This week, counsellor and author of Extraordinary Relationships Lucy Cavendish advises our reader on how to deal with waning interest in a partner
sex and relationshipsSometimes when he tries to initiate I actually feel repulsed. Sometimes I look at him and I don’t know how we ever got together. I feel physically turned off. I feel horrible that this is my reaction and I don’t know what is going on.However, on an emotional level, it is worth thinking about when you started to feel repulsed by your boyfriend. Was there a particular change in anything? It has obviously got worse over time and repulsed is a very strong word.
I am inviting you to think about patterns; on a general level, people who get involved with other people and then find themselves shying away from commitment and involvement – despite the fact that everything was going well at the beginning – tend to be what therapists callbut once they are involved, and things are going well, they start to go off their partner.
At the basis of this is, sometimes, the feeling of being let down. As you are 44 I am assuming this is not yourand we make a relationship with them, we are telling ourselves a story. Maybe this is The One. Maybe this person will heal all our past hurts and love us back into wholeness. We are in the heady realm of fantasy and projection here. But no one can be our everything. We need to be our everything.
So once we start to really get to know someone – say after a year or so – and we begin to see them more clearly, we can feel very let down by them when they don’t do the job we have unconsciously or consciously foisted on them. Not that we have told them that. Maybe we don’t even know it ourselves.
Might you be willing to view this relationship in a slightly different light? If you could find an iota of yourself that could hold on to the good in the relationship and truly celebrate and invest in that, it might be that your repulsion dissipates. The truth is, recognising our part in our behaviour is the most life-changing thing we can do. If you concentrate on what is good and lean in a bit, it has a fair chance of working out.
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