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I'd be interested if you expand on this a bit. Like OP is early 40's and, uh GF?, is late 30's. At what point is it normal for sex drive to appreciably decline. Somehow I thought that 45 is early, but not supper early, for menopause to begin.
I would have thought that there are healthy marriages, where both people have taken good care of themselves and look good for their age, but neither is close to their objective peak physical attractiveness. Is the expectation that experience and comfort with self/partner makes up for not being as young and hot? That the attractiveness is found in the intimacy of knowing your partner so well.
Surely it's unreasonable to expect your partner to be as physically attractive, with respect to sexual intimacy, as she approaches 40 then when she was 24. What's reasonable to expect? Do you need like > 80% physically attraction relative to the hottest young thing, or just some irreducible quantum of attraction that you share with each other?
I've been with girls who have aged over time and it's been fine. The initial attraction stays and is kind of grandfathered in to the relationship. That isn't the case here. I wasn't really attracted to her physically to begin with.
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Horniness is best modeled as declining linearly from relationship debut. Like baseball pitcher velocity.
Is it?
Married 20 years this year, no real decline yet.
Yes, that's my opinion. I'm not going to get into an argument with you about how often you make love to your wife, or the raw hormonal horniness underlying it, especially as the two are both obviously separate and almost impossible to parse.
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That was actually a very helpful analogy. I think?
So in a healthy relationship, you might start the game throwing 96. Coach will leave you in in the 8th, throwing in the high 80s, so you can get the shutout. But in OPs case he's getting pulled in the third because he made the start hanging balls over the plate, and has loaded the bases with zero outs.
I think I still don't understand exactly what slope of decline is the normal range, but in this case I guess it doesn't matter because the starting intercept is zero.
Moreso a joke about aging curves in baseball.
A 22 year old Dominican flamethrower who sits at 96 and can reach for 100 in a big spot, at 28 he's probably sitting 93 and can still reach for 97 when he needs it, and at 33 his fastball is 90-91 and if he's serviceable at all it's by learning to rely on location and clever breaking balls to trick hitters rather than blowing by them with raw stuff. He might actually peak as a pitcher in quality at 27, when he's got the best mix of velocity and experience, and he might keep pitching to 35, but almost never will he add velocity in his career.
A 24 year old clever college lefty who debuts with a fastball that never breaks 92 and starts by relying on tricking hitters, at 32 he is going to be sitting at 86 and throwing batting practice. He started by sneaking by, and pretty soon there just isn't enough there to work with.
To return to relationships, if you meet your partner and start making love, you're never going to exceed the raw attraction and numbers you had then. There's no trick to it, you're just never going to be as horny for each other as you were then. The sex might get better over time in quality, but sheer desire will never exceed the start.
And if you started at fucking twice a day every day can't get enough of each other, then ten years down the road the decline will still keep you at a place where experience and tricks can carry you. Where if you started at "meh I guess if it's convenient" the decline quickly leaves you at zero. You're almost never going to add attraction during the course of the relationship.
Pretty much. I didn't find an increase in attraction, but the sex (when we had it) did get better due to comfort and experience.
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It's gender dependent, though highly variable. As a relationship ages, women tend to lose interest in sex more than men. That's why lesbian bed death happens.
Even at the beginning of a relationship, men tend to initiate sex most of the time. As the relationship goes on, this becomes more like all the time. Since OP isn't attracted to his partner, this is why the sex is zero.
Obviously, everyone is different and there's some small percent of women are who extremely horny. That presents other problems though.
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[Insert Performance Enhancing Drugs joke]
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I'm no biologist or doctor. I'm just pretty sure that 30s-40s is well within the region in which one can still expect a lot of sex to happen, under normal circumstance.
More generally, your partner and yourself will both age. Maybe the one ages more gracefully than the other thanks to superior genetics, in which case yeah, unless the difference is truly extreme it's just plain good sense to live with it if that's the whole of the problem. But obviously one's standards should adjust themselves with age and the passage of time.
What's unreasonable to expect is that your partner just lets herself go like a sack of potatoes and you tolerate it indefinitely.
This...probably doesn't provide much value to you as far as answers go, but it's close to everything I have to say on the subject.
She hasn't really let herself go. Small amount of weight gain, but nothing out of the ordinary. I just don't want to have sex with her. I can't blame her for that. I shouldn't be here in the first place.
"I'm getting 3 out of 10, elbows too pointy" vibes, unless there's a serious facial deformity involved.
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I didn't mean to imply as much. Sorry, I just piggybacked off of your topic to ride my hobby horse.
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Speaking as someone in that age bracket, I don't think the attractiveness of myself and my wife has changed dramatically from our mid-20s. We're both plainly older than we were a decade and a half ago, but just as slim and fit as ever, and with the added benefit of much better sartorial taste and the money to support it. I'm not saying there's no difference, but our attraction to each other and likely to others hasn't changed dramatically over the years.
I do think this is a basically reasonable expectation and as I've aged, I've become surprised by how willing other people are to become frumpy at such a young age and just chalk it up to age rather than their sedentary lifestyle and disinterest in style.
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