Are we normal? Are we broken? Is there hope?
Those are the three questions almost every couple walks in with. Here are the short answers: yes, no, and yes. Now let me tell you what’s actually happening between you — because I think you’ll recognize it, and I think that will be a relief.
You’ve stopped touching each other in the kitchen.
Not because you don’t love each other. Because a hand on a waist stopped being just a hand on a waist.
Somewhere along the way, ordinary affection started carrying a question: is this going somewhere? One of you began bracing when the other came close. The other started scanning for signs before making any move at all. And the simplest solution — the one you both arrived at without ever discussing it — was to stop touching altogether.
So now nobody hugs for too long. Nobody spoons. You go to bed at different times, and you’ve each got a reason for it that isn’t the real reason. There’s a version of you that used to be casually physical with each other and you can both remember it, which somehow makes it worse.
Meanwhile you’re still kind to each other. You still handle the logistics, the kids, the money, the in-laws. From the outside nothing is wrong. Which is part of why it’s so hard to explain, even to yourselves.
And underneath it all is a subject the two of you have quietly agreed not to raise — not because it doesn’t matter, but because every previous attempt ended with someone hurt and someone defensive and both of you further apart than when you started. So it sits there. Getting heavier. Taking up more room every month you don’t touch it.
If that’s roughly your life: you’re not broken, you’re not unusual, and you’re not the worst case I’ve seen this week. You’re in a pattern I can describe start to finish — which is the first sign that it can be interrupted.
The Sexual Avoidance Cycle
This is the pattern I named in my book Sex Without Stress, and I’ve watched some version of it play out in nearly every couple I’ve worked with in fifteen years. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s a machine, and it runs on its own once you’ve built it.
Sex becomes all or nothing
Somewhere you both absorbed the idea that sex is one specific thing that goes one specific way and ends one specific way. Anything less than that doesn’t count.
So sex becomes a goal
If only one outcome counts, then every encounter is aiming at it. You’re no longer doing something together. You’re trying to get somewhere.
A goal creates an expectation
And now there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. A way to succeed and a way to fail. At something that used to just be play.
The expectation creates weight
Sex stops being light. It starts carrying meaning about whether you’re desirable, whether you’re adequate, whether your relationship is all right. That’s an enormous amount to hang on one act.
Weight creates pressure and anxiety
Which is, for most bodies, the precise opposite of what arousal requires. Anxiety and desire don’t share a room well. So the thing you’re worried about becomes more likely, not less.
Anxiety leads to avoidance
Perfectly sensibly. If an experience reliably ends in disappointment or failure or a hard conversation, of course you begin to steer around it. Avoidance is not laziness. It’s self-protection.
And then the avoidance spreads
This is the part that catches people off guard. It doesn’t stay in the bedroom. No pat as you pass in the kitchen. No snuggling in bed. No lingering kiss — because any of it might be read as an opening bid, and neither of you wants to be the one who started something or the one who said no.
Now it’s the elephant in the room
And it’s heavy. Guilt for the one who doesn’t want it. Shame and rejection for the one who does. Fear on both sides about what it means. All of it unspoken, all of it enormous.
And here’s the cruel part: all of that guilt and shame and fear makes sex feel even heavier than it did at step four. So the cycle doesn’t just continue — it tightens. Every month it runs, it runs harder. This is why waiting has never once made it better.
You’re each braced for something different.
In a first session I can usually feel it — two people sitting very still, each waiting to find out whether the therapist is going to side against them. You’re not afraid of the same thing. Let me take both off the table right now.
You’re afraid I’m going to tell you you’re broken.
That there’s something wrong with your body or your desire or your history. That you are the problem in this marriage and everyone’s been too polite to say so.
And underneath that, a bigger fear: that the entire purpose of therapy is to get you to have more sex than you actually want. That you’ve just walked into a room where two people are going to work on you.
Neither of those is what happens here. Low desire is almost never a defect — it’s usually a completely reasonable response to the pressure you’ve been under. And I will never make more sex the goal. Nobody gets talked into anything in my office.
You’re afraid I’m going to tell you to accept it.
That this is simply how your partner is built, and the mature thing is to make peace with a sexless marriage. Or the other version: that if you’d just do more around the house, be more emotionally available, be more something, they’d finally want you.
And under that, the fear you probably haven’t said out loud: that they’ve lost interest in you specifically. That they quietly retired your entire sex life, on their own, without telling you.
I’m not going to tell you to accept a sex life you’re unhappy with, and I’m not going to hand you a chore chart. Your longing isn’t a character flaw and wanting your partner isn’t pressure. What you’re reading as rejection is almost always the cycle, not a verdict on you.
