I haven’t had sex with my husband for seven years but it’s made us closer than ever
A SEXY hotel room, plush bed and open bottle of champers – Emma Reid had everything set for a night of lust with her husband.
Just one thing needed attention — her flagging sexual desire.
Emma, 55, a mother and retired civil servant married to former engineer Kevin, 61, says: “At age 47, after 21 years of sexually fulfilling marriage, I hit the menopause, stopped having orgasms altogether and struggled to even get aroused.
“What used to take minutes now took hours.
“Kevin tried his best for me to get some enjoyment from sex but it was as if I was dead from the waist down.
“After a while, I stopped wanting to try because it was so depressing to keep hoping for something to happen, only to be left disappointed.
“I felt as if I’d lost an important part of who I was and worried what it would mean for my marriage.
“They say most things get better with age but for many women, myself included, this does not include sex.”
New book Feeling Blah?, by Tanith Carey, is published this week and looks at loss of libido and ways to recapture your mojo.
Tanith says: “Sexual anhedonia is the scientific term for ‘blah’ — the loss of enjoyment or the inability to enjoy pleasurable experiences in bed.
“It usually hits women around the age of perimenopause, between 45 and 55, and a smaller number of men at around the same age.
“It is caused when the brain’s main reward system, where feelings of pleasure are formed, is no longer working as well as it should due to hormone changes and nerve damage over time.
Mood swings
“Anhedonia can also dial down the pleasure we get from our senses, in particular that of touch.
“That means being stroked or caressed by our partner no longer feels as good.
“In turn that affects our ability to have an orgasm or feel it as strongly.
“But don’t worry — there are ways to get that exual desire and feeling back again.”
Emma Reid, though, is one of around 15 per cent of women who say they can no longer orgasm, despite having been able to previously.
The number of men who struggle is around four per cent.
Emma, from Cardiff, says of hitting the menopause: “The mood swings, hot flushes and night sweats left me exhausted and irritable. Having sex was the last thing on my mind.
“It was a huge change to my relationship with Kevin, as prior to this our sex life had been extremely healthy.
“I’d fancied my husband the minute I’d first clapped eyes on him on a blind date in a country pub in December 2002 and he felt the same.
“In the early days we literally couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It was so bad our friends got fed up with being around us because of the constant public displays of affection.
“It remained the same after 21 years of marriage.
“We made love three or four times a week, especially once my daughter, now 33, had moved out of the family home in 2007.
“I told myself my lack of desire was a temporary thing, and that once I was over the worst menopause symptoms, things would go back to normal.”
Experts have found hormonal imbalances caused by the menopause can be a cause of anhedonia.
Tanith adds: “In women, the sex hormone oestrogen helps make orgasms stronger, so its disappearance during menopause will play a part in anhedonia.
“Oestrogen also helps make oxytocin, another pleasure chemical crucial for sexual pleasure, so climaxes may take longer to achieve, fade more quickly or may not feel as intense.
“And the pelvic floor can weaken after pregnancy, so ‘shockwaves’ through this area are not as strong.”
Someone who also knows about the ordeal of lost libido is 57-year-old Fiona Myles, who has struggled in the bedroom since both she and her husband hit health problems.
Fiona, who lives in Saltford, Somerset with Bryan, 44, and their seven-year-old daughter, says: “Sex was an important part of our relationship, especially when we were newly married in 2004.
“We had it as often as possible — two, three and four times a week — and I imagined it would always be that way.
“But after my husband battled testicular cancer in 2016, his sex drive fell.
“I still had a healthy drive, but was not able to be close to Bryan sexually as he had severe damage that caused pain.
“Then in 2017 a scan revealed a precancerous tumour in my womb that needed a hysterectomy and removal of my ovaries and cervix, and it was a year before I started to feel more like myself again.
“But while I was physically healed, my sex drive had completely disap-peared, I didn’t feel any physical desire for sex — even trying basic sexual stimulation and arousal. I simply didn’t feel any pleasure.
