Is the fading of sexual desire an inevitable consequence of a long-term relationship?

In his article Limitations to the Capacity to Love (2011), Otto Kernberg, M.D.,  basis of analytic work with individual patients and with conflicts of couples in later life years, notes:

Passionate encounters and an intense sexual relationship are a long-range aspect of a love relationship that does not necessarily diminish or disappear throughout time.

Inhibitions in the passionate nature of sexual encounters of long-lasting relationships usually reflect unconscious conflicts throughout the entire spectrum of a couple’s object relationship, and may improve dramatically in the course of treatment. Mutual superego projections and acting out of conflicts around aggression are leading psychodynamic features of these conflicts. 

The fact that, physiologically, the frequency of desire for sexual relations decreases in the case of men while it maintains itself relatively stable in the case of women does not imply the decrease of the intensity of meaningfulness of erotic engagements at any stage of life. 

The development of sexual boredom in a long-term, lasting relationship is a typical symptom of narcissistic pathology. 

This is a widespread symptom, particularly exacerbated, of course, as part of a persisting syndrome of separation of idealized desexualized love objects and devalued but sexually exciting ones, perhaps the most frequent expression of a combination of unresolved oedipal conflicts and narcissistic pathology.

In successful love relationships, by contrast, Kernberg notes that partners may develop a broad and flexible capacity to adapt mutually to each other’s sexual interests and needs. This stands in contrast to the typical intensification of differences in sexual interests, which may become an overt battleground concealing deeper conflicts in the couple’s relationship. 

In a mature love relation, the idealization of the body of the other, the experience of physical beauty of the other in the light of one’s love is a permanent aspect of love, and does not need to be affected by the changing aspects of the body as an effect of aging or illness. 

To love the other with shortcomings and problems includes the love of the other with physical imperfections, as is the capacity to honestly share with the other one’s concern about physical shortcomings or imperfections in oneself.

To share the intimacies of one’s body is the counterpart to sharing the intimacies about one’s emotional life and problems, sharing one’s sexual desires and uncertainties in the same way as one’s uncertainties, fears and conflicts regarding competition, jealousy, financial uncertainties, threatening family members and conflicts with parents and adult children. 

The tolerance of the manifestations of aging, in oneself and the other, without any loss of the erotic excitement with the body of the other, is a consequence of the dominance of Love over Aggression, of maintained idealization of the surface of the body in contrast to the unconscious projection of aggression into the body of the other, the early mechanism of the origin of the sense of beauty.

At bottom, the real unconscious conflict is not between the tender, stable nature of emotional commitment and passionate eroticism, but between Love and Aggression within both the tender emotional and the passionate sexual realm, and within the superego structures involving the ego ideal of the couple and persecutory superego features.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy