E47: "I'm Just Tired": The Desire Shift No One Warned Us About

"I'm just tired." That's what I said. What he heard was: "She doesn't want me anymore." Neither was true, and that gap almost cost us. If you've whispered those same words, this one's for you.

For years, I thought I was broken. I had a great marriage, a beautiful family, a real partnership, so why was connecting in the bedroom so hard? Turns out it wasn't a lack of love. It was a lack of information, and once I understood what was actually happening in my body, everything changed.

So if you've been lying awake wondering where your desire went, or feeling like you're failing your partner, I want you to hear this: you're not broken, and your marriage isn't either. This is the honest, tender conversation nobody had with us ahead of time.

In this episode, I'm walking you through:

• The two kinds of desire and why the "order" flips after menopause
• The three culprits stealing your desire
• The truth bomb every couple needs: a lack of initiation is NOT a lack of attraction
• What I need the men to hear, so he stops taking it personally
• My 5 practical intimacy pro-tips
• How to bring this up without it getting awkward
• Your ONE lever this week

If you've been quietly grieving the way intimacy used to work, come sit with me. There's a happy way forward, and I'll show you how to speak its new language.

Your next step:
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Transcript

The “I’m just tired” misunderstanding

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This week's episode is a little bit more sensitive, definitely for couples. I wanted you to picture this scenario. Getting ready to turn in for the night. Um, he rolls over and tells her, You just don't want me anymore. And she doesn't have an answer. Not because she's quit loving him, but quite the opposite. She's actually been asking herself the same thing lately, but always comes up empty. The closest thing she has for an explanation is that she's tired. So that's what she says. I'm just tired. What his brain registers her response as is that she doesn't love him anymore, doesn't want him anymore. He starts thinking, Well, she's done with me. And what she really means, but didn't know how to say is I don't know where it went, and it scares me too. Nobody in that scenario was lying. They're both working off two different sets of bad information. That gap is where a lot of midlife marriages start coming apart. Not because someone had an affair, but because they're misreading each other and they don't have all the information that they need to move through this. I'm Joyce McCall. This is Unmute Your Midlife. Let's keep moving.

There’s actually TWO kinds of desire

SPEAKER_00 1:07

So something I learned. Did not learn this in nursing school, did not learn this until I was actually in post menopause. And I'm sharing this because I truly thought I was broken. I thought there was something wrong with me. And I felt bad for my husband because I didn't know how to explain it to him. I didn't know what the problem was. So I've learned the explanation and I want to share it with midlife women everywhere because I think it will save some marriages. So it's not that your desire gets broken, but there's two kinds of desire. A younger brain often has spontaneous desire, meaning you see him, you just, you know, want to jump his bones or whatever. Um, you you can get turned on just by looking at them. And then when you get older, that doesn't happen anymore. There's a lot of reasons for it. Most of it is hormonal or nervous system related, like those two things combined together: the hormones fluctuating and the nervous system experiencing this overload of stressors. So spontaneous desire is when you you feel the desire first and then you pursue the intimacy. Based on what we see in TV shows and movies and read in books, that's the only kind of desire there is. What we are never taught about is this other kind of desire that's called responsive desire. So with responsive desire, you start to experience connection or intimacy first, and then the desire follows. There's a huge difference between the two. One begins with desire, the other one responds to desire.

Only 15% of women keep this after menopause

SPEAKER_00 2:38

I was listening to an interview with Dr. Sally Greenwald, and she's a urologist, and but she specializes in women. And one of the things that she's discovered is only 15% of women maintain their spontaneous desire after menopause. They still have the responsive desire, but they don't have the spontaneous desire. And it doesn't matter if you supplement with testosterone, if you're on HRT, that's not really the driving force behind it. It's more nervous system related. And there's nothing wrong with it. It is absolutely normal. It's just we weren't prepared ahead of time for this. We we didn't know that this was going to be coming. And so it kind of like, you know, lobs you upside the head like a freight train. The key takeaway, though, is that many women in committed relationships don't lose the capacity for desire. They just lose the experience of desire showing up first. You're probably not going to have very many, maybe none at all, experiences where you see your loved one walk in the door and you want to drag them off to the bedroom immediately. But that's not to say those moments are over. They just um things go in a different order now.

