What if I am not attracted to my husband anymore?
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In short: If you've found yourself wondering, "I'm not attracted to my husband anymore," it doesn't necessarily mean that your sexual attraction has gone away. Loss of attraction is often the result of unresolved relationship patterns, emotional disconnection, and nervous system protection — not simply a lack of chemistry. This article explores the hidden reasons attraction fades and what couples can do to rebuild both emotional and sexual intimacy, even when it feels like you’re not attracted to each other any more.
Reading time: 11 minutes
The Damaging Story We've Been Told About Attraction
Many of us inherited a story about attraction.
When attraction fades in a long-term relationship, we assume the reason is obvious.
Our partner has aged.
They've gained weight.
Their body isn't what it used to be.
Or perhaps we've changed, and we blame ourselves for no longer being desirable.
Without realizing it, we've been taught that attraction is mostly a response to physical appearance.
But after working with hundreds of couples, I've found that this explanation simply falls.
More often, attraction changes because the relationship changes.
It responds to years of feeling appreciated or taken for granted. To unresolved conflict. To emotional safety or emotional distance. To resentment that quietly accumulates. To whether we feel seen, understood and desired as a whole person — not simply as a body.
The encouraging news is that this works both ways.
Just as attraction can diminish when the relationship becomes burdened by disconnection, resentment or pressure, it can also grow as couples create greater emotional safety, repair old hurts, feel deeply seen and understood, and learn to meet one another in new ways. I've watched couples who thought the spark had disappeared discover that their attraction wasn't gone — it had simply been waiting for the relationship to become a place where it could flourish again.
In other words, attraction isn't only something we feel toward our partner.
It's also something that emerges from the emotional space that exists between us.
Which means that when someone says, "I'm not attracted to my husband anymore," the most important question isn't whether their partner has become less attractive.
It's this:
What has happened in this relationship that has made attraction so difficult—or so easy—to experience?
The answer is often far more hopeful than people imagine. Because if attraction has been shaped by the relationship, then the relationship can also become the place where attraction is rebuilt.
That also means we have more influence than we've been led to believe. Every conversation, repair, moment of vulnerability, expression of appreciation, and act of turning toward one another helps shape the emotional environment where attraction either slowly withers — or steadily grows.
This article takes you on a journey from wondering "Why am I not attracted anymore?" to understanding the deeper relational and nervous-system patterns that influence attraction.
But first …
What Is Sexual Attraction?
At its basic sense, sexual attraction is the draw towards another person that leads to the desire to seek out sexual satisfaction and engage in sexual intimacy. It’s a sense of being drawn to each other, like an invisible string pulling two people towards each other.
Conventionally, we’re conditioned to believe that this sexual attraction is either there or not. Like chemistry. We are also conditioned to believe that it has to do solely with physicality — it’s about being attracted to the body.
There is some truth to this, although it always never has to do with objectively-attractive physical attributes. It has to do with the subtle ways that our bodies resonate with each other. The smell that draws you in. The twinkle in the eyes that turn you on. The way a person moves or laughs that send tingles go through your body. All of these powerfully attract us and draw us in towards each other.
There are many factors beyond the physical that contribute to sexual attraction, including psychological and social factors as well as energetic and spiritual. We are attracted to someone when they have an encompassing energy or way of being that resonates with our energy. It energizes us in a powerful way and compels us to move towards each other.
If you struggle with feeling attracted to your partner in a long-term relationship, it’s worth asking yourself first: was the attraction there to begin with?
Maybe you were not really attracted to your partner from the beginning and got married for other reasons, such as a common goal to create and raise a family. Maybe your partner was not your type physically, but it was good enough for other goals. Maybe they do not have the kind of personality or energy that you drew you in, but again, it was good enough. Maybe their body chemistry did not ignite you in terms of smell, touch or kissing, but again it was good enough. This scenarios is more common than we realize: we choose to overlook aspects that don’t fit our greater goals; then when we achieve those goals, such as creating a family, these aspects become more prominent and stand in the way of connecting sexually.
While the physical and energetic aspects are not all that makes up sexual attraction, as I describe below, these are necessary, foundational aspects that have to be there for that sense of being drawn to someone. In their absence, it would be hard, if not impossible, to have even a bare minimum of attraction without significantly changing your partner or continue to dismiss your own needs.
However, if you’ve “lost” the attraction you once had with your partner over the course of your marriage or long-term relationship, there is likely something else at play.
There is more to physical attraction than just the physical
Long-term committed relationships are not the sum of dates over the span of decades; a marriage takes a life of its own, creating its own currents, dynamics and laws. Think of it as its own independent eco-system that has nothing to do with your independent lives when you were dating.
