‘I felt like I was his carer’: why straight women in relationships lose interest in sex

In unequal households – the majority of heterosexual homes – domestic and emotional pressures on women can have a direct effect on libido. Zoe and her husband, Charles, can’t keep their hands off each other. They were like this in the early stages of their relationship, too – “there was something wrong with us” – Zoe jokes about their prolific lovemaking. But this new, “giddy” phase is different.

“It feels like we’ve just started again. But with all this history, and this amazing child, and all this other stuff that binds us together,” she says. Less than a year before I spoke with her, those bindings were coming loose. Zoe had a young child and she was working a difficult, high-stress job. To top it off, Charles was not helping. He chafed against the constraints of early fatherhood and parenting brought up difficult feelings about his own childhood that he struggled to understand.

“He started projecting all his insecurities on to our marriage,” Zoe says. He’d complain about how they hardly went out, hardly had sex. “All these things that are just a phase of your life when you have a small child … I was just getting so frustrated, because I felt like I was his carer and the carer of a baby.

In the end, she told him she could not cope any more and that there was no space for her emotional wellbeing. She was just worried about him, or catering to his needs, or catering to the baby’s needs. She said: “It would just be easier to have me and the baby, to be honest.”.

After some time apart, Charles realised he had to make changes. First, he tried to enlist Zoe in his self-improvement efforts. He asked her to write a list of everything she was doing around the house, so he could understand the tasks he had not been helping with. Her list being long enough without the addition of writing another list, Zoe refused.

Charles started seeing a psychologist and soon realised Zoe had been right about the housework too. “It was a long road of therapy, and he did a lot of work trying to understand the mental load … figuring out how to be a grownup, and a dad, and a husband all at the same time,” she says.

Eventually, “we got there. I finally have a teammate, an actual partner who picks up the slack without being asked, and who does things for us without being asked, and who takes control of situations without me having to tell him to.”. “It’s kind of hard not to be horny for someone who’s put in all this work to be a better person,” she says.

To me, Zoe’s story is a 21st-century fairytale. But not every Cinderella who finds herself stuck doing most of the emotional labour – alongside childcare, housework and work outside the home – can convince her handsome prince to pick up his broom and start sweeping.

Zoe is one of 55 women to have told me about her love life in the last two years. Some of those women were newly coupled up, some divorced, some permanently single and some in long-term relationships. And at least a quarter of those women had been in situations like Zoe’s at some point – long term relationships where they felt there was “no space” for their needs or desires. While Zoe’s story is far from the only happy ending these women shared, it is the only one that did not involve a breakup.

Aleks Trkulja, an Australian sex therapist, says it’s not uncommon for female clients to come into her practice with low desire or other sexual function issues that are clearly relational, not individual. Several other therapists have told me similar stories.

Therapists are trained not to be directive, says Dr Lori Brotto, a Canadian clinical and research psychologist who works with women experiencing low desire. While a girlfriend can tell a woman, “He’s a jerk, get rid of him,” Brotto can’t do that, “even when I’m thinking that”.

Rather than telling someone to leave, “it’s about asking the questions in a way that helps the person realise that actually their partner is contributing quite a bit to their low desire”. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning.

The dynamic Zoe was experiencing before Charles stepped up is something Brotto sees frequently in her clinic. It is part of why she contributed to the heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire in women partnered with men. Published in 2022 by some of the world’s leading researchers on human sexuality, this theory lays out how several gendered expectations placed on women (and men) serve to obliterate women’s sexual flourishing.

Dr Sari van Anders, a Canadian scientist, is the heteronormativity theory’s lead author; her work is in neuroendocrinology, sexuality and gender/sex. Over a video call, she explained to me that while the pressures that create gendered roles are social, they end up having a biological impact too.