The THREE culprits stealing your desire

SPEAKER_00 3:49

So obviously, hormones do matter. The hormones don't exist in isolation. So I've shared on many episodes and blog posts before about how the midlife woman is often carrying heavy loads and unseen labor during a time when her hormones are ricocheting around like bullets in a Western movie. And if she keeps adding more stressors, the nervous system tries to step in and offer some protection. This is where my husband would start quoting the godfather. Uh I've got an offer you've got refused. This isn't that kind of protection, though. It's really, it's not about whether uh she still loves her husband. It's more like her nervous system is asking, Am I safe enough to move towards pleasure? Your body has this natural way of putting safety first, connection second, and desire way back there, like third, fourth, fifth, tenth, whatever. The other caveat to chronic stress is that it elevates cortisol. And so those high cortisol levels can definitely interfere with sexual interests and the ability to be aroused. Another thing the midlife woman is probably experiencing trouble with her sleep, whether it's the hot flashes or the random waking up in the middle of the night or insomnia keeping her up way past her bedtime. She's not getting the rest that her body needs. And when you are going through a period of poor sleep, it affects your mood, your energy, and your sexual function. It can make desire less likely to emerge even in a perfectly healthy relationship.

My advice for the men

SPEAKER_00 5:18

So, guys, do not take this personally. Do not walk away thinking she doesn't want me anymore just because she's not the one initiating. You're gonna have to be the one to initiate from now on, most likely. If your wife's spontaneous desire has eroded away, it's not coming back. You can go get checked out by a urologist and make sure it's not something physically causing it. But most likely, this is going to be a permanent change in the relationship due to menopause, and there's a happy way forward. I'm not here with doom and gloom or despair. Quite the

Here’s what happened to me

SPEAKER_00 5:47

opposite. So my husband and I, we had to decode this in our own marriage when he noticed that I quit initiating. And he would even say, I don't want to be the one to initiate all the time because then I feel like I'm bothering you. Okay, well, that's fair. I didn't know all of this, so I agreed to like be the one to initiate, but I never wanted to initiate. And then I felt bad. And we're both feeling like we're failing at this relationship, at least on the intimacy side of it. We have a great partnership, we have all these things we do together and this amazing family that we've created, these kids we've raised, um, parents that we're helping, and things that we do for volunteer work together. So it always baffled us, you know, why do we have so much trouble connecting in the bedroom? And now it all makes sense. Unfortunately, we went through years of this pattern of me thinking I was broken and him thinking I didn't love him or or find him attractive anymore. And it was just a bunch of miscommunication. And the thing is, I know we're not the only ones who have gone through this or might still be going through this in their marriages. That's why I'm doing this episode today. Because I can tell you right now, even though we're not sitting face to face in real life, it's still hard to talk about it with all of you. But I love you and I care about you, and I want you to have the best midlife and the best marriage. So I am going to lay it all out there. Okay, so back to our situation. It wasn't that I didn't love him or find him attractive anymore. It was just that I was so overloaded with stress and I was barely getting any sleep. And then there were some physical changes that I was struggling with. I mean, when your estrogen is depleted, you don't have moisture. When you don't have moisture, it can be very painful during or after intimacy. So that's why I've talked about before about lube is your best friend. Find one you like and keep plenty of it on hand. Once I started to understand the ins and outs of menopause and got on HRT, definitely improved things greatly. But I still wasn't ever like the one who wanted to initiate. And so learning about, you know, the nervous system and this new change about spontaneous desire versus responsive desire. I didn't know that initially, even when things started to improve, that was actually something I just learned probably in the past year. But it was such a godsend to find that information. I want every couple to understand that a lack of initiation is not the same thing as a lack of attraction. Okay, that's like a truth bomb right there. If he's going to be the one that has to initiate, then there are some things you can do. I like to listen to the hormone solution with Karen Martell. Um, she's on podcasts and she's also on Substack. So if you like researching things and you want to know more, she gets pretty deep into like the science and medicine of it all. And she was sharing how her and her husband