“Bryan still had no desire for sex either after his cancer op, so our sex life was well and truly over.
“He was more upset than me, but one thing that did bother me was that sex had always been a way for us to be close.
Kissing and cuddling
“If anything, though, not having a sex life actually brought us closer in the end.,
“It’s been seven years since we last had sex but now we can cuddle and be affectionate without the pressure of one person wanting it to progress to sex and the other not feeling it.”
Tanith agrees that surgery, like child-birth, can trigger sexual anhedonia.
She says: “What women like Fiona go through with surgery can completely turn them off sex.
“And when sex is attempted, it can feel disappointing.
“This is because to achieve an orgasm with penetrative sex, the optimum distance between the clitoris and vagina is thought to be one inch.
“But over time or due to surgery or childbirth, this distance can get slightly longer, making climax difficult to achieve.”
But for those experiencing anhedonia, the good news is that it can be worked on.
Tanith says: “It does not have to be permanent and can be treated with the help of a mental health professional.
“There are also easy ways to reignite your sex drive, from massage to talking to your partner and/or a professional.
“If you can work on dialling up the chemicals of joy yourself, you are more likely to find your route back to sexual enjoyment.”
Indeed, Emma is now one such success story, and has managed to rekindle the lost spark with her partner.
She says: “Realising how important my soulmate is to me, all those years after the anhedonia started, I tried to get the important intimacy and sex life back.
“We booked a room in a hotel, opened a bottle of champagne and spent the night kissing and cuddling and taking the time to relearn our bodies.
“We worked on getting ourselves physically aroused and connecting on an emotional level — something we hadn’t done since anhedonia had started getting in the way.
“Now we earmark afternoons just to lie down together. We kiss and cuddle for hours, and later make love.
“It’s lovely and intimate.”
HOW TO TACKLE SEXUAL ANHEDONIA
TAKE SEX OFF THE MENU: If touch during sex doesn’t feel as good as it used to, try being mindful about what you are experiencing when caressed by your partner.
By letting go of the expectations of sex, at least for the initial sessions, you will have more freedom to relax, appreciate it and enjoy the sensation.
Each partner should take up to 15 minutes to touch the other, at first avoiding the breasts and genitals, but varying the speed and pressure of the stroking so the other person can say what feels good.
Even if you don’t have sex, keeping up regular non-sexual touch will reduce the cortisol build-up that could be swamping your levels of feel-good dopamine, which you need for strong orgasms.
GETTING THE MASSAGE: One way to get back your pleasure from touch is massage.
Massages have been found to increase the feel-good chemicals serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine and reduce the stress hormone cortisol, which dampens sexual responsiveness.
LET MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE: Touch and sex can be enhanced by music. In experiments, robots were used to stroke the skin on the forearm of volunteers with a brush.
When music was played that the participants found sexy, they rated the touch as feeling more sensual.
GO SLOW: Get your partner to watch their speed.
In studies, being touched at the rate of 3cm per second has been rated as the most pleasurable because it triggers a special nerve fibre which fires up the parts of the brain that connect to reward.
HUG IT OUT: Just beneath the skin are tiny egg-shaped pressure receptors.
When these feel pressure, they send a signal to the brain which releases oxytocin, needed for good sex.
A range of studies have found that hugs of between ten and 20 seconds raise our oxytocin levels.
More oxytocin in your body will boost the power of your orgasm.
TALK IT OUT: Many people don’t want to tell their partners about their sexual anhedonia because they worry that they will feel blamed.
But when you let them know it’s not their fault and you’d like their help to work together on dialling up the chemicals of joy, you are more likely to find your route back to sexual enjoyment again.
TANITH CAREY
- Feeling Blah? Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless And How To Recapture Life’s Highs, by Tanith Carey, is published by Welbeck (£16.99 ).