Last Updated on 7 February, 2026 by Cara Sutra
This feels terrifying to admit, as a sex blogger with a sex blog who writes about sex for others’ enjoyment and as a job. But for some time now, my libido has been so low it’s currently propping up a bar in the lowest circle of hell. Last year saw some monumental life changes for me, something I reflected on more fully in my 2025 reflections. These included ongoing perimenopause issues, then the onset of chronic illness from spring. I began deeply confronting psychological work in trauma-informed therapy, and I’m doing it without the temporary softener of alcohol. As I enter 2026, I have a renewed commitment to my core values of honesty and authenticity leading the way on my blog. So, as scary as it feels, it is important to me to be honest about my low libido and where I am right now in this difficult midlife period.
It’s time to tell you all the things I haven’t been saying.
Let’s start with: my libido is so fucking low and I don’t want to have sex right now.
For over a year, I’ve been coasting on superficial output here on the blog, and on my social media. I’ve been hiding the truth of me, feeling ashamed, feeling like a fraud. A sex blogger who doesn’t want to have sex. My entire identity had shifted, and I didn’t know who I was anymore.
If you’re expecting an advice post, or a triumphant “problem solved!” write-up, you’re going to be disappointed. I’m right in the middle of this frustrating situation, and right now, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve taken all my own advice about increasing your sex drive, followed all the usual sex tips. Nothing is working.
Beginning trauma-informed therapy in spring 2025 has also dredged up many complex emotions and raw truths about myself, adding an extra layer of difficulty.
My sex life right now
I still enjoy orgasms, and I write about that side of my life in my recent sex toy reviews. I masturbate two or three times a week with my favourites. I feel ashamed of this, not because I believe there’s anything shameful about masturbation and solo pleasure, but because I’m not having sex with my husband much, if at all. Partnered sex feels different, difficult for some reason. I feel incredibly bad for my husband, who despite being loving, understanding and patient, has had to adjust to a wife who used to be clamouring for daily sex and now my libido has disappeared. He says he loves me and he understands and there’s no rush, that even if we never had sex again, he would understand and love me and want to be with me. The thought that I’m moving towards a sexless marriage terrifies me and fills me with guilt and shame.
My personal pleasure sessions aren’t driven by erotic mental lust or a desire for sexual contact. It’s more of a physical release, a fast way to relax, something driven purely by a need to let off steam then carry on with my day. That distinction is really important.
At a time when agency and control over my body seems to have slipped away for various reasons and through various ways, it’s especially hard to share my body. Even with my husband, whom I love very much. I feel safe with him; he’s my home. But I’m in a changed form, one I’m struggling to recognise, and disappointed by my reduced capacity due to ageing and M.E.
Where my desire is at
I still experience arousal, but it isn’t living in my body like it was before. It’s psychological and connected strongly to power exchange and kink. I feel this makes sense in light of my diminished agency over my own body and the grief that brings. My ability to still access desire and arousal through consensual Domination, without sexual contact or engagement from my body, is understandable through this lens.
The arousal I experience through FemDom is intense without the need for physicality. It’s a charged territory, with themes of taboo creativity, consensual control, the spotlight on someone else’s vulnerability and receiving their hands-off obedience.
That’s where the mental spark lives for me right now.
The physically bonding act of sex between bodies, without inhabiting a role of power and control, feels uncomfortable and too difficult. I’m unable to be that vulnerable, naked and exposed woman, just me, not playing any role, that I know my husband loves, but who I am struggling to love at the moment.
I’m not who I thought I was, not who I have felt strong and confident in being for decades, and the rug has been pulled. It will take some time to work through my issues and recover.
I have been feeling ill at ease for quite some time about being publicly associated with desire, whilst privately struggling with its absence. I already had imposter syndrome about my writing; for a while I’ve felt like a fraudulent voice for confident, liberated female sexuality, too.