Why you should schedule intimacy

SPEAKER_00 8:25

have an appointment on their calendar for weekly intimacy time. And she said, you know, sometimes she'll think, oh, that's coming up. And then she'll tell herself, why are you dreading it? You know you're gonna like it. It might take you a minute to get warmed up, but then you'll enjoy it and you'll have this great time of connection and it'll be wonderful afterwards. So come on. And it kind of cracked me up listening to her talk about it because you know, we almost feel like it's making it all clinical and cold to put it on your calendar. But that's actually very good advice because what do we know about our time? To me, my time is almost more valuable to me than my money because you have limited quantities of time. You can always go make more money, you cannot create more time. And there's always so many things trying to steal your time. Emergencies that come up, urgencies that come up, phone calls, people knocking on your door. I mean, the dogs, you know, we have to we have to pick a time when the dogs are very sleepy and satisfied with lounging in the backyard in the sun or on the couch in the living room, thinking that mom and dad must still be watching a movie because the TV's

My FIVE best intimacy pro-tips

SPEAKER_00 9:28

still on. So I'm gonna share some intimacy hacks that you may or may not know about. And they're very practical. The first one I'm gonna call transition rituals. So you can't just expect desire to appear out of poof air the minute you collapse into bed. But you you can create a transition to kind of set the stage and allow your nervous system time to switch gears. So some things you might do are you could take a hot bath by yourself or the two of you could take a shower together. You could sit outside and watch the moon for five or ten minutes, holding hands, talking about something that's not stressful, reminisce about, you know, one of your favorite trips or uh why you fell in love. You could have a little mini yoga session of stretching, randomly slow dance in the kitchen while you're closing up the house for the night. It's just something that cues your nervous system that it's time to switch gears. Like I said, you're setting the stage for intimacy to be a possibility. Second thing I would say is touch without agenda. One of the healthiest things couples can do is intentionally touch each other without having the agenda of expecting it's going to lead to sex, like back rubs, holding hands, foot massage, just lounging around together, laying together on the couch. Because when every touch feels like it carries the expectation of something more later, then some people will avoid touching each other altogether. But when you remove the pressure, you increase the connection. Uh the third one, I'm gonna call the 10 minute yes. This is borrowed from some relationship therapy concepts that are out there, but you would say, okay, we're gonna spend 10 minutes connecting. And by connecting, I mean trying to be intimate. And if one of us isn't feeling it after 10 minutes, then we are going to call it good. Say, okay, well, we're done. We had a great time connecting, even though it didn't lead to the big payoff. Again, that removes performance pressure. I haven't really talked about this, it's not really my lane, but you know, about the same age that us women are going through the menopause changes, men start struggling with erectile dysfunction. And so while we have our own issues putting pressure on the intimacy side of the relationship, they have theirs too. And so if you're both experiencing these issues, then you've got like the perfect storm for a lot of misunderstanding and a lack of physical intimacy happening. So all of my hacks are about removing pressure. We do not need pressure to perform in the bedroom. Sometimes when you remove the pressure, um, desire can appear. Sometimes it doesn't. Either outcome needs to be okay because the goal is connection, not obligation. Okay, number four is daytime intimacy. So your nervous system starts that journey towards intimacy long before bedtime. A lingering hug, some text messages through the day saying, hey, I'm thinking about you, um, helping with dinner, you know, or cooking together or cleaning up the dishes together, you know, doing something together. I don't know about him, but I know she needs to feel emotionally supported. So all these little episodes of daytime intimacy, they're not foreplay. They are nervous system preparation. And then number five, I've kind of touched on earlier, but it's scheduling time together. And don't necessarily schedule sex together. Schedule time to connect. That tiny language shift matters because you aren't scheduling a performance. You're protecting your time together on the calendar. I mean, I have one couple that I'm friends with, and their time together is usually on a weekday morning after they've called the kids off to school. They circle back to the house and meet up and do their thing because that's the only time of day where they know they're not gonna be interrupted, they're gonna have complete privacy in their home and they don't have to feel the pressure of like someone's gonna barge in on them or overhear them and their energy is up, they're not like exhausted from all the day's events. And so for them, certain mornings of the week are better. You have to talk to your partner and find out when is their energy the highest, when is their stress the lowest, when are the burdens and the cares of the day least likely to interfere. And if there is no time at all where those conditions are satisfied, then it's time for you to make some changes. Like in my case, I had to change jobs because I was working 60 or more hours a week. And so there really wasn't any time. And I was on call 24-7. Like any given, I had to keep my phone next to me all the time. That wasn't conducive

