Desire Under Pressure™ Resource Center: Help for Sexless Marriages & Lost Desire
Expert Guidance to Rebuild Desire, Intimacy & Connection
If you're struggling with a sexless marriage, feeling rejected, pressured, disconnected, or unsure how to bring intimacy back, you'll find here practical guidance, expert insights, and proven pathways to reconnect emotionally and sexually.
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Many couples assume a sexless marriage is simply about not having enough sex.
In reality, the loss of desire often reflects deeper relationship dynamics: emotional disconnection, resentment, pressure, stress, parenting demands, nervous system activation, communication breakdowns, and years of unmet needs.
This resource center brings together my most popular articles, practical tools, and expert guidance to help you understand what's really happening—and what it takes to rebuild sexual intimacy and desire.
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Understanding the Sexless Marriage Cycle
Many couples focus on sex as the problem.
But sexless marriage is often the result of a predictable cycle of pressure, withdrawal, resentment, avoidance, and emotional disconnection within the couple, not a responsibility that falls on one person.
Understanding the cycle is often the first step toward changing it.
The Fight-Flight-Freeze Bedroom: Why Sexless Marriages Become Emotional Battlefields
Why do conversations about sex turn into conflict, avoidance, or shutdown? Learn how negative cycles and nervous system responses create “fight-flight-freeze” dynamics in sexless marriages — and how couples can begin rebuilding safety and intimacy.
The Hidden Meaning Behind 'You Only Want Sex': What Actually Happens in a Sexless Marriage
Why partners say “you only want sex” or “intimacy just isn’t important to me” in a sexless marriage—and what deeper fear, confusion, and unmet needs lie beneath sexual rejection.
When Sex Is Not the Issue in a Sexless Marriage
What happens when sex is not the issue in a sexless marriage and the lack of vulnerability kills any possibility of connection.
5 Most Common Mistakes Couples Make When Working on a Sex Problem in a Long-term Relationship
I’ve compiled a list of very common — and very understandable — mistakes that couples make to help you prevent this unnecessary pain and get the resources you need sooner.
What to Do When Your Sex Life Is Gridlocked, Stuck or Shut Down
Getting out of sexual gridlock can be hard. You end up in a cycle of seasons: feeling good for a few weeks, then falling back into the old patterns. Read this article to understand why you keep getting stuck and the underlying issue that needs to be addressed.
How Long Is Too Long Without Sex?
Discover what it really means when sexual connection and intimacy fade — not by counting months, but by tuning into how you feel, interact and connect. Explore the subtle signs that it’s been “too long” without sex, what’s underneath the silence, and how to open the conversation and rebuild closeness again. Read article here
What If I Am Not Attracted to My Husband Anymore?
When couples struggle with loss of sexual desire and/or passion in a marriage or long-term relationship, almost universally the first thing they question is whether it’s due to the lack of attraction. Most often, it’s not the case. Find out what factors influence attraction or sexual desire in a long-term relationship and what to do about them.
3 Warning Signs of Divorce and How to Address Them Before It's Too Late
There are three clear signs that couples who struggle with sex and desire issues exhibit that indicate that they’re heading for divorce. Learn these signs and commit to changing the course before it’s too late.
The Real Cost of Liquid Courage: How Alcohol Sabotages Sex & Intimacy in Marriage
Alcohol may feel like connection—but it can dull desire, disrupt emotional intimacy, and create distance in your sex life. Learn its heavy impact and what to do instead to create connection.
Why Your Partner Won’t Get Couples Counseling and How to Get Them On Board
You plead for getting a couples counseling in the form of coaching or a therapy and your partner refuses. What do you do to get them on board?
How “Talking About Your Feelings” Is Harming Your Relationship
When the relationship is struggling over the “sexual desire gap” problem, couples will naturally want to talk it over, telling each other what they think, under the guise of “telling the truth.” This actually harms your relationship. Find out how — and what to do instead.
There’s a way that couples manage sexual challenges in their relationship that they believe will serve them. Instead, they backfire and hurt their love. Find out these top three destructive thought patterns that backfire — and what to do instead.
15 Ways Sex Is Different in a Long-term Relationship
It’s predictable that sex will change in a long-term relationship. But it’s hard to not feel heart-broken when it happens to us.
