.

I have become a little obsessed with the intention moment. The smallest nudge from my body that says there is an intention here to connect. It might be that I spot a practical window of privacy. It might be a slight tick of interest when I am ovulating. It might be that he did something sweet. It is not my libido yelling. It is my wallflower with a request on the tip of her tongue, barely coming out. The subtle voice. That is the place to play.

Step Three: Turn Stop Signs Into Yield Signs

When your body says no, when you turn your partner down or shut down your own spark, that is a stop sign. It is all the reasons your nervous system and your habits and your fears have for not going any further. I am bloated. I am tired. I do not feel sexy. This will be so much work. It sucked last time.

Some stop signs matter and you listen to them, full stop. A true lack of safety. A night you genuinely need to sleep. No wiggle of intention at all. Listen to your no, always.

And, some stop signs are worth getting curious about. Sometimes they are just protecting you but getting a little over defensive. Sometimes the no is a habit, the easier and more worn path. Sometimes there is a false belief underneath that you can gently pull at. There is a lot of room in getting curious about our no's and finding the ones we can turn into yield signs. Slow down, proceed with caution, one step at a time, and if it feels right, keep going.

Back to that night. My husband came into bed and, instead of settling on his side, moved toward me under the covers, which is not our norm. My body went straight to suspicious. What are you doing, what do you want. He said maybe we could have a little cuddle. I was taken aback. I do not see myself as very sexy these days, so I was mostly just confused. I could have read that confusion as a big red stop sign and shut him down. Instead I awkwardly said, well, okay, maybe we could. Very smooth.

We started to make out, and every alarm bell in my body went off. I had this bossy director in my head yelling that it was all wrong, back to your starting positions, people. I could not get comfortable. The pacing felt off. Part of me was saying I do not want to, and another part was saying I do want to. A full internal tug of war, with my nervous system voting no.

So the answer was to tend to my nervous system. We used the checklist. We put on music I like. My partner backed off and gently massaged my body in playful ways, exploring some new spots and touches we had actually learned earlier that week from a video about erogenous zones. And we got there. It was delicious. I could have missed out on the whole thing.

Step Four: Talk Before, During, and After

The last piece is communication. Before, me negotiating whether I was in. During, me asking for what I needed, a change of music, different touch, a different pace. And most importantly after, when we debriefed what happened, and noticed how those new tools helped me transition from a no, to a maybe, to a yes. I was specific about what he did and how it felt.

I could have done what I have so often done, which is take the lack of desire in my body, and all those stop signs, as proof that I am broken and do not want sex anymore. Instead I decided the formula was broken. Desire equals arousal equals hot sex. I rewrote it.

I did not decide my body was broken. I decided the formula was broken.

What could have been another wedge between us became a night of real connection.

So I will hand it to you. Do you want to keep wishing your libido will show up, or working yourself ragged to force it back with every strategy under the sun, some of which you need and some of which you do not? Or are you ready to start creating? To start planning the party your libido actually wants to show up to?

Want In

If this is landing for you, this is exactly the work I do one on one. I am opening a limited number of 1:1 coaching spots this fall, and the waitlist gets first access. Even if you are just at huh, maybe, get on the list. The link is here.