'My Partner Isn't Attracted to Me Anymore!'

These nagging doubts are a trail of crumbs that leads to a more passionate life, with or without him.

Birthday (1942) by Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly!

I have written several draft letters to you over the last several months about this big swirly vortex of emotions and thoughts I can't parse through. How should I start this one? How about here: I am incredibly sensitive. I never let things go, memories cling to me like needy children, and I'll remember a hurt forever. If something good happens, I hold onto it until it's dust in my hands. If something bad happens, it colors my experience of that person or place forever. I think I've always been like this.

So, the situation causing the vortex: I am several years into a serious relationship with a very nice man. We fell deeply in love very quickly, in college, and it was my first real relationship. I poured my whole soul into it. He's from the city where we went to college; I'm from far away. I stayed there after college mostly for him, growing to love and despair the city in equal measure — it is gorgeous and wild and lovely and a deeply terrifying place to live. Three years ago, after one too many climate disasters, I decided to leave the city. He came with me, leaving his hometown for the first time. Now we live closer to where I'm from, and have a beautiful rented apartment and a sweet cat. The last four or so years have been insanely difficult due to external factors: My health took a nosedive, we got isolated in our new town, my parent died, we both had major work crises, his family left his hometown. But we try really hard to connect with the beautiful things in our lives every day despite depression and dread.

About six months ago now (!), my partner shocked me. I had been sulking to myself about not receiving enough physical affection from him, a recurrent issue that wasn't a dealbreaker, but it made me really sad and we struggled to talk about it constructively. Before we fell asleep one night, he told me he knew I knew something was wrong, and he wanted to be honest with me: I had gained weight and he wasn't feeling attracted to me anymore.

Polly, I was so shocked that I didn't even get angry. When my health crashed, I lost a whole bunch of weight and gained a whole lot of physical pain. When my childhood best friend visited, she immediately asked me what was wrong because I was so skinny. Another friend told me I looked like a Dostoyevsky character (she wasn't being mean, believe it or not). I felt awful. Maybe 8 months ago, I got a new diagnosis and changed up my meds, and started to finally fill out again. I was back to about the weight I had been in high school and college (not that I measure). The creases in my face were less visible, but more importantly, I didn't feel so much like a fucking skeleton. There was padding between my joints. I could do things like cook dinner and walk up stairs. I felt and looked better. And here was this person I had believed in, who was so kind and supportive to me when I first got sick, saying that he liked it better when I was a skeleton. I've still only told a few friends about this, because after so many years I have so few friends who aren't also his friends, and I don't want them to think less of him. If my best friend told me her partner had said something like this to her, I'd deck him.

After a sleepless night in separate beds, I of course told him how awful he made me feel. He was tearful and apologetic, saying that he was dumb to say anything and should have just kept it to himself. That didn't make me feel better. I told him that he needed to accept that my body was going to change, and that I'm not motivated by looking sexy — I'm motivated by feeling like a healthy functioning human person, and that as my partner, he needed to get on that same page ASAP. He understood that. I told him he needs to make me feel beautiful, and he has given me lots of physical affection since. We've talked a few more times about it since that awful night, but every time I bring it up, I think the conversation goes worse. He feels like I'm rehashing a dark moment and that we should move forward. Maybe he's right.

But Polly, something has changed since then. I used to dream about marrying this man, basically pestering him about it (he said we weren't ready yet). Those dreams have evaporated. I think I want kids, but I can't imagine having them with him anymore. I have this strong, deep urge to fling myself far away and be ALONE, like cross two oceans alone. I've never felt that before. And most embarrassing: I'm nursing this silly, fantastical crush on the person I loved before him, who I haven't spoken to in many years, and who to my knowledge has a very fancy, successful job a couple continents away. We had a deeply beautiful but very short, circumstance-limited fling on a trip years and years ago; my heart broke when we parted ways, and it took almost a full year before I started dating my current partner and finally gave up on door #1. Door #1 actually tried to reconnect a few years ago, but I was with my current partner and shut it down. Now I can't stop thinking about door #1, fantasizing about how great life would be if only I could open it. If only distance and time and money didn't make it impossible to open that door!

