Age: 39, Amelia’s Story
It came up in Caroline’s kitchen, the way these things do. Four of us round the table, the good crisps out, someone’s coat still on because she was only staying an hour and stayed until midnight.
Caroline said she’d gone off it completely. Just wasn’t interested any more, hadn’t been for two years, and did anyone else feel like that?
They all nodded. I nodded too, because it was easier, and then I went to the loo and sat on the edge of the bath for longer than I needed to.
Because that wasn’t it. That wasn’t my thing at all, and I didn’t know how to say what mine was without it sounding like nothing.
Here it is. When Dan and I had sex, I liked it. Not politely. I liked it properly, and afterwards I’d lie there in the dark with my hand on his chest thinking, why on earth don’t we do that more often?
And then a fortnight would go by. Three weeks. And the thought never once arrived by itself.
That’s the whole thing. I never wanted it first.
I don’t remember when I started counting, somewhere in the years when the girls were small, when the evenings were a queue of jobs, and the last one was always me. Dan would put his hand on my hip while I was brushing my teeth, and I’d do the maths in my head. Eleven days. Sixteen. That’s too long, that’s not fair on him, that’s a thing a person notices.
I got very good at the eleven o’clock scroll. Five more minutes on my phone, and then five more, until his breathing changed and I could put it down and lie there hating myself a bit.
Not because I didn’t fancy him. I did. I do. That was what made no sense.
At twenty-two I’d wanted him in that thoughtless way you see in films. I assumed that was the real version, and everything since was a fading photocopy that I’d had a certain amount of and spent it on a wedding and two babies and a house with a boiler that only works if you hit it.
There’s a particular kind of quiet that grows in a marriage when nobody says the thing. It’s not rowing. It’s worse than rowing. It’s Dan not reaching over anymore because he’s been turned down enough times to have learned, and me noticing that he’s stopped, and neither of us mentioning it while we watch a documentary about the sea.
Then last autumn we drove back from his cousin’s wedding, and somewhere on the road while driving home he said, not looking at me, “Do you still fancy me?”
I said yes. But there was a gap before it. Half a second, maybe. I was assembling the whole explanation in my head, and by the time I got to the word it had already landed wrong.
He said, “It’s fine.” And put the radio on.
I sat in the car outside the leisure centre the next Saturday while Ruby did her swimming lesson, and I looked at my hands on the steering wheel and thought: I am going to be like this forever and he is going to get tired.
It was a podcast, in the end. Some woman I’d never heard of, talking while I sat in the car with the engine still running because I didn’t want to arrive and lose the thread.
She said that for a lot of women, wanting doesn’t come first. It comes second. You can be perfectly interested and still need something to happen before the interest shows up; she used the phrase responsive desire and said it like it was ordinary, like a shoe size.
I didn’t cry. I just sat there with my hands in my lap thinking, oh.
I told Dan a week later, badly, standing on the landing with a pile of towels because that’s where the courage arrived. I said something like, it’s not that I don’t want you, it’s that the wanting turns up late, and I’ve been treating late as never.
He said, “So the order’s different.”
And I said yes.
And he said, “That’s it? That’s what you’ve been carrying about?” and then he sat down on the top stair, which I’ve thought about a lot since.
Looking Back
I spent about twelve years marking myself against a version of desire I’d absorbed without ever agreeing to it. Sudden, unprompted, arriving on its own like weather.
Mine has never worked like that, and possibly it never did. Even at twenty-two, there was a hand on my back first.
I’m not tidy about the rest of it. There was the exhaustion of small children. There was the year I was doing everything for everyone. There was probably something in the coil, or there wasn’t, and I’ll never really know which bits were which.
What I do know is that I turned a difference into a fault, and then I hid the fault, and the hiding did more harm than the thing itself.
What Helped Me
Saying it out loud, in the wrong words, on a landing, holding towels. It did not need to be said well.
Stopping the counting. That took months, and I still slip.
Learning that closeness could happen without it being an audition for something else. Sitting with his arm round me on the sofa without either of us treating it as a question.
Telling one friend. Just one. Caroline, as it turned out, over a coffee that went cold.
Going to my GP eventually, not because I wanted fixing but because I wanted someone to check I was alright and to hear it from a person who wasn’t my husband. That was my choice and my situation. Yours may be entirely different.
Time. Which is not a very satisfying answer, but it’s true.
What I Wish I’d Known
That there is no correct order for this.
That enjoying it afterwards isn’t a consolation prize. It’s evidence. I had the evidence the whole time and kept filing it under failure.
That my silence was writing a story in Dan’s head, and his story was that I’d gone off him, which was miles from the truth and cost him more than it cost me.
That “I need a bit of a run-up” is a sentence you’re allowed to say to your own husband.
Reflection
We’re not transformed. I want to be clear about that, because I’ve read enough of these to be suspicious of the ones that end with everything mended. Some weeks it’s still a fortnight. Some weeks I’m knackered, and that’s all it is.
But last Sunday the girls were at his mum’s, and we had toast in bed at eleven in the morning, and nobody was keeping score, and I thought about the woman sitting on the edge of Caroline’s bath, so certain there was something wrong with her.
I’d like to go back and tell her she was just built in a slightly different order. That’s all it was. That’s all it ever was.
Who this article is for: “If this story felt familiar, we hope it reminds you of one thing: you’re not the only one. Every woman’s journey is unique, but understanding often begins by hearing someone else’s story.”