Basic chemistry that I described above is only the beginning when it comes sexual attraction in a long-term relationship.
Sexual attraction in a marriage or a committed long-term relationship is deeply relational. It is cultivated in the space of the couple, in the give and take and the interaction between its two members. Every action that happens — and every action that does not — either creates more attraction or it takes away from it.
Caveat: What I am describing here is only important for wanting the kind of sex that goes beyond the physical. I am talking about I refer to as Connection Sex, where you feel connected and naked, open and free, and where you bring together two souls in the physical act of making love. For this kind of sex, physical attraction is simply a tiny starting point and rest is cultivated in the relational space between.
It is in the relational field that you develop deep attraction — to the person, not just their objective sexual appeal or chemistry. It is in the relating that beautiful sexual passion takes hold and grows.
It is also equally true that it is in the relational field where most couples end up losing themselves and each other for the lack of knowing how to navigate the typical and healthy aspects of any relationship such as disappointments and hurt feelings that chip away at the passion.
Relational dynamics impact both people, but they are especially impactful for women’s sexual desire, compared to men’s.
Almost 80% of women resonate with what is called responsive sexual desire, which means that their desire to have sex with their partner is responding to what their partner does — and does not do — with them. From emotional connection such as feeling understood and seen, to admiration and appreciation of each other, to feeling close, all of these emotional elements will influence and change how drawn a woman is to her husband and the idea of engaging with him sexually.
The relational dynamics affects men too, but in a different way. The quality of relating might not reduce his sexual desire or attraction to his wife. However, it will impact his desire to be emotionally available with her, in the bedroom and also outside of it. He might be more withdrawn or distant, putting up a wall when it comes to deeper engagement. He might engage in sex for sex’s sake, but hold himself back from engaging himself fully and vulnerably in making love.
It is these relational dynamics that all too often masquerade as loss of attraction, distracting us from the real thing underneath.
To put it succinctly:
Feeling sexually attracted is easy. Biology makes it work.
Relating in a safe and sexy way that builds that attraction over time takes work.
If you won’t work on the latter, the sexual attraction dies.
And with that, I will explore this question from a female reader: I am not attracted to my husband and struggling. Help!
5 Relational Dynamics that Contribute to Loss of Attraction in a Marriage or Long-term Relationship
While there are significant differences between each of these five items, all of them are closely related and tightly intertwined, with each one affecting all others. I focus specifically on this from the woman’s perspective, but this can resonate with any gender.
1. Lack of Emotional Safety
Just like with loss of trust, there is a gradient to loss of safety. Large-scale betrayals of trust are a major break in safety. Emotional abuse and neglect are too. But there are myriads of small ways that we break down safety in the relationship that go unnoticed in our daily lives. That’s especially true when the relationship is otherwise “good” or “solid”.
Loss of safety in the relationship might look like:
Your partner’s dismissive comments about what is important to you
Sarcasm or derision to the point of contempt
Trying to convince each other to change your mind
Blame for what is happening that forces you to walk on eggshells
Opening up and being hit back with the information that you shared
Defensiveness and lack of taking responsibility
One partner hounding the other for answers or resolution while the other is running away and withdrawing
Stonewalling, withdrawing and/or avoiding
Being cornered or blind sighted
Make no mistake about it. When one or more of these behaviors is present, it becomes not safe for either partner to open up, and it will affect how drawn you are to opening up to your partner. It will directly impact attraction and sexual desire.
That’s because when you don’t feel safe, the natural response is to close up and protect yourself. The last thing you want to do is to open yourself up to engage in a vulnerable way. You put up a wall.
And you cannot be closed and protected and open and vulnerable at the same time. Your nervous system cannot be both relaxed to open sexually and vigilant and on-guard for the next wall at the same time.
This isn't simply an irrational emotional reaction. When your nervous system no longer experiences your relationship as safe, it naturally shifts into very rational protection instead of openness. Many couples unknowingly end up living in what I call the Fight-Flight-Freeze Bedroom, where conflict, avoidance or shutdown replaces emotional and sexual connection — and thus attraction too.
Coming back to vulnerability and willingness to understand are crucial to rebuilding safety.
Caveat: In and of themselves, none of these behaviors are lethal to connection or the relationship. However, if left unresolved and uncorrected, these behaviors will contribute to what I now call the Relationship Spiral—the predictable progression from disappointment and disconnection toward resentment, emotional distance and, eventually, the end of the relationship. Learn more about the stages of the Relationship Spiral here.