It's not like I've given up on my current partner. He really is a kindhearted and smart person, and we've built a very nice life together. But sometimes when I am falling asleep in his arms, I feel these alternate waves of pleasure and disgust and love and not-love crashing over me. I'm so confused! I can't ignore the years of beautiful relationship we've built, but I also can't forget the hurt he caused me. And my brain won't let go of door #1, like a dog with a damn bone. I keep thinking: if only I could keep everything in my life the same, but swap out the men. As if that were possible. (As if there were only two doors in this vast, vast world!)

So here I am, stuck between a beautiful, impractical dream and my confusing, difficult reality. I know I can't break up with my partner without exploding both of our lives, and I am so sick of getting my life exploded, and I know he is, too. I know that he has been good to me before, that I chose him before, that I have desired him fiercely. But I can't stop the wondering. Yearning, even. I want to know who I am without a crisis, I want to know if I can take care of myself. Part of me thinks I need to cut the safety net of my current relationship in order to really find that out. But I am afraid of exploding a love that has been beautiful, afraid of living on my own and getting worse, afraid of starting over AGAIN after so many failures. I don't know if I'm in love or not, or with who: partner, fling, or myself.

Woof. My life is beautiful, but inside my brain I'm stuck under all these waves. I want to break up but I want to stay but I want to move across the world but I also really like the life we have built. Help????

No One's Skeleton

Dear NOS,

We all want to be released from our nagging doubts. They’re unpleasant. They make us question everything. They mess with our good life.

But sometimes nagging doubts are there for a reason. We need to study them, listen to them, watch them grow and shrink. As frightening as our doubts are, we need to unearth them, take them out into the open air, and study them in bright light.

And then we need to sit with them patiently, doing nothing. We need to resist the urge to decide, to change everything, to reengineer our entire lives. We need to use our imaginations, sure, but we also need to breathe in reality, be where we are, and eliminate all urgency from the picture. We need to remind ourselves: I don’t have to panic about this. I can just keep feeling what I’m feeling without fear. I can allow this pain and this longing to help me grow and expand past this moment.

Both you and your partner are grappling with nagging doubts, but you don’t know what the deeper sources of your doubts are. Your partner has, like so many men before him, translated his doubts into something visual: You look different than before, therefore I am less attracted to you! You’ve translated your doubts into romantic notions about the past and the future: I loved this other guy once. Maybe with him I’d be more passionate and happier and more secure!

You feel hurt by your partner’s words. I would’ve been hurt by them, too, and I also would’ve ended up delivering a long lecture about how sick and warped modern beauty standards are. I would’ve gone on and on about how much I love a few extra pounds on myself and others. Like you, I like bodies that look healthy and resilient and strong.

But let’s move past that layer. Let’s dig deeper into his doubt and ask where it comes from. Let’s ask ourselves whether or not he has the capacity to understand his own desires and preferences. Is this supposed change in attraction a manifestation of his fear of losing you? Is he protecting himself? Does he feel distant from you for reasons he can’t accept or face? Does his shame and lack of curiosity about himself block him from knowing more and growing more?

We know how you feel about your body. You feel proud and strong. But how do you feel about your partner? Are you attracted to him, or has that changed, too? Do you feel withdrawn from him for reasons you haven’t articulated, for fear of hurting him? Do his harsh words about your weight make you feel like he’ll never love you in the soulful way you imagined he might?

Now I need to tell you a story. A few nights before my double mastectomy four years ago, I told my husband that even though he was determined to love me no matter what, once my body had been rearranged dramatically, he might have a bad reaction to it. After my operation, he might feel less attracted to me than he was before.

I told him that he shouldn’t feel guilty about this. I could handle it.

