But her sexual struggles in a long-term relationship, orgasms and frequency of sex notwithstanding, make her something else again: normal. Jane’s perseverance might make her a lot of things: an idealist, a dreamer, a canny sexual strategist, even-again channeling typical anxieties-unrealistic, selfish, or entitled. She has suggested more radical-seeming potential fixes, too, like opening up the marriage. Jane has bought lingerie and booked hotel stays. She wants to want John and be wanted by him in that can’t-get-enough-of-each-other-way experts call “limerence”-the initial period of a relationship when it’s all new and hot. Or different.ĭespite “fears of seeming sex addicted, unfaithful, or whorish” (Gotzis doesn’t like these terms, but they speak to his patient’s anxieties, he explained), Jane has tried to tell John, in therapy and outside of it, what she’s after. Mostly he can’t understand why, if his wife is having sex with him and having orgasms, she wants more. She thinks there’s something wrong with her.” John, meanwhile, feels criticized and inadequate. And like other straight women he sees, “she’s confused and demoralized by it.

It’s that the sex they’re having isn’t what she wants,” Gotzis told me in a recent phone conversation. “The problem is not that they are functionally unable to have sex, or to have orgasms. Based on numbers alone, one might wonder why they need couples counseling at all.īut only one of them is happy with the state of play. They have sex about three times a week, which might strike many as enviable, considering that John and Jane-who are in their 40s-have been together for nearly two decades. Andrew Gotzis, a Manhattan psychiatrist with an extensive psychotherapy practice, has been treating a straight couple, whom we’ll call Jane and John, for several years.

German word for intimate relations