Sexless Relationships and Low Libido Counselling
Effective and Approachable Counselling for Sexless Relationships and Low Libido
Sexless Relationships and Low Libido Can Happen to Anyone
You find yourself thinking “if I really loved my partner, if I found them really attractive, I should want to have sex with them”, but you just don’t. You want to want sex, but the urge isn’t there. Maybe you start avoiding situations that could lead to sex. No more long kisses (what if my partner takes it as a sign I’m in the mood?). No more snuggling in bed. Maybe you’re not even hugging or touching your partner any more because you don’t want to lead them on and just feel disappointed afterward.
Low sexual desire, or low libido is the most common sexual concern among women and men. But there is hope.
Relationships and the individual experiences within those relationships can have their ups and downs. Sometimes, passion and desire are hard to come by, and other times, one partner may have lost interest in sex despite wanting to have an interest.
There are many reasons for these experiences, but there’s no reason to simply accept them as the status quo if that is not what you want. With the right support and counselling, it’s possible to return to desiring sex more often and experiencing meaningful and pleasurable sex.
Handouts / Downloads
Download the Tri Health Clinic’s Free eBook: Discover the key to optimal sexual health with our free ebook! Packed with expert advice and practical tips, this comprehensive guide will empower you to take control of your sexual well-being. Download now and embark on a journey towards a fulfilling and vibrant intimate life.
The Sexual Response Cycle Handout: All the information from our eBook compressed into a bite-sized version.
Download the Tri Health Clinic’s Free Sensate Focus Guide: Sensate Focus is a therapeutic technique that promotes intimacy and connection by emphasizing non-sexual touch and exploration, allowing couples to enhance their sensual experiences and deepen their emotional bond. Download it directly here.
What are Sexless Relationships and Low Libido?
Sexless relationships refer to couples or individuals who do not have as much sex as they want. A sexless relationship is loosely defined as when a couple has sex less than once a month or 10 times yearly.
Sexless relationships are caused by a number of things, including low libido or low desire. Low libido, which can impact both men and women, is a decrease in the frequency and/or intensity of sexual desire. The experience can be long-term or temporary. It can also be a desire mismatch, when one person experiences more or less sexual desire than their partner, or desire discrepancy, which is the difference between one’s desired frequency of sexual intercourse and the actual frequency.
Low sexual desire impacts 40% of women and around 20% of men. This is a very common concern!
Both sexless relationships and low libido come about for several reasons, many of which are not biological factors. Stress, parenting, depression/anxiety, physical ailments, trauma, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, and pain with penetration can be part of why you are experiencing a sexless relationship or low libido.
Sexless Relationships and Low Libido Don’t Have to Be Your Story
Sexless relationships and low libido can affect any of us at any time, and they can hurt relationships, emotional intimacy, and sense of self. When it is not what you want, being in a sexless relationship is challenging.
But you do not have to accept it as your new way of being.
By taking time to understand your health, mind, relationships, behaviours and attitudes, you can get to the root of the issue, address it, and return to a happy, healthy, satisfying sex life.
Here’s How Tri Health Clinic Can Help Reignite a Sexless Relationship
- We take the time to help you identify, understand, and process the root causes of your low libido or disinterest in sex
- We build solutions around the strengths you bring to the table in your relationships or sexual expression, making it easier to address any behaviours or beliefs that make you feel uncomfortable or unhappy
- We can work with you and your partner (if you have one and want to include them) to address anything that may be happening in the relationship that impacts your interest in sex and intimacy
- We can help you identify and move beyond behaviours and attitudes that no longer serve you or your sex life.
Let's Talk
Don’t wait any longer. Contact our expert team and start your best life today.
Tri Health Clinic Sexless Relationships and Low Libido Services
At Tri Health Clinic, we want you to know that experiencing a low sex drive or a sexless relationship does not mean you are “sexually broken,” It does not necessarily mean that something is “broken” in your relationship. It is a common experience, and many effective treatments are available.
Tri Health Clinic’s approach to sex therapy is holistic and backed by the leading science. It addresses the mental, emotional, and relationship factors central to your sexual health and well-being.
Our treatment options are based on four major principles of support: education, self-knowledge, changing behaviours, and tracking change. We do not offer a one-size-fits-all approach and will tailor these principles to meet your needs and therapy goals.
All our sexless relationship treatments focus on educating, identifying, and working through sexual myths that may be holding you back from a gratifying and fulfilling sex life.
Together, we identify and explore ways you can strengthen your skillset, grow emotional and interpersonal skills, and help you let go of the behaviours and coping strategies that no longer make sense.
And because worrying about how to “fix” your sexless relationship can distract you from the progress you are trying to make, we will track changes and progress for you, ensuring that you stay on the right track, deal with roadblocks as they happen, and keep moving towards your therapy goals.
Remember—low libido is not your fault, but getting beyond it will take effort and understanding. But the work is worth it.
Learn More About Loss Of Sex Drive Men, Women, and Queer Individuals
Sexless Relationships and Low Libido Resources
Videos
Online Resources
Dipsea app (erotic audio stories)
Emjoy (for women)
Mindfulness Sex Therapy – free mindfulness exercises to help you live your best sex life.
Coral App – Your coach for connection
Book Recommendations
The Guide to Getting It On
This guide replaces taboos with techniques and provides safe, practical advice for improving your sexual relationships. It all comes down to communication and this is one book that has no problem with telling it how it is.
Anyone who says “Why does a book on sex need a new edition?” needs to throw away their flip phone. Today’s young adults are the first generation who began watching the most explicit porn in history on their phones in Middle School. They have very different expectations and needs from a book on sex, and those needs are changing as rapidly as technology is changing. There have been hundreds of studies done in the past four years on everything from female orgasms to how semen influences a woman’s immune system to not kill sperm. You’ll find it all in this new edition of The Guide. And the new chapter on consent will hopefully do a much better job of helping you understand what consent is and isn’t than Title IX with its strange little slogans.
