“My partner wants sex a lot more than me and I’m beginning to feel the pressure every time he comes up to bed.  I hate saying no to him but I just don’t feel like it a lot of the time.  We have young children and after putting them to bed, which is always a drawn out drama and then clearing up the daily mess, I crash into bed exhausted.  I feel like I’m saying no to him a lot but I’m so tired and drained and every day its just the same old routine….” 

Maybe this sounds familiar if you are in the throes of raising a young family and trying to hold on to a sense of normality within your relationship.  Perhaps its hard to believe that your relationship before children is the same as the one it has become now.  Maybe you are feeling unhappy and you know that your partner is struggling too and possibly part of the problem is that you are both expecting your relationship to carry on more or less as it was before you started a family.  But things have to change and its important to make a transition in your relationship alongside rearing children so that you can still feel connected with each other and be able to nourish your relationship with care, intimacy and love.

So if sex has become problematic because one of you has more desire for it than the other, potentially given your changed lifestyle around children, then it might help to consider other ways to start expressing your feelings for each other, outside of sex.  This might prove to be an important first step in re-introducing an erotic element to your relationship and to explore how sex can become a happy part of your life again.  Couples therapy will support you in working together to make this happen.