Questions to reflect on:
If attraction is responding to the quality of your relationship, what might it be trying to tell you right now?
After conflict, do you usually feel closer, further apart, or simply unfinished? How does that impact your attraction to your husband?
When was the last time you felt deeply seen, appreciated, or emotionally held by your partner? What happened to your sense of closeness then?
What would emotional safety look like for you?
2. Loss of Trust
If there has been a major breach of trust, it is a natural and healthy response to lose attraction towards your partner. Betrayals of trust such as an affair or hiding financial information can upend not only your relationship, but how trusting you feel to get close and open up again.
However, it’s important not to overlook another common source of loss of trust that happens to “good” and “solid” relationships. I am talking about small and regular instances of loss of trust that happen regularly — in every day lives — that often go unnoticed but that end up creating a deep wedge.
It is often the case that over the years of lack of emotional safety create a lack of trust that your partner will be there for you during duress, will prioritize you and your emotional safety, and will create the conditions where you can be yourself.
That trust is generally important for both men and women.
For men, loss of trust forces men to withdraw emotionally.
For women, loss of trust affects safety. It becomes more challenging — or appealing — to open up sexually when you don’t feel safe with your partner on this deeper emotional level.
What kind of breaches of trust am I talking about? Here are some examples:
Your husband promises to not check emails at night or work during the weekends, and then does it anyway.
He promises to show up on time, and he doesn’t.
He says he will do one thing and then does another.
He avoids addressing situations that need to be addressed.
For women in particular, these oh-so-typical situations where you do not feel that you can count on your partner to live up to his word and be there for you, it will erode trust, which in turn affects admiration and respect, which in turn impacts attraction.
There is no denying or ignoring how important these are to openness to be physical and sexual with each other. Without repairing these breaches of trust and finding ways to solve these challenges, how you see your partner and how drawn you are to them will be affected.
Some questions to reflect on:
Where has there been loss of trust?
What has been the impact of loss of trust for your desire?
What does that loss of trust create in you? How does that affect your desire to be close with your husband?
What needs to be repaired or addressed to remove the wall between us to rebuild trust?
3. Loss of Admiration and Respect
For women in particular, admiration and respect for a man’s character is critical to attraction to them in a committed long-term relationship. How a man shows up and interacts with the world impacts how we are drawn to them. We literally see and relate to people differently when we appreciate and admire them.
This is responsible for a deeper kind of attraction that goes beyond feeling horny. As the fondness for each other grows, so does the desire to be close through physical means.
This can often be seen in arranged marriages, where couples that meet as strangers actually grow to be attracted to each other when they discover a kind of fondness based on how they show up and care for each other. It does not happen automatically or often, but when it does happen, it’s common to witness the bond creating sexual attraction.
On the flip side, over the course of a marriage or a long-term relationship, our admiration and respect of each other constantly gets challenged by conflict, differences of opinion and loss of trust.
You might lose respect for your husband for how he treats others. Maybe you see him being disrespectful to co-workers or the waitress at the restaurant, or neglecting his parents.
You might lose respect for how he treat himself. You might lose respect because you see your husband neglecting his health through excessive drinking, eating or smoking.
Maybe you lose admiration because he is constantly being mean to the children, ignoring his responsibilities at work, or gambling away your savings.
You can also experience loss of respect for how he treats you — more on that in a bit.
If you experience loss of admiration and respect for your husband, you might benefit from understanding where it’s coming from and addressing it together. However, beware of mistaking what things look like and what is actually going on — a blindspot for most people. We see others through our own eyes, not theirs.
For example, maybe your husband’s disrespectful behavior of throwing his dirty clothes on the floor by the shower is not about disrespecting you. Maybe he is working so hard all day that when he comes home after a busy day of work and earning money, he just needs to get out of these uncomfortable dirty clothes. It is not a sign of disrespect but of the urgent need for comfort.
When your relationship and your sexual desire are intertwined, admiration and respect play a crucial roll in attraction — more than we realize.
Without intentionally addressing these issues, they will not go away on their own. In fact, the wedge outside the bedroom will create more physical and sexual distance.
Part of building and growing intimacy in a relationship is addressing these relational topics through vulnerable conversations. If these tend to be challenging, you might benefit from the help of a professional who can help you break out of negative patterns that might make these conversations difficult.
Some questions to reflect on:
What do you respect and admire about your husband today?
What happens for you when you reflect on that?
Where are places where you’re losing or you’ve lost respect for him?
What relational topics are not being addressed? What would change if you could address these?
