Most women we see have been struggling with their sexual functioning for a significant amount of time. It’s not uncommon for us to meet women who have spent years — even decades — trying to figure out why they can’t have a normal sex life and what they need to do to fix it.
As many patients have shared, they kept hoping and believing things would get better. That the perpetual low desire would resolve itself once they found the right partner, or got pregnant, or had a baby, or stopped breastfeeding, or lost weight, or took a vacation together, or made a pledge…(the list goes on). And as long as there’s the ‘next thing’ that is giving hope for resolution, the willingness to reach out for help subsides.
As a woman, it can be virtuous to be the kind of person who focuses on the potential, not the actuality. And this can be a helpful perspective when dealing with relationships at work, at home, in social settings. But sometimes the proclivity to focus on the potential can be detrimental because it can hinder your willingness to acknowledge the reality of the situation at hand and the need to get help for it…now. Believing in the potential for things to get better is great. But when it seems like ‘someday’ is starting to turn into ‘never’, there needs to be a change in the game plan.