How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous!
Dear How to Do It,
In three months, I’ll be turning 30, and I’m having a mini existential crisis about it. That is normal, I’m sure! Watching my parents get older and more feeble, feeling the societal pressures of marriage and babies, and just the general nature of everything changing is getting to me, and if I’m honest, really bumming me out. But weirdly, it is manifesting in my sex life.
My boyfriend and I (I’m a woman, and we’ve been together for around half a year) have had pretty regular sex since we got together. But now I can feel myself avoiding it. I make excuses when either of us sleeps over. I kind of dread the whole thing, even though we have good sex! I can feel myself comparing my sex life now to my mid-20s, when I was more adventurous, and get in my head about it. I think my general attitude about this all is seeping into making me just not want sex. Any advice?
—Trying to Be Cool About It (Failing)
Dear Trying to Be Cool About It,
Milestones, such as turning 30, do have a way of drawing our attention to our life’s direction and larger context, and other subjects that put us more in our minds than in our bodies. Your boyfriend has almost certainly noticed the change in your interest in intimacy, so I’d start by cluing him in on what you think is happening. Give him the opportunity to be there for you, and give yourself the chance (assuming he’s up for it) to talk through everything you’re thinking and feeling with someone you’re close to.
If you feel the same pressure to perform being OK with your boyfriend as you do with, say, co-workers or strangers, do consider whether that lack of freedom to be human and require support might be part of what’s preventing you from feeling open to sexual interaction with him. In that case, think through whether you generally put on an appearance of having it all together with people who are close to you (or romantic partners in particular), or if it’s more because he’s proven less than receptive in the past. In the case of the former, that’s a place to do some work—maybe with a therapist. In the event of the latter, six months is not very long and I’d encourage you to end the relationship and see whether anyone else strikes your erotic fancy.
Meanwhile, three months is even less time than six. Unless something in that time signals to you that you need professional support, I’d wait it out and see how you’re feeling after your birthday has passed. In the same way that milestones tend to make us rethink large areas of our lives, being on the other side of them often gives us clarity from a different perspective. Once you have that, take stock of where you’re still feeling friction and do deeper examination of those aspects.
With the looming threat of tombstone shaped balloons emblazoned with the number 30 out of the way, you probably will need to work toward acceptance of aging. Your parents will continue to become more feeble. Your own body and your relationship to both sexuality and novelty will continue to change. People around you will continue to get married and procreate. You might do one or both of those things, too. Start learning how to live with the fact that time brings profound changes, ranging from beautiful to genuinely tragic, and all the feelings that accompany those experiences. Expose yourself to the stories of people who are in their late 30s, middle age, and older. Pay close attention to the ways that older women talk about events in their 30s to 50s, and how their lives shifted, and priorities and preferences changed. Autobiographies and memoirs by women like Emma Goldman and Marina Abramović come to mind. (I’m more of a reader than a watcher, so maybe the comments section can chime in with appropriate documentaries.) Talk with the older people in your life, too. Just like that conversation I’m hoping you can have with your boyfriend, having a real back-and-forth discussion with someone in our lives can often help us increase our understanding or feel more generally at ease with big topics.
—Jessica
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