Living in a body that needs to conserve energy
As you’ll know from reading my recent blog posts, I’m living with a few different, demanding conditions. I’m in midlife, with all the challenges ageing as a woman brings. There’s the onset of perimenopause, with its rollercoaster of hormones and emotions and body issues. I have high frequency hearing loss, deafness which isn’t fully resolved by my hearing aids. I wrote about this in more depth in my piece on living with hearing loss. Last spring I started the confronting, difficult and sometimes destabilising work of trauma-informed therapy, and around the same time I developed M.E. This chronic illness means I’m exhausted every single day, all day, no matter how much I rest or sleep.
This is life for me at the moment, while I also feel guilty about my low libido and slower sex life. And the guilt just acts as another vehicle driving my libido further underground. My desire can’t thrive in a body which is exhausted, in pain, undergoing uncontrollable changes, hypervigilant for the next change or decline, and busy just getting through the day. My libido soared when I was healthy, more confident in my body’s ability and appearance. When I was at full capacity and felt safe in my bodily agency. Currently, my body is completely focussed on regulation and survival, rather than having space available for want and arousal.
That shift toward regulation and survival is something I’ve written about more fully in my pieces on protecting my energy in 2026 and giving myself permission to rest. This new focus is tied closely to how I’ve been unlearning restriction and choosing nourishment instead, which I’ve explored in my piece on moving away from diet culture.
As well as the psychological issues, there are physical ones that I feel aren’t talked about enough. At this time of life, with these health conditions, arousal doesn’t come easily. Sensual touch feels like an effort. Intimacy has hurdles like dryness and discomfort. My body doesn’t respond on cue just because my mind remembers how things used to be. There is also deep grief that comes with these changes.
None of this makes me broken, just different. I’m human, I’m a woman, in a body which is changing, adapting and re-prioritising.
Relationships, patience, and letting go of expectation
Life with a low libido doesn’t just affect me, it affects my husband as well. It affects our relationship. We don’t love each other any less, but I carry intense guilt alongside the grief of losing arousal and desire for partnered sex. I feel like a disappointment, like I’ve let him down, and I worry he’ll think I don’t love him anymore.
My husband is a wonderful, kind, patient, tender, understanding man. He doesn’t expect or demand, and he doesn’t rush me. There’s no pressure on me to have sex with him through this difficult time of libido loss. Our relationship has changed, but in a way it’s deepened, because we’re not basing our strength of love and feeling toward each other on how regular our sex life is, but on how gentle and patient we are with each other through this tough part. The lack of regular sex hasn’t weakened our relationship; it’s highlighted that our intimacy and connection isn’t reliant on sex in order to exist. Our love hasn’t diminished or vanished just because physical sexual relations are rarer, gentler, quieter.
I’ve learned that rushing myself and being submerged in guilt just makes my libido shrink further out of reach. This isn’t a problem that can be easily fixed if I just press the right button, if I have a candlelit bath and a massage. This is a learning phase, a process, a bumpy landing into a new era of being. I hope to rediscover a strong desire for physical sex at some point. I can’t see it on the horizon just yet, but I trust it’s there, somewhere.
This isn’t a comfortable place to be. Nothing about this time of life is. I’m being directly confronted by years of conditioning about my worth being directly related to my desirability, my sexual availability, responsiveness and confidence. That perhaps that confidence was a bluff all along, and it’s time to do the hard work to build the real thing.
Being a sex blogger with very low libido
The public aspect of a private part of life makes all of this so much harder to navigate. It’s difficult, confronting and exposing to write about it honestly.
I’m a sex blogger and I work in the sex industry. I’ve spent many years writing about sex, pleasure, BDSM, erotic confidence and desire. I feel like a fraud, admitting that my own libido is currently a strangled whisper.
In the past, I believed that because I’m a sex blogger, I must have a constant high desire for sex in order to be valid. I felt an expectation that my body should always be switched on, open to it, positively responsive. I don’t believe that anymore.
The world of sexuality isn’t limited to appetite and action. It encompasses so much more than bodies colliding and exploring and devouring and erupting. It’s about agency. Mental health. Consent. Complex truths. It includes the quiet seasons, the ill health, the psychological as well as physical issues. Practical aspects of intimacy and how it fits into relationships. Sexuality is as much about not wanting as it is about strong desire.
