My Girlfriend and I Have Gotten Into the Best Shape of Our Lives. What It’s Done to Us in Bed Makes No Sense.

How to Do It I’m left scratching my head. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous! Dear How to Do It, My girlfriend and I (we’re in our mid-30s) have both been on a mission to get fit over the past year. We started going to the gym together, and then just kept it up on our own. We’ve each lost a considerable amount of weight. We’ve also gained a lot of mobility. On the weekends, for fun, we might take a yoga class together or otherwise do some stretching or long walks. We’ve been together for five years, and we have talked about how this is the most active we’ve ever been. I’ve always been attracted to her, of course, as has she, but she undoubtedly looks really good now, and I’m more into her than ever. So I’m left scratching my head, wondering why our sex life has suffered. We used to have sex three times a week; now we’re lucky if we’re doing it even bi-weekly. Our life is otherwise good! We’re not arguing or anything like that. Could it just be that we’re busier? How do I talk to her about this without laying the blame on our lifestyle shifts that I ultimately want to support? —Fit But Famished (he/him) Rich Juzwiak: For a lot of people, fitness and horniness are positive correlations. So this is a little bit of a mystery, just because of the way it can affect your hormones. A lot of people, for example, if they do lower body work like squats or deadlifts, they will report feeling particularly horny after the gym, especially men. These things tend to momentarily boost testosterone. So I am also kind of scratching my head at this and am inclined to look at other potential influences that are unrelated to the new fitness routine. Jessica Stoya: I mostly wholeheartedly agree with two exceptions. The first one is that, having lived in a female body, there can be a point where you need a certain body fat percentage to feel sexual and take pleasure in really anything. So I would consider: Has she maybe overshot and lost so much that it’s affected her desire to have sex? Rich: Right. It is interesting, though, because our letter writer is a guy, but he doesn’t report a boost to his horniness. The letter isn’t, “Oh, we are fit, and now I’m so horny, and my partner isn’t.” So it’s happening on both sides. They’ve been together for five years, so is this part of the natural progression in a relationship where your sex life becomes use it or lose it? If you don’t pay active attention to keeping things up after a period of time, your sex life does tend to be affected. It’s an active process. And if, in fact, you’re busy with other things and have less time for sex, well, then it can fall by the wayside pretty easily. Jessica: Also, the sign-off combined with the absence of discernible lust in his own writing—not that I’m asking people to send us full-on erotica in the letters—makes me wonder if there’s been a reduction in pleasure and sensuality along with this focus on all of the physical movement and working out. Because for some people, going to the gym, going to yoga, going on walks—all of these things are sensory experiences that they take a sort of erotic joy in. And then you have people in the middle, like myself: I will not lift weights, I will not walk on a treadmill, but if it’s something that is a physical movement activity that is engaging for me, then I will get that physical, tactile, rich, layered kind of joy out of it. Then, there are people who always feel about any physical movement the way that I feel about the treadmill. And so it’s a very good on them to do something solely for the purpose of being healthy. But if there’s been this push for both of them to focus more on doing a thing that is not inherently pleasurable for the reasons that make it worthwhile to them, I’m wondering if that’s maybe part of where they might’ve lost the three-times-a-week level of desire. Rich: Another thing I wonder is where exactly the motivation to write the letter is coming from. Because it reads to me like this is an intellectual motivation. This is an assessment of, “Well, we used to do it this much, and now we’re doing it this much, and now I think that’s wrong,” as opposed to more emotional or even libidinous motivation. Do you want to be having more sex, or do you think that you should be wanting to have more sex because you’re not having as much sex as you did before, so something must be wrong? This might just be what makes sense for both of you now in terms of your drive, the time that you have, etc. And so you’re in the right pattern—and it just feels wrong because it’s different. Jessica: Just like the dynamic between two particular individuals can be very different from what it would be if one of those people were swapped out, time and the ways your lives are structured can operate similarly. After considering what you encouraged him to consider, I would just check in with the girlfriend. “Hey, are you getting enough intimacy, enough sex, enough orgasms?” And then, if there’s a gap between what he wants and needs right now and what she wants and needs, then work on those details. Rich: Right, because she could very well be like, “Actually, I didn’t notice,” or, “No, this is what is fine with me right now. We’re still sexually connected. We’re connected in other ways now, and this is what’s satisfying to me.” So there might not be a problem. Just because something’s different, it doesn’t mean there’s a problem. But if you do both want more sex, then it’s going to be a matter of scheduling it in and making the effort, and you’ll handle that because all of that’s fun. If you’re both interested in doing it and want to do it, you just have to train your attention to it, and then you can do it. Jessica: That can look like having romantic but not overtly sexual physical intimacy on the walks, like holding hands, and strolling arm in arm. And in more private spaces, there are plenty of workout videos that are porn on the internet. People manage to come up with some fun things to do. More Advice From Slate I have been married to my wife for almost 20 years. It was a second marriage for both of us. A year into the marriage, I contracted an STD and found out she had it since her teens. At parties with her friends, I started hearing about how promiscuous she had been in her younger years, and I just accepted that it was before me. We have always had a real good sex life and discussed how great it has been, but now, she wants to practically stop having sex. I’m handsome, in great shape, and a very understanding and sensitive lover. She is still beautiful, attractive, and has no serious medical conditions. She explains that she had so much sex in her teens and early 20s that she can take it or leave it… Advice Sex