So much is confusing in the early days of a relationship. Navigating sex and desire at this stage can be tricky — are you having sex too much, and that means the connection is just physical? Are you not having sex enough, and that means the connection isn’t strong enough? It’s easy to get in your head about it. Here’s what you need to know about what kind of desire is appropriate for the beginning of a dating relationship:
High libido early in a relationship
For many people, it’s common to feel intense and frequent sexual desire early in a relationship or dating. A major relational driver for many people is novelty — the intensity of everything being new, exciting, and revealing of the person you’re interested in, including sex.
Sex can also be correlated with intimacy and connection. At the beginning stages of dating, we’re almost overdosing on connection — we’re learning a lot more about the person we’re seeing very rapidly, and probably spending lots of long dates and late hours just talking and developing emotional intimacy. For many people, this emotional connection feels linked to a desire for physical connection — and may make us feel more emotionally connected to our date, which is often what we’re looking for in the early days. When we’re riding a several-months-long connection high, sex with this new and exciting person may feel totally intoxicating.
Alternatively, we may be strongly drawn to sex with new partners because we don’t have much emotional intimacy established with them yet — before we know the true inner landscape of the person we’re seeing, it’s easy to focus entirely on their physical attractiveness and the broad signals they’re sending to our attachment programming. For instance, if the tall, dark and gorgeous person you’ve been seeing for a few weeks is totally your physical type and also doesn’t always respond to texts for a day or two, revving up your anxious attachment type, it’s possible that this will express itself as an intense desire to have as much sex with this person as possible.
Low(er) libido early in a relationship
There are a lot of entirely valid reasons why you might experience middling to low desire for a new partner early in a relationship. First, it’s important to remember that no two people on earth have the same sex drive — someone is always going to be the person who wants sex less, and there’s no moral component to that. It could be that you always have a lower sex drive than your new date, and with good communication and care that doesn’t need to be an issue.
It’s also possible that rather than being drawn to novelty, you’re someone whose sexual attraction is predicated on trust and intimacy. For many people, desire is something that grows alongside deepening intimacy with a new person, and they feel most drawn to sex with people they trust deeply. This is often a very healthy and sustainable pattern for connection with others.
Remember also that your sense of what constitutes “low” libido may be subjective or based on anxieties. It’s easy to imagine everyone else is having more, better, more adventurous sex than we are. We may feel like having average desire for a new date means they aren’t really “the one” — after all, if they were, wouldn’t we want to rip their clothes off constantly? In reality, it’s rare to sustain that kind of intensity of desire, no matter how special the connection.
Shifting/context-dependent desire
Our bodies and brains are complex, and this includes our relationship to sexual desire and attraction. Sexual desire is about more than just physical type of our partner — it’s also impacted by our levels of stress and mental health, our relationships with our own bodies, the specific emotional and sexual dynamic we’ve built with this particular person, our psychological safety in the relationship, and even the other relationships in our life, like challenging family dynamics.
It’s completely possible you find your levels of desire and attraction shifting from day to day or situation to situation — you felt totally fired up while making out in the front seat of the car while dropping them off at work, but you feel ambivalent about sex after an hours-long romantic date when you have the whole evening ahead of you.
It’s completely normal if this describes you. It may be worthwhile to work on befriending and familiarizing yourself with your own internal sexual landscape. What turns you on most, and why? What circumstances or context does sex feel best to you in? Are there certain sex acts, like kink or anal, that are important to you, and you’re less interested in sex if they aren’t on the table? It may also be worth thinking about what kind of sexual dynamic you’re into — it’s possible you’re interested mainly in bottoming or topping, but have been trying to have kinds of sex that don’t resonate with you.
Regardless of the outcome of that process of sexual exploration, it’s okay if your sexual desire waxes and wanes at the outset — or throughout your entire relationship. Direct and transparent communication will set you and your partner up for success as far as being on the same page sexually.
Recommended Books:
Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure
Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Long-Lasting Relationship
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