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life:
An essential exploration of why and how women’s sexuality works—based on groundbreaking research and brain science—that will radically transform your sex life into one filled with confidence and joy.
Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill” for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never be the answer—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.
Mating in Captivity
One of the world’s most respected voices on erotic intelligence, Esther Perel offers a bold, provocative new take on intimacy and sex. Mating in Captivity invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home.
Drawing on more than twenty years of experience as a couples therapist, Perel examines the complexities of sustaining desire. Through case studies and lively discussion, Perel demonstrates how more exciting, playful, and even poetic sex is possible in long-term relationships. Wise, witty, and as revelatory as it is straightforward, Mating in Captivity is a sensational book that will transform the way you live and love.
Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Long-Lasting Relationship
Can sex survive monogamy?
Yes, once you understand how sexual emotions really work.
This acclaimed, paradigm-shifting guide turns traditional sex therapy inside-out to reveal the hidden rules for great sex.
Gentle, compassionate, and filled with compelling stories from Dr. Stephen Snyder’s thirty years as a sex therapist working with over 1,500 individuals and couples, Love Worth Making is essential reading for anyone hoping to keep sexual inspiration alive in a committed relationship.
Rekindling Desire: A Step-by-Step Program to Help Low-Sex and No-Sex Marriages
Is sex more work than play in your marriage? Do you schedule it in like a dentist appointment? Do you make love once a month, twice at the most?
If you answered yes to these questions, you are among the forty million Americans trapped in a low-sex or no-sex marriage.
Now there is help from nationally acclaimed sex and marital experts Barry and Emily McCarthy, who for years have helped couples break down the barriers that have developed between them, and rebuild closeness and longing. Their groundbreaking ten-step program is designed to get sex and intimacy back into these marriages and revitalize relationships. Crafted by years of clinical practice, Rekindling Desire first shows couples how to root out the “poisons” that inhibit sexual desire: shame, guilt, anger, passivity, as well as medical side effects and physical dysfunctions. With sensitivity and tact, the McCarthys then lay out concrete techniques and effective strategies that help couples increase sexual awareness, confront inhibitions, revitalize desire, and integrate intimacy and eroticism.
An exciting new way to spark and sustain desire, Rekindling Desire confronts the secrecy and stigma of low-sex and no-sex marriages, teaching couples how to enjoy a fulfilling, life-long sexual partnership.
Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships:
If there is one thing we know about men and sex it is that men are always in the mood. Any time, any place. Right?
Wrong.
Men’s sexual desire has long been depicted as high, simple, and unwavering. But the new research around men’s desire tells us this is far from true; and that good sex and relationships are suffering from these long-held misconceptions. In Not Always in the Mood: The New Science on Men, Sex, and Relationships sex researcher and relationship therapist Sarah Hunter Murray presents a lively, timely, and critical exploration of the newest, most surprising science on men and sex, shattering myths about men’s sexuality and helping today’s couples connect more deeply and authentically than ever before.
One-by-one, Murray examines the most detrimental, deep-held beliefs we as a society promote around men and their desire, and dive into how they affect our intimate relationships daily – and what to do about it. Do men actually crave and enjoy sex more than women? Do men “do the wanting” and prefer the chase? Where do they stand on sexual rejection? What’s the deal with porn? Answering these questions and more, this is a book for modern women and men alike. Moving beyond typical “here’s what he likes” sexual tips, the book empowers readers and offers a completely new perspective on sexuality that will validate men’s experiences and help their partners to a greater understanding of the psychology and emotions surrounding them.
Tell Me What You Want
What do Americans really want when it comes to sex? And is it possible for us to get what we want? Tell Me What You Want offers an unprecedented look into our fantasy worlds and what they reveal about us. It helps us to better understand our own sexual desires and how to attain them within our relationships, but also to appreciate why the desires of our partners may be so incredibly different.
If we only better understood the incredible diversity of human sexual desire and why this diversity exists in the first place, we would experience less distress, anxiety, and shame about our own sexual fantasies and better understand why our partners often have sexual proclivities that are so different from our own.
Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers
What makes sex magnificent? What are the qualities of extraordinary erotic intimacy and what are the elements that help to bring it about? Is great sex the stuff that people remember nostalgically from the “honeymoon” phase of their relationships, or can sex improve over time?
Magnificent Sex is based on the largest, in-depth interview study ever conducted with people who are having extraordinary sex. It gathers the nuggets for remarkable sex from the “experts”, distilling them into an attainable blueprint for ordinary lovers who want to make erotic intimacy grow over the course of a lifetime. Looking at factors including individual and relational qualities, empathic communication and the myths and realities of magnificent sex, this book offers accessible and evidence-based guidance for lovers and therapists alike.
It is replete with frank and often humorous interviews with straight and LGBTQ individuals and couples, those who are “vanilla” and “kinky”, monogamous and consensually non-monogamous and healthy and chronically ill. This illuminating book explores the implications of the findings to develop a model that effectively tackles the common problems of low desire and frequency. The “cure” for low desire is to create desirable sex!
These resources are intended as a compliment to therapy under the guidance of a trained sex therapist.
Start Your Journey to Better Sexual Health With the Tri Health Clinic
We understand low libido may be a difficult topic to discuss, so we take great care in remaining sensitive to the issue. With several treatment options available for individuals or couples with low desire, we can help.
We provide counselling for low libido to all of Ontario, including Windsor, London, Guelph, Waterloo, Kitchener, Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Mississauga, Brampton, Toronto, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Markham, Oshawa, Brockville, Kingston, Ottawa, and beyond.
Contact us today to book an initial assessment.