It doesn’t have to be awkward

SPEAKER_00 13:45

for relaxing or you know, making my nervous system prepared for any kind of intimacy to happen. Enough about me. How to make this conversation less awkward? A couple rules I'm gonna put in place. Don't try to have this conversation after one of you has felt rejected. Don't have this conversation in bed. As someone who's always struggled with sleep hygiene, one of the things I've always read is bed is for sleep, rest, and intimacy. It's not for watching TV, it's not for doing work. I might read a little to help me fall asleep, but it's not for playing on your phone or working on your laptop. All those things will interfere. The bed is for sleep, rest, or intimacy. So don't have arguments in bed. Don't talk about hard things in bed. Don't try to have this conversation in the middle of an argument. I really shouldn't have to say that one, but I'm going to because there might be somebody out there who tries it. But a good way to do it would be like while you're driving in the car or while you're taking a walk through the neighborhood or sitting on the porch together. The thing that those have in common is that you're kind of like shoulder to shoulder instead of face to face, because a shoulder-to-shoul conversation can sometimes feel less threatening, less embarrassing. You're not having to maintain eye contact and you're not squirming, you know, you're like you're walking, you're driving, you're physically doing something that disperses some of the tension. And you could start with an opener like, can I tell you something that I've learned about how desire changes in midlife? Or, hey, I learned something really interesting about menopause that you're gonna want to know about. I would not open it with saying, look, we need to have a talk about our sex life. You see the difference. One invites curiosity while the other one invites defensiveness. We don't want this to be a defensive conversation. We want this to be a relaxed, peaceful, really, it's not even a negotiation. It's just like we're sharing insight. We're exploring ways to make the relationship

Your ONE lever this week

SPEAKER_00 15:30

better. So I always give you one lever to pull each week to help you recalibrate your energy, reclaim your authority. So this week, I want you to ask your partner what helps your nervous system feel safe enough to relax. And then, you know, when they give you their answer, you'll have a chance to give them yours. Try not to interrupt or problem solve for them. Just listen and hear them out. And then follow it up with what's one small task I could do this week that would help? Really simple. Two questions. What helps your nervous system feel safe enough to relax? And then after they tell you, what is one small task I could do this week that would help? And then say, now can I share mine?

Translating your new language

SPEAKER_00 16:10

I really hope that today's conversation gave you another possibility and encouraged you that your relationship is not broken, your body is not broken, this is a change that we're all gonna get to go through. But luckily, we are being equipped to handle it much better now than the generations before us. Physical intimacy does not have to disappear in midlife, but it does kind of speak a different language. The couples who really thrive are not gonna be the ones who never change. They're gonna be the ones that learn how to translate.

How to work with me

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Now, if this episode raised your standard, good. Go implement it. If you're ready for structured implementation, unmute your midlife is where we do this kind of work. You can schedule a free unmute session, put it in by the best plan for you. And while you're here, click on whichever linked video pops up for more awesomeness. But I'll be back with more new stuff next week. Thanks for listening.