How to Know When to Walk Away from a Sexless Marriage
The decision to walk away from a sexless marriage is a gut-wrenching one. This in-depth article will talk about what qualifies as a sexless marriage, the pain of a sexless marriage, what to try before walking away, when to walk away, and how to distinguish which problems masquerades as unsolvable and how to solve them.
Who's Running the Show in Your Arguments?
When couples fight, it's rarely about the topic. And it's rarely a mere exchange of words. By understanding this one thing, you can learn to deepen your connect and feel closer in talking about sex.
3 Honest Mistakes That Lead to "No Sex Tonight!” Over and Over Again
Couples make these mistakes all the time, and it means no sex for weeks, even months. Are you making these, too?
Wondering Whether Your Sexless Marriage Can Recover?
Most couples don't go from connection to resentment overnight. They move through predictable stages —from compromise and accommodation to frustration, avoidance, distance, and eventually contempt — that become harder and harder to recover from.
Take this free 5-minute assessment to uncover the hidden patterns affecting intimacy, desire, and connection—and receive a personalized roadmap for moving forward.
Saving a Sexless (or Near-Sexless) Marriage
A Tale of Two Couples and One Sex Problem: How Some Sexless Marriages Be Saved and Others Cannot
Why can some sexless marriages be saved and why others cannot? What is the difference? Read this article to find out the key element that turns one sex problem into a disaster or a recipe for closeness and passionate sex.
How to Find Your Way Back to Each Other and Revive a Sexless Marriage
These five steps will take you through the process of recoving a sexless marriage towards more intimate connection and sexual expression. With ongoing curiosity, openness and lots of tender loving care, a couple can work to create the safety and security that are necessary to rekindle a love-filled, deeply intimate union.
10 Sexy & Playful Ways to Feel in Love Daily
For long-term couples, feeling in love should not be reserved for once-a-year Valentine’s day. Choose one or more of these 10 easy ways to connect to each other daily and feel in love with each other, opening the door to deeper intimacy and sexual passion.
7 Insights to Understand About Each Other That Make Sex Flow in a Long-term Relationship
We wrongly think that we know our partners, even though our knowledge comes from our own assumptions. To truly understand each other — and feel understood — we need to talk. This article provides tools to help you connect more intimately, build closer sexual connection and make sex that’s more than just the same-old boring motions.
What Is the Meaning of Sex in Your Long-term Relationship?
Like all important aspects of life, sex carries meaning. Understanding what sex means to you — and your partner — will tell you if you’re on the same page in valuing and prioritizing it. Or not and if you need to walk away.
I Am a Sex Coach, and Here's Why I'm Against Foreplay
We are culturally conditioned to focus on foreplay to get a woman "ready" for sex. What if it's actually harmful and hurts women's changes of actually having a fulfilling sex life?
Why Is Sex Better on Vacation & How Do You Bring That Passion Home with You?
It’s a known phenomenon: sex seems to be better on vacation — more fun, easier, flowing. But it’s hard to maintain the magic when you get home. Learn five ways to bring home the vacation-sex effect into everyday life.
Unmet Needs Lead to Resentment. This Can Help.
Sex can melt away stress in a relationship. When sex is connected, you can do anything together. But what if stress and resentment are stopping you from connecting intimately and having sex?
Is Scheduling Sex Bad for Your Relationship?
Scheduling sex is another example of advice offered to couples who’re struggling with sexual desire in a long-term relationship. Yet, it’s really bad advice because it hurts their relationship. Find out the alternative.
Set Yourselves Up for Success as a Couple in Sex & Intimacy
Being intentional in your relationship sets you up for success in creating what you desire. More critically, it allows you to feed and nourish what is important to you. Learn the 5-step process to being intentional and make it happen, through the highs and lows.
Skip Date Night! Build Sexual Passion with These Daily Practices
Having a date night is the most common advice out there for couples struggling with lack of sexual passion and desire in a long-term relationship. Find out why it backfires for couples and what to do instead.
Talking About Sex Can Be Hard — but This Will Help
Talking about sex can be intimidating and scary — until you learn this. Check out the exact do’s and don’ts of talking about sex to make it more comfortable, easy and connecting.
How to Stay Passionate in a Long-term Relationship
Losing ‘the spark’ is bound to happen in any long-term relationship. It’s a hard pill to swallow — especially when that excitement of the honeymoon phase felt so passionate and so effortless. Understand what makes the passion wane and what makes it burn for decades.