What I’m actually going to do is treat the pattern as the problem — not either of you. That isn’t a diplomatic dodge to keep you both comfortable. It’s that after fifteen years I genuinely believe it, because I’ve watched two decent people build this thing together without either of them meaning to, over and over again.
What actually happens in sex therapy.
People arrive with some strange ideas about this, and a few of them stop people booking altogether. So, plainly:
No. None. Sex therapy is talk therapy that happens to be about sex. You will be fully clothed, on a video call, having a conversation. There are no surrogates, no demonstrations, and nothing physical happens in a session, ever.
No — and this is the fear I hear most. Being told to dive into the deep end of the pool is exactly what doesn’t work. It’s what the two of you have already tried, and it’s what taught you that trying makes things worse. We start in the shallow end, deliberately, at a depth that feels almost too easy.
Sometimes, yes — and more than you’re probably expecting. I’ll often walk through what I call your dance around sex: who does what, in what order, what each of you is thinking at every step, and exactly where it goes sideways. Genuinely play-by-play.
It sounds excruciating. It almost never is, because I keep it matter-of-fact rather than exposing, and because you’re both describing a dance you already know by heart. And it’s worth it: once the whole thing is laid out in front of the three of us, it becomes obvious to everyone what needs to change. You stop arguing about it and start seeing it.
Yes, and it’s the heart of the work. Sessions are where we make sense of things; the structured experiences you do at home are where the change actually happens. They start small on purpose. Nothing is sprung on you, and you’re never assigned something you haven’t agreed to.
No. I work on the pattern between you, which means each of you gets to find your own part in it — not as an accusation, but because your part is the only piece you can actually change. That’s where your power is.
Then you’re in extremely ordinary company, and it matters less than you think. I’ve worked with couples at one year, five years, and longer. The length of the drought is not the thing that predicts whether this works.
Some of what we work on together.
- Mismatched desire
- Sexual avoidance
- Sex has stopped entirely
- Low or absent desire
- Painful sex
- Erectile difficulties
- Difficulty with orgasm
- Performance anxiety
- Sex after kids
- Menopause and hormonal change
- Bodies changed by age, illness, or disability
- Cancer treatment and its aftermath
- Rebuilding after an affair
- Porn conflicts
- Kink and desire differences
- Different ideas about monogamy
- Never having learned to talk about sex
- Shame carried from childhood or religion
- Trauma affecting intimacy
- Feeling like roommates
Is there hope?
Yes — as long as there’s a foundation of love and goodwill between you. That’s the one condition, and it’s the only one.
I wouldn’t be able to do this work if I didn’t see it every day. Two people who love and respect each other can find a physical relationship that genuinely works for both of them. Not a compromise where somebody quietly loses. Something that actually works.
But it usually means two things have to change, and neither of them is how much you want sex.
The first is becoming more flexible about what counts. If only one thing qualifies as sex, you’ve given yourselves exactly one narrow door and it’s often locked. Widen the definition and suddenly there are a dozen ways to be close.
The second is rethinking the expectations you built — the ones that turned sex into a test in the first place. Those expectations are the actual problem. Not your desire, not your body, not your partner.
That’s the work. It’s more interesting than it sounds, and for most couples it’s a considerable relief.
Practical details, so you know what you’re signing up for.
Both of you, every time
All sessions are the two of you together. I don’t hold individual sessions, and I don’t keep secrets from either of you. It keeps the work balanced and it’s one of the reasons people relax faster than they expect.
Three to six months, usually
Some couples come with one specific question and finish in a handful of sessions. Some want a deeper overhaul and stay a year. You are not signing up for forever, and we’ll talk honestly about where you are as we go.
By video, across Washington
Everything happens on HIPAA-compliant Zoom. You need an internet connection and a camera. Sit together on your own couch, or join separately if that’s what the week looks like.
AASECT-certified
Washington doesn’t regulate the term “sex therapist” — anyone can use it. AASECT certification means 160+ hours of specialised coursework, 50 hours of supervision, and hundreds of clinical hours with sexual concerns.
You’ve waited long enough to find out.
Whatever you’ve been telling yourselves about how bad it is or how long it’s been — I have almost certainly sat with a couple further along than you, and watched them find their way back. Tell me a little about what’s going on and we’ll see whether I’m the right fit.
Not in Washington? I offer private coaching for couples anywhere. Not ready to book? Start with the Better Sex Podcast or Sex Without Stress.