Why High Performing Women Lose Touch With Desire

Dear Nicole,

I don’t even know if this is a sex question or something else. My husband and I have a fine sex life. Nothing’s wrong, exactly. But somewhere along the way I stopped being able to tell him, or honestly even myself, what I actually want. I don’t think I ever did. I can tell you exactly what I want in a client negotiation. I have zero problem being direct at work. But in bed I just... go along. I perform interest, I perform enjoyment, and half the time I don’t actually know underneath it whether I’m into what’s happening or just managing it so it goes smoothly. Is that a desire problem, or is something else going on?”

Thanks,

Dawn

Hi Dawn,

It’s not a desire problem. It’s a voice problem — and the fact that it shows up in bed and nowhere else in your life is a useful clue you’ve given me.

Before I explain why, I want to stay with the phrase you chose: going along. These words are not describing the edge of a much larger loss, rather than a minor accommodation.

Going along enough times — performing interest, managing the moment so it lands smoothly, monitoring whether you’re responding correctly rather than noticing what you actually feel — doesn’t just cost you energy. It costs you your body as a source of information. The body stops being somewhere you live and becomes something you operate from a slight remove, such as the way you’d run a system you understand well but don’t inhabit. And when the body is rarely consulted and trusted, she will eventually pause reporting. It goes quiet — not the quiet of ease, but of shutdown. The signals that previously informed you that you want this, not that, good, wrong stop arriving, because the messages have been overridden rather than listening to them.

This is the actual danger of going along, and it extends well past the bedroom: enough disconnection from your body’s signals, and you lose access to yourself. This occurs gradually, almost undetectably, because from the outside everything continues to look composed and your to-do list takes priority.

What I hear beneath your letter is not “my desire is low,” but “I am no longer certain how much of me is still present.”

Duty is not desire & what your are passing down now

The cultural narrative influences a women’s relationship to her body and sexuality. For most of history, women’s sexuality had little to do with wanting at all. It was organized around duty — a husband’s needs, a marriage’s stability, a household’s peace. Whether a woman desired anything was, for most of recorded time, simply beside the point.

We are living in the first era that expects something different: that a woman’s sexuality rooted in desire rather than obligation, in pleasure and genuine wanting rather than accommodation. That expectation is, historically brand new and nobody handed most women the internal architecture to meet it.

You were likely raised by the old inheritance (be pleasing, be available, keep things smooth) while being told to produce the new outcome (want it, mean it, feel it). Going along is what happens when a woman is fluent in the first language and has never been taught to speak the second. This evolution isn’t a defect in you. It’s an entire cultural transition still moving through a single body, yours, faster than any of the surrounding scripts have caught up.

Where going-along was first learned

There is also a well-documented developmental moment — usually early adolescence — when girls who spoke with complete clarity as children begin losing access to what they know. Not because the knowledge disappears, but because they learn, rarely through anything explicit, that saying what they honestly think aloud could cost them a friendship, a room’s ease, someone else’s comfort. So the knowing goes underground rather than vanishing. A girl learns to say “I don’t know” about things she knows precisely, because the uncertainty is a safer currency than clarity.

This was never merely a way of speaking. It is a way of inhabiting our bodies — a bracing, a habitual self-monitoring, a reflex of checking the room before checking yourself. This reflex becomes the operating stance the body takes toward everything - pleasure, want, and the basic experience of being inside your own skin rather than watching yourself from just outside it. If your early training was to read what was wanted from you and produce it seamlessly, that training does not politely exempt your sexuality. It often governs there because there is no other learned options so the old strategy defaults to exactly what you described: manage it so it goes smoothly. It isn’t that you were choosing vagueness to stay safe. It’s that not knowing became the protection itself — if you never let yourself find out what you wanted, there was nothing specific to be judged, rejected, or wrong. The not-knowing wasn’t a decision. It was what safety required.

Why it can feel safer to manage than to want

A second mechanism operates alongside, which is what you learned, very early, about how closeness survives.

If you grew up learning that your genuine reactions — your no, your hesitation, your specific want — could destabilize someone you depended on, you likely built something in the direction of what attachment research names an avoidant or deactivating strategy: a nervous system that preserves connection by minimizing its own signal rather than risking one that might land badly. This isn’t distance for its own sake. It is an old and serious form of care, both for the relationship and for yourself, achieved by keeping your inner weather a degree quieter than it actually was.

