Dear Carol,

My friend told me about your column and recommended that I contact you for any ideas you may have concerning my sexual problems. They seem larger than life to me, and since the birth of my perfect son three weeks ago, have taken a bizarre turn. I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone.

Here’s my problem. I am a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac married to a man who can happily have sex once a year. Now – since the birth -- I am not interested in having sex until it is time to conceive again. It may be 50% hormones and 50% I give up on a man who does not want me, I don't know -- but now he is taunting me sexually. He is suddenly very flirtatious, and I am almost insulted.

Do you think you have any advice? I am…

--Confused, and Maybe Desperate

Dear CMD,

First, about your sex drive and the sudden changes associated with it. (I’ll get to your husband in a minute.) You’re in the throes of intense physical changes brought on by, you’re guessing right, the hormone fluctuations that happen from pregnancy through birth and beyond. This is a more intense hormone roller coaster than even puberty, so just give yourself some time to adjust to it. (The other physical thing that may well be affecting your libido right now is lack of sleep – if your sleep cycle is being disrupted, as many new moms’ are, that can provoke enough of a stress reaction to change your relationship to your own sexuality, at least for a while.)

You might return to your nymphomaniacal desires fairly soon; one thing that can affect the length of time you remain under the influence of birth hormones is whether and how long you breastfeed. Some women also have a change in sex drive affected by their own postpartum self-image; pregnancy-related weight gain and body changes sometimes affect women’s sense of their own sexiness, although I want to note that it’s very possible to feel full of sexual desire whether or not you have a sexy self-image; those two things are not always completely linked. Plus, you could be turned off to any desire for intercourse or other partner sex, yet still want to masturbate. That’s one factor you might tune into to assess whether your libido changes are physical ones, or at least partly affected by the emotional tenor of your relationship.

Partners certainly often have differing levels of desire for sex, and sometimes differing types of sex are desired by each person – so that even if you both want sex approximately as often as the other, you can still be sexually incompatible. It sounds as though you and your husband have been pretty profoundly mismatched in that arena lately, and that by itself might eventually have been enough to put a dent in your libido with or without pregnancy-associated changes. You don’t say how long you’ve been married or whether your husband has acknowledged any concerns about having a low libido himself, but often people do not associate their own low libido with a problem – in fact, he may have been telling you that you had the problem. Has there been any talk of your being “oversexed”? The term “nymphomaniac” is often used in a pretty pejorative way, the notion being that it’s possible for a woman to want too much sex. This, of course, is completely subjective.

If you had not told me that all of a sudden your husband is coming on to you, I’d have treated your question as a (more or less) simple question of, as the sex therapists call it, “desire discrepancy disorder.” Instead, I need to say a word about his change of heart. From where I sit, this could be a fairly simple case of seesawing – when you stop pursuing him, he turns back to you. But if you have any sense that his new availability, if that’s what it is, is only happening because you’re not available, I’d say you do have a problem. And if he has ever bad-mouthed you for your sex drive, or is truly doing this now in a taunting way, he’s engaging in power tripping, even abuse. The question is, is he doing it consciously? The next question: Can he learn to (and is he willing to) stop?

I’m going to assume (for now) that he can reverse this pattern, probably with the support of a sex therapist. But let me get back to the question of his libido. If he’s monogamous with you yet wants sex as rarely as you report, it might be worth considering some common reasons libido takes a dive. True, some people just don’t want much sex. But if you have any sense that his libido has dropped since, say, the time you were married, it’s worth wondering whether your husband is depressed; has an organic illness; or is having his sex drive suppressed by medications, drugs, or alcohol. (These can cause libido problems and also erectile dysfunction – and a man who doesn’t get erections when he wants often turns off to sex.) Another thing that affects the sex drive is stress, which of course can come in many varieties.

Any of these issues can be successfully dealt with – by a physician or therapist, usually, or perhaps even just by his making a decision to change his life for the better. It does not sound from the tone of your letter, though, that he is busy seeking change. So I’m going to recommend two things for now.

First, check out the book The Sex-Starved Marriage: A Couple’s Guide to Boosting Their Marriage Libido by Michele Weiner Davis. The author is a marriage therapist whose approach is compassionate and no-nonsense at the same time. I’d recommend you read it and that you share it with your husband. You may both find a lot that resonates for you, since Weiner Davis addresses both the higher- and lower-libido spouse. (She is very clear that often the low-libido partner is male, so if you’ve been feeling that you might be the only woman out there with this problem, you’ll quickly learn how much company you have.) Other readers should note that when she says “marriage,” she doesn’t just mean any couple. She isn’t talking to people who live together, or to same-sex couples. People who aren’t heterosexual and married may well find useful info here, but they won’t find their own lives reflected in Weiner Davis’ pages.

Second, I’d recommend a therapist. If you want to stay married to this man, try to get him to go with you. If he won’t, go yourself. I’m concerned that the negative sexual messages you’re getting, not to mention the mixed ones, are wearing on your self-esteem, and also that you will need some support to intervene in your relationship’s problematic patterns. Good luck.