4. Loss of Connection as Lovers
Not withstanding the previous three points, without intentionally feeding their romantic and sexual relationship, all couples naturally end up sliding into roommate-dom.
They live parallel lives, keeping each other abreast on their comings and goings, but rarely opening up their hearts to each other.
Touch might be limited to a friendly hug or peck on the cheek.
Flirting and playfulness become a thing of the past, some romantic ideal you see in the movies, but that is absent in everyday life.
When there is no actual romantic relating happening on a regular basis, it is easy to stop seeing your partner romantically or be drawn to them physically. And whatever attraction you might felt when you were dating (and being romantic with each other) will disappear.
Which is why intentionally feeding your relationship with emotional connection, sensuality and touch — the components that make up what I call Connection Sex — is critical to maintaining the romantic part of a relationship and thus attraction.
Time and time again in my coaching practice, I see couples falling in love with each other anew after decades living in roommate-dom and literally becoming deeply drawn to each other sexually like they never have before.
One of the biggest myths that couples are fed by couples therapists alike is that date night is enough to build that connection. In my experience, while it might be enough for relationship maintenance purposes to keep you avoiding like total strangers, a monthly or even a weekly date night is not enough to keep couples deeply connected for sexual intimacy to become spontaneous or passionate. And for highly-sensitive women, it is entirely not enough to create sexual desire and attraction. Deep connection must be cultivated in every interaction, every exchange you have. One date night weekly cannot make up for the fact that you feel alone and disconnected for the rest of the week.
Which is why Connection Sex is built upon connection practices that build intimacy and playfulness into their everyday lives in a way that does not require much effort. In fact, it is all about infusing a sense of closeness and focus on what feels good into what you’re already doing.
Some questions to reflect on:
When you felt deeply connected to your partner in the past, what was that connection like? What has happening (or not happening)?
In what ways did that kind of connection affect you?
What kind of connection are you longing for now that might be missing? Be specific: do you long to talk more to each other? To touch? To spend alone time together in a certain way?
What would feeling more connected do for you today?
5. Built-up of Resentment and Anger
The last relational factor of attraction is a combination of the previous four.
There is nothing more lethal to attraction than the build-up of resentment due to loss of trust, loss of connection and hurt feelings that go un-repaired and un-corrected.
Resentment is not merely about the hurts, disappointments, unmet bids of connection, or loss of trust. It’s not only about not getting our needs met.
Resentment forms when our needs and hurts get ignored, forgotten or dismissed altogether. Resentment is what happens when we get the message that we are not important enough to fix this. It is then compounded into rehearsed nervous-system response of fight, flight or freeze that resembles a battlefield and takes on a life of its own.
It is virtually impossible to be attracted or drawn to someone who has hurt you and who does not show up to repair the hurt. When left un-addressed and un-repaired, resentment first creates distance. Eventually, it calcifies into an impenetrable wall that separates both people — emotionally and sexually.
Once again, coming back to vulnerability and truly listening and understanding each other is key to repair the built-up resentment and hurt that goes with it.
Some questions to reflect on:
What past hurts still feel like they have not been addressed at the emotional level?
What do you wish your partner understood or “got” about you and your emotional hurt?
What kind of apology or admission do you wish you could hear?
From your side of the equation, what did you contribute to a past hurt that you need to acknowledge?
If you could really repair and truly move on from a past hurt, what would that look like?
In conclusion
As it might be evident by now, none of these dynamics that create a loss of sexual attraction and desire can be solved by dressing up nicely and going out for a date night. Relational dynamics all too often masquerade as loss of attraction or passion, distracting us from the real thing underneath: that loss of safety, trust and connection affect sexual desire and attraction. These affect every fiber of your relationship (and heart) and must be addressed holistically.
Read 15 signs an unresolved sexless marriage is damaging your relationship to see which of these are really affecting yours.
The reality is that the sexual and the relational components are inextricably intertwined and must be addressed in tandem. The relational aspects must be looked at without losing sight of the sexual connection, and vice versa. One of the biggest mistakes couples make is believing they need to completely fix emotional intimacy before working on physical intimacy. In reality, emotional and sexual intimacy grow together rather than one after the other.
If you as a couple who feels safe enough with each other to broach these together, use the questions provided above to create vulnerable and open communication to repair and replenish areas where these losses took a hit on closeness — and thus attraction.
If you need professional support to approach these conversations in a safe way and learn new tools to break out of negative cycles of blame, withdrawal or arguing, you’re in the right place. Set up a free consultation session where we can discuss what is happening and what to turn things around.
Your marriage — and your love — are truly worth the effort!