It helped that I wasn’t dying. It helped that I didn’t have to do chemo. It helped that I knew I had a very good plastic surgeon and I would probably look okay. But what surprised me was how I felt: I felt calm and confident. I wasn’t afraid.

Maybe I would end up flat or with bad implants. I would definitely have scars. Maybe I would wind up looking incredibly different. But somehow I wasn’t worried. Of course I wanted to be attractive, not just to my husband but to the entire galaxy, because that’s how I am. I’m vain. I like attention. I want to feel beautiful.

Even so, I felt very sure that I could find new ways to feel beautiful. So I told my husband, “I’m not going to blame you if you’re not attracted to me. I’m pretty sure I can find takers. I know I’m going to look good to someone, even if I don’t look good to you anymore.”

This probably sounds a little fantastical of me, but it’s how I felt. And it felt GOOD to feel so sure of this. It wasn’t that I actually suspected that my husband would stop being attracted to me. But I wanted to make it clear to him that whatever HIS anxieties about the future might be, I wasn’t panicked. I knew I would be fine!

This discussion with my husband wasn’t about looks, exactly. It wasn’t about the specifics of how my new, reconstructed body would look. It was about me reminding myself that I WILL ALWAYS BE SEXY TO THE RIGHT PERSON.

I know that lots of people are going to argue with me about this. They’re going to say “No! You’re living in a fantasy! That’s not how the world works at all!” So I’m going to have to get more explicit with you now: I have scars where my nipples used to be, and I absolutely don’t see them as flaws. In fact, they feel like odd works of art to me, a surgeon’s willful inscription, like a signature across my chest, a first and last name. I was rearranged by an artist who tried to make a masterpiece out of my living cells.

I’m not arguing that my scars are objectively beautiful. But I am arguing that they will look beautiful to anyone who truly understands me and respects my desires and grasps the wide range of moods and creative impulses and big ideas that live under my skin. My scars will look exquisite and exciting to anyone who truly, deeply loves me and wants to be as close to me as they can possibly get.

It’s not that I didn’t go through hell at times, or that I haven’t had doubts. It’s not that I never feel ugly. But there’s this core part of me that knows that I will always shine, and those who shine the way I shine will recognize it and feel it.

While we’re in this weird territory, I’d also argue that my despair, my rage, my longing, my imagination, my strange taste, my loves, my odd habits, my random hobbies, and my bizarre digressions are all things that someone who respects and desires me will ALSO find fascinating and exciting and suspenseful. I’d argue that someone who loves being alive and learning more and more every day as much as I do will naturally be drawn to all of the flaws and curiosities in my big, unwieldy treasure chest of a self.

I have a guy friend who once said to me, “I wish I had met you when you were 28. We would’ve had so much fun together!” This, to him, was a sexy thing to say. But what I thought was, “Huh? I am so much better now. And if you think I was better then? Jesus. You really aren’t attuned to who I am and what I’m made of at all.”

I’m telling you all of this because I think your situation right now is much deeper and more complex and more vitally important to your future happiness than it might appear to a casual observer. Just as my understanding of my own value and appeal solidified right before my double mastectomy, I think your grasp of who you are and what you want from your life is coming into focus through the crucible of this remark that hurt you so deeply.

You’re confused by your partner’s reaction because it makes so little sense to you. You’re so much stronger and healthier now! But your partner wants you frail and weak? What the fuck is wrong with him? It’s not just about attraction, right? You’re wondering if he understands what makes you special at all.

Even though that’s infuriating, without compassion for each other, you and he both run the risk of not understanding what it all means. Is his so-called lack of attraction to your new body a long-delayed manifestation of his fear of losing you when you were sick? Is this just his body protecting himself from a person who might ‘abandon’ him in her sickness? Or does he, just like you, find it difficult and taxing and not that passionate to navigate your current crisis-free existence after so many years of struggle together?

Does he associate passion with struggle? Do you? Does the fact that things are comfortable mean that it’s boring to you? Is the relationship between you asleep or half-dead? Did he subconsciously use the jolt of a hurtful remark to shake you both out of a withdrawn, passion-less state?