7 Habits of Healthy Couples Who Have Great Sex
Great sex doesn’t “just” happen in a long-term relationship. It’s fed, nourished and ignited by conversations about sex that make you feel desired and important to each other. These 7 habits show you what healthy couples do to have great sex.
How to Tell If Your Sex Life Is Good & What to Do to Create One
If 2,510,000,000 Google results for “signs you have a healthy sex life” tell you anything, it’s that people want to know what makes for a good sex life. Trying new things and good orgasms always top the list. Without a doubt, newness adds variety and excitement and orgasms make for a grand finale. But is that enough? Here’s a set of different kinds of questions to gauge the quality of your sex life — how passionate, how connected, how erotic, and how enriching it is for you?
Understanding Men in a Sexless Marriage
Many men experience profound loneliness, rejection, and self-doubt when intimacy disappears from a marriage.
These articles explore the emotional impact of sexlessness on men and offer practical guidance for rebuilding connection without pressure or blame.
How men struggle in a sexless marriage
For men for whom sex is a vehicle of expression of love through the connection and physical intimacy of love-making, the relationship turning sexless means a severing off of an extremely important point of connection that differentiates a marriage from being roommate or partners.
13 Revelations About Men’s Sexual Desire That Will Make It Easier to Initiate Sex
Too often in the bedroom men and women misunderstand each other’s intentions and desires. Learn these 13 revelations about men’s sexual desire that will change they way you read men.
These signs may look so simple, which is why men miss these cues. But make no mistake here: they have a profound effect on women’s sexual desire.
Understanding Women Who Have Lost Desire for Sex
Loss of desire is rarely random.
For many women, desire is affected by stress, emotional safety, nervous system activation, relationship dynamics, parenting responsibilities, and years of accumulated resentment or pressure.
The Biggest Threat to a Woman’s Libido
It takes many things to build up women’s libido but it takes one swing of the wrecking ball to destroy it. Yet we do this every day.
Three Reasons Women Stop Wanting Sex
If you as a woman do not experience spontaneous sexual desire, it does not mean there is something wrong with you. Learn about three things that keep women's libido low in a long-term relationship.
The Many Faces of Low Libido in Women
Low libido affects as many as 50% of all women, yet having this label gets us even more stuck. In reality, there are 29 “faces” of low libido in women that point to the very things that we can change to find your way back to sexual desire. Read the article to identify yours.
Given how many married women claim that they could go without sex for the rest of their lives, it’s a question that both men and women want to know: do women like sex?
When Low Libido Is Simply Common Sense
Low libido or loss of interest in sex is the most common sex problem for women. But is it a problem, really? The elephant in the room we’re refusing to admit to is that for most women, not being interested in sex with their partner is common sense. Read this article to understand why.
A Letter to the “Sexually Broken” Woman
As many as 1 in 2 women in the US struggle with low libido. It’s time that we look at what is actually going on with these “sexually broken” women.
What Is Arousal and Why It's So Important for Women's Sexual Desire
The process of women’s sexual arousal has a crucial role in women wanting sex. It’s the experience being turned on sexually on both physical and emotional levels. This article maps out what sexual arousal provides and how to optimize it.
How I Finally Learned to Love My Body (and My Pussy Too)
It didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t take mantras. But it did take learning to receive pleasure.
Enjoying Sex and Intimacy as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)
HSPs are just as sexual as non-HSPs, but they need a different path to opening up sexually that has been overlooked by sex educators, relationship counselors, and authors of self-help books. Learn what HSPs need to come alive in the bedroom.
Sex and the HSP Woman: How Meeting "Pre-Sex" Needs Contributes to Her Enjoyment and Desire for Sex
Despite being critical for her sexual desire and ability to engage fully in sex, women’s pre-sex needs are often ignored or de-prioritized over the more sexual overtures. That is especially important for highly sensitive (HSP) women.
For Men: How to Be a Better Lover with an HSP Woman
For a man, being a better with a highly sensitive person (HSP) woman means making a few important internal shifts to bring out her best nature and sexual desire.
Why Sex Is (So Much) Better at Midlife
Learn how midlife brings a new kind of sexual freedom in a long-term committed relationship — grounded in trust, self-awareness, and deeper connection.
Top 3 Mistakes Couples Make That Turn Women Off Sex
As a coach who works with women and couples to create satisfying and nourishing sex lives, I can zero in on three top mistakes that couples make when it comes to sex — mistakes that lead to little or none of it.