It’s time to write the honest truth about where my sexuality and I are right now. And it feels a whole lot better than struggling to maintain an image and a role which was frankly limiting and that I’ve long outgrown. I refuse to live restricted by expectation, whether that’s from the outside world or my own psyche.
Looking back at last year with compassion
As I mentioned near the outset of this piece, for the last year I’ve been coasting in terms of content here on the blog. It was perhaps a little harsh to describe it as superficial, as there’s still value in the advice pieces I’ve written and I’m learning to be kinder and more compassionate to myself. My harsh inner critic is still loud.
I need to drop the judgement about my sex blog posts which were more polished and contained, which didn’t reveal anything about my turbulent inner world. Articles and reviews which stayed safely away from anything painful and confronting to write. I wasn’t ready then, but I am now.
Last spring, I developed M.E. I also started trauma-informed therapy, along with still navigating complex parts of my personal life such as parenting neurodiverse teenagers, ongoing perimenopause issues, lifelong deafness, food issues and other body focussed behaviours plus trying to hold everything together somehow.
I didn’t have the bandwidth to write deeply or more creatively. I just knew I had to survive, and tried to keep my blog ticking over meanwhile.
Keeping to safe, familiar and easy topics provided me with something manageable as well as pleasantly distracting in a life where everything else felt precarious and unstable. On the practical side, I could keep working and earning without opening myself further than I was able to cope with at that time.
Coming into 2026, I feel different. Not because everything is resolved, far from it. But I have reached a point through time and gentle processing where not saying all of these things, not speaking my truths, weighs heavily, feels misaligned and deceptive.
It’s time to be honest with myself, and with everyone else.
Why I’m writing all of this
There are a few reasons why I wanted to write about my current low libido and its psychological impact.
To embody my core values of honesty and authenticity, and stop feeling like a hypocrite. To help me process these difficult thoughts and feelings, because releasing them from my brain in this way is genuinely helpful and a relief. And last but not least: in case all of this resonated with somebody out there. I refuse to believe I’m the only one going through all of this, and I like to think reading my thoughts, feelings and experiences will help you feel not quite as alone with it all.
Maybe you found this post because you’re quietly looking for someone else out there like you. Someone in midlife wondering what the fuck happened to their desire for sex. Chronically ill and disabled people whose bodies have other priorities in everyday life. People who live with the effects of trauma, whose nervous systems struggle to access arousal without unhealthy coping mechanisms, numbing techniques and distractions like pouring your whole self into work, compulsive exercise, eating disorders or an unhealthy relationship with alcohol or drugs. People who live with intense shame and guilt because their sex life doesn’t look the way it used to, like they hoped it would, like they feel it should.
So much content out there (I’ll admit, this includes posts right here on this blog) frames low libido as a problem to solve. A passing phase, a temporary problem which is easily rectified. I’m not offering any solutions here. Just company.
Not my final form (but if it is, that’s ok)
I’ve stopped working towards regaining my libido or putting any pressure on myself to perform with regards physical sexual activity. I have no idea if my libido will return to a higher level in the future or not, but I’m doing my best to feel ok about either possibility. A deep breath here, because the possibility that my sex drive won’t return to where I want it to be is incredibly difficult to accept.
No demands on myself. I’m quieting the harsh inner critic. My priority is kindness, compassion and patience with myself. I’m working on letting myself feel sadness without turning it into something to fix or hide. No promises or predictions. I’m not trying to return to an earlier version of myself; she bluffed with false confidence boosted by a lifetime of learned coping mechanisms and unhealthy obsessions. I’m in my cocoon era, trying to see it less like festering or floundering and more like learning and adapting and accepting and processing, to encourage the eventual emergence of my true Self.
The keys feel like patience instead of pressure. Kindness instead of judgement. I need to be honest with myself, and invite you, my readers, along with me for this revealing ride.
I am still a sexual person and I’m still a sex blogger. I am committed to write my honest truths from my lived experience, even when I’m living through unresolved, uncomfortable and quiet times. I am valid and I am enough, exactly as I am right now.