I think readers sometimes mistake my digging into these sorts of layers as a sign that I privilege long-term commitments, marriage, and maintaining the status quo over big break ups, or that I often forgive the flaws of careless men in particular. This is as far from the truth as it gets! I can’t know whether your partner is good or bad for you based on the few words you’ve sent me. What I care about is the enormous potential for growth that’s offered by this crisis!

So I want you to look very closely at the layers of fear, anxiety, restlessness, and wonder that are embedded in this very important moment of your life. That’s THE OPPOSITE of maintaining the status quo. What I’m advocating is a level of self-love and self-knowledge that eliminates the HURT from the picture, and increases your curiosity, expands your horizons, and strengthens the understanding between you and your partner, whether you stay together or split up.

The staying together or splitting up is far less important than what you learn from where you are at this moment. You need to know that you are beautiful. You need to feel it and own it. You need to understand your value, in other words. Understanding your enormous charms and delights makes you feel beautiful, even if you’re a scaly sea monster with red goopy eyes and sharp claws. When you love your own desires and passions, when you love your freaky imagination and your odd moods and your sadness and yes, even your nagging doubts, you feel gorgeous and divine.

When you love yourself generously and fiercely, you are built to give love generously. That makes you luminous. You are built to forgive those who can’t give a thing, who can’t see past their own limited, childish, rigid notions of what beauty is, who can only embrace youth and smooth lines and perfect little pink nipples, lol.

Nipples are overrated, in my opinion. JUST MY TWO CENTS! The two cents of a savage beast who lurks under dark waves, hungry for a salty man-snack. Muhahahahahaha!

In order to connect with another human being at the deepest level possible, you have to make space for monsters and luminosity and otherworldly desires. And yes, you sometimes have to confront limited, childish, rigid notions of what beauty is. You have to forgive yourself and each other for being molded by a dumb, superficial world. You have to scrape off the preexisting prejudices and stupidity you’ve accumulated over the years. You have to respect each other’s shortcomings and soothe each other’s injuries.

To have a deep love for each other, to inspire each other, to incite passion in each other, you have to approach the other person like they’re a work of art. Sex is worship. Affection is signing your name across someone’s body over and over, and saying, with tenderness, “You don’t belong to me, you belong to yourself. I respect your independent experience. I forgive your rage and your longing. I admire your infinite capacity for new sensations and desires.”

You can’t treat another human like a work of art until you treat yourself that way.

Can you?

I think you can. And I think that’s what this very important moment in your life is asking from you. This moment wants you to grow and expand and tap into your limitless passion. You have so much more to offer this world, and so much more to feel. You are expanding in every direction right now, which is why this notion of A LOVER TWO OCEANS AWAY is lighting up all of your senses. You know exactly how you want to feel, don’t you?

So don’t ask yourself which of these men is best. That question feels way too small for the moment. Because you will always have takers. Tell this world who you are and what you believe in instead. State your name and what you’re made of. Make it clear that you will not compromise your dignity, your power, or your passion for any man.

Treat your body like a priceless work of art. Honor it. Expect to be honored.

I know I’ll never spend a minute with a man who doesn’t see my scars as beautiful. If he sees them as ugly, then he’s not seeing me at all. It’s such a helpful tool, such a useful litmus test! It’s a shortcut to knowing whether or not someone senses my complexity and respects my brilliance and admires all of me, which includes my harrowing past, my hidden longing, my vast imagination, and my savage heart.

When you know what you are and you love what you are, you’re not afraid of discovering that someone else DOESN’T. You want to know the truth. Because you know, in your heart, that you will never, ever accept half-assed love from someone who can’t see you clearly. You love yourself too much for that.

So your path is crystal clear, isn’t it? You will honor a grown adult who sees you clearly, who recognizes your power, who admires and worships you with the awe and reverence that you deserve. Anything less is not enough.

Polly

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