The One Thing That a Woman Needs for a Healthy Sex Life
There is one thing a woman needs to have a healthy sex life. And it’s not what you think. Read the article and get 5 ways to have it.
Painful Sex Should Never Be the Norm for Women
Irene Fehr and Rachel Gelman, DPT, pelvic physical therapist, teamed up to talk about why painful sex should never be the norm for women and offer ways to work through the pain to create more pleasure for women.
What's REALLY Causing Painful Sex for Women?
Painful sex is the norm for many women. But what is really causing this phenomenon?
15 Ways to Turn Yourself On and Get Ready for Sex
If you're struggling with getting in the mood for sex using the most commonly-prescribed sexual methods, discover 15 ways to turn yourself on that feel good and are easy to do in your busy day.
3 Ways to Get in the Mood for Sex After a Busy Day Without Trying
Trying to get in the mood for sex at the end of a busy day can send a woman into a tailspin. Here is a mindset (plus three easy alternatives) that will help.
How to Regain Interest in Sex After Having a Baby
Why do so many mom’s feel broken sexually? Learn the truth about women’s sexual desire, the roles partners can play in recovering women’s libido, and tips to help get back to yourself and your sex life after becoming a mom.
5 Ways to Restore Her Excitement for Sex
Loss of women’s libido is almost a given when couples approach sex without forethought. Learn how couples can prevent this fate and restore her excitement for sex.
33 Ways to Self Pleasure for Better Sex
Feeling sexy is one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs. But how do we get there, especially after a busy day? Explore these 33 ways to find your pleasure — and turn on that will fuel your day and fire up your night.
Why Can Sex Feel Painful for Women?
Video 1: Most women experience painful sex and intercourse at some point. Get the info you need to shift into pleasure.
Video 2: How to tune into your body to shift into pleasure.
The Self-Care Practice Most Women Give Up On (Even If It Opens Them Up Sexually)
As women, we know this is one of the best ways to feel good in our bodies and turn ourselves on. It's time to reintroduce this practice to our day!
FREE MASTERCLASS: How to Know What You Want & Confidently Ask for It
The most frequent complaints I hear from women is they don’t know what they want in sex. This free 3-part training teaches you exactly how to find out what you want — and the path to getting it.
Try This Every Day to Boost Your Sexual Desire (and your partner will thank you!)
Ever hear "you can't pour from an empty cup"? When we run on empty, sex gets hard. There is another way!
How to Relax and Receive Sexual Pleasure
Learn this powerful practice to help connect to your body and receive pleasure — in sex and in life.
Dating & Other Related Topics
Couples who come to me for sex & intimacy coaching have often been to 3 to 5 therapists before me. Why did their couples therapy fail? Find out three reasons why couples therapy fails to address sexless marriages.
Best Books on Sex & Intimacy for Your Summer Reading
These books are guaranteed to open your eyes, make you blush, and relax your body into the pleasures of summer.
Orgasmic Holiday Gift Guide for Couples
Five must-have things on your list guaranteed to make sparks fly in your relationship any holiday season — or time of the year.
Netflix Breaks Taboos on Female Pleasure — and Gets It Right
When Netflix released “Sex, Love & Goop,” I thought … there’s no way they’re going to hit the spot on the touchy subject of women’s pleasure. But after watching the show end to end, I can confidently say — they get it right.
Bigger is better in sex? Not always ...
Popular advice for reigniting sexual intimacy tells us to up the ante on date nights and such. Yet when it comes to intimacy, smaller is better.
Energize Yourself, Reinvent Your Sex Life
When we’re running on empty, sexuality has little chance. Fill your cup, energize your life, and reinvent your sex life.
Dating Essentials: What It Takes to Create a Sexually Fulfilling Relationship from the Start
Even if you’re in the early stages of dating and getting to know each other, It’s never too early to begin to create a foundation for a sexually fulfilling relationship. Learn what it takes here.
Dating Essentials: Why Speaking Up About Your Sexual Needs Up Front Matters
It’s awkward to speak up too early about sex when dating … but it can also backfire, as you bond and connect with someone who might be on a different page with you. Learn why talking about sex early on really matters to having a sexually fulfilling relationship later on.
Everything Your Need to Know about Sex and Dating (to Get What You Want in Both)
If you're in the process of dating or starting a new relationship, you probably have a lot of questions about sex. Watch these videos to know what to do to get get what you want in sex and the new relationship.