That strategy is excellent at producing smoothness. It is nearly engineered to prevent the exact thing you’re asking about — knowing, in real time, whether you actually want something or are simply managing the room. If the deepest rule you absorbed was don’t destabilize the bond with your own realness, then going along in bed isn’t confusion. It’s loyalty to an old and well-earned rule. Your body is doing precisely what it was trained to do. The problem is that the rule was written for a much younger nervous system, in a considerably less safe context, and it may no longer be reporting the truth of what’s needed now.

Why this cannot be resolved by thinking harder about it

Here is what derails almost every capable woman working through this exact question: because the loss lives in the body, it cannot be undone purely in the mind. You can absorb everything above, recognize yourself completely in it, and still find nothing shifts — because insight was never the missing piece. Your mind already understands this. The body is a slower, more skeptical student. It will not believe a new account of itself until it has had a new experience of safety.

Desire is the act of owning your own wanting. It is an expression of sovereignty, not an involuntary reflex — you can be compelled into behavior, but never into desire itself. This means desire is not a switch waiting to be located. It is closer to a form of authorship: the capacity to know, and hold, and voice what you want, without waiting for anyone else’s permission to consider it legitimate.

Pleasure requires witnessing. It is very difficult to experience pleasure without some aware, attentive part of you registering that you are experiencing it — the same way it’s nearly impossible to feel connected to someone without some part of you noticing the connection as it happens. If your attention is occupied entirely with managing how you appear, none of it is left over to register what you actually feel. You cannot outsource your awareness to performance and still expect pleasure to register underneath it. The two require the same attentional resource, and going along spends it all on the wrong side of the ledger.

The practical version of this work is almost deceptively small: name a want aloud without shrinking it or apologizing for its size. Receive something pleasurable without immediately converting it into gratitude, reciprocity, or guilt — let a good sensation belong to you that is unearned and unmanaged. These moments teach a woman that her internal yes is permitted to exist and be spoken before anyone else has ratified it.

One honest complication

Female desire isn’t a fixed drive that switches back on once an old inhibition is cleared. It behaves more like an ember that requires deliberate, ongoing tending — imagination, novelty, a departure from the merely familiar — sustained actively over years, not restored once and then left alone. Which means the question isn’t only what old rule from your history is still running the show. It’s also what, in your present life, right now — the domesticity, the routine, the sheer familiarity of a long marriage — is quietly keeping desire dormant, independent of anything that happened to you at fourteen. The origin stories explains why the capacity went underground. It does not, by itself, explain what would make wanting feel alive again inside a specific, particular Tuesday of your actual life.

Both things are true at once: the old rule that taught you managing was safer than wanting, and the present-tense question of what would have to change in your sense of who you are outside of wife and managing this smoothly, for desire to have anywhere new to land.

Why sex is disclosing the truth, not concealing it

I would not treat what you’ve described as a bedroom problem to be solved. I would treat it as the clearest available reading of where an old rule is still governing, and where a present-tense rut may be reinforcing it.

Almost everywhere else in life, you can perform fluency and your body will comply. You can deliver the confident sentence in a negotiation while something in you braces. You can manage a room while quietly reading everyone else’s temperature. Adult life rewards precisely this kind of override so consistently that it can pass for health.

Sex is one of the few remaining places where the override doesn’t fully hold — where some part of you registers the difference between performing enjoyment and actually having it, even when you can’t yet name that difference in the moment. This is your body being more honest than almost anywhere else you’re permitted to be. It is telling you the going-along strategy is still active, and it is telling you precisely where to practice something else.

Where I would begin

Not with a technique for wanting more, or better, or more often. I would start smaller: notice a single moment, in bed or well outside of it, where you feel or thought of a genuine want and let it exist for a few seconds without editing it into something more acceptable or convenient. Not act on every one of them. Just let one be felt before you smooth it away. Then, you can see what you want to do with this want. Let yourself exist in it and choose.

This is the practice that lets a woman begin trusting what she knows again. Voice does not return through explanation. It returns through repetition, beginning with the wants you are least accustomed to being allowed to have and it has to be re-practiced, not just once discovered, for as long as you want it to stay alive.

You did not lose your voice. You relocated it to a place that felt safer to stay quiet. The work now isn’t finding it. It’s letting it be audible again, starting with the voice of your body.

Thank you so much for your question.

Warmly

Nicole Ohebshalom

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