"I Want to WANT It" - What Low Desire Really Means (And Why It's Not Your Fault)
By Erinn Hoel, LCSW | Sex Therapist & Intimacy Coach
There's this phrase I hear from almost every single woman I work with, usually within the first five minutes of our first call.
"I want to WANT sex again."
Not "I don't want sex." Not "I'm not attracted to my husband." But this specific, confusing, kind of heartbreaking thing where you know you should want it, you wish you wanted it, and you genuinely can’t figure out why you don't.
And the fact that you want to want it somehow makes the whole thing worse. Because if you truly didn't care, you could just move on. But you do care. You care a lot. You just can't seem to close the gap between knowing you want to want it and actually wanting it.
So you lie there wondering if something is fundamentally wrong with you. You Google it. You try things. Nothing works. And the cycle keeps going.
Here's what I want you to know: that phrase, "I want to want it," is not a sign that you're broken. It's actually one of the most important clues about what's really going on. And once you understand it, the whole thing starts to make a lot more sense.
Why "I Want to Want It" Is Different From Just Low Libido
Most conversations about low desire treat it like a simple on/off switch. Either you want sex or you don't. Either your libido is there or it's gone.
But "I want to want it" doesn't fit that framework at all. Because you're not saying your desire is gone. You're saying it's somewhere you can't reach.
That distinction matters more than you might think.
Women who say "I want to want it" usually have what sex researchers call responsive desire. This means your desire doesn't show up on its own, out of nowhere, like it might seem to for your husband. It needs something fun, pleasurable, and connective to happen first, so your sex drive can RESPOND to that thing. It’s the connection that actually brings it online.
The problem is, when sex has become stressful, guilt-ridden, and loaded with pressure? Those conditions don't exist. So your desire is waiting for an environment it never gets.
It's not gone. It's just waiting. And it has been waiting for a really long time, which is why this feels so hopeless.
The Real Reason You Can't Just "Get in the Mood"
Here's the biology of this, and I promise it's going to make everything click into place.
Your brain runs two competing systems: your threat response (fight-or-flight) and your arousal response. And here's the thing nobody tells you: they cannot both be running at the same time. One shuts off when the other turns on.
When sex starts carrying weight, which it absolutely does when you've been avoiding it, feeling guilty about it, and bracing for the conversation every time he shifts toward you in bed, your brain starts filing "sex" under threat. Not consciously. You're not sitting there thinking "sex is dangerous." But your nervous system picks up on the stress and pressure around it and responds accordingly.
Fight-or-flight turns on. Arousal turns off. Every single time.
This is why you can want to want it intellectually and still feel absolutely nothing when your partner tries to initiate. Your brain isn't letting desire through because it's too busy managing the stress response that sex has triggered.
You're not broken. Your nervous system is doing its job. It just learned the wrong lesson about what sex means, and now it's protecting you from something you actually want.
Why This Gets More Confusing When You Actually Enjoy Sex
Okay, this is the part that really messes with people's heads.
A lot of the women I work with will tell me, almost sheepishly, that when they actually have sex they enjoy it. Sometimes it's even really good. And they cannot reconcile that with the fact that they dread it, avoid it, and feel zero desire before it happens.
This makes you feel even more broken, by the way. Because now it's not just "I don't want sex" but "I don't want sex even though I know I still like it sometimes," which feels genuinely insane.
But it makes complete sense once you understand what's happening.
The dread and avoidance happen before sex, when your nervous system is running its threat response and keeping desire locked out. Once you're actually in it and the threat response has calmed down, your body can access arousal again. So you enjoy it. And then the next time rolls around, and the cycle starts over.
The issue isn't that you don't like sex. The issue is that the path to getting there has become so loaded that your nervous system throws up a wall every single time.
"I want to want it" is your brain accurately describing this experience. You want to get there. You just can't figure out how to stop hitting the wall first.
I Know This Feeling Better Than I'd Like To
For years I was this person. I wanted to want it. I loved my partner. I knew it was important to our relationship. I even knew, in the back of my mind, that I'd probably enjoy it once we got there.
And yet every single night felt like this low-grade dread. Every touch felt loaded. Every time he looked at me a certain way, I felt my body go tense before my brain had even caught up.
I tried everything that was supposed to help. None of it worked because none of it addressed what was actually going on underneath. I wasn't dealing with a desire problem. I was dealing with a nervous system that had learned to treat sex as something to survive, not enjoy.
When I finally understood that, everything changed. Not overnight. But the path got clear in a way it never had been before.
That's the shift I want to help you make. Because "I want to want it" is not a life sentence. It's a starting point.
"I didn't realize how much shame I was carrying around the fact that I enjoyed sex when we had it but never wanted to start. I thought it meant something was wrong with me, like I was performing or something. When Erinn explained the nervous system piece it was honestly the first time I felt like my experience made sense.
I wasn't broken. My body had just learned to tense up with sex instead of look forward to it. And once we worked on that, I actually started to want it again."
— Katie, worked together 4 months
What Actually Helps (And Why Everything Else Misses the Point)
The conventional advice for low desire goes something like this: schedule sex, try new things, communicate more, take a supplement, do more date nights.
None of that is going to touch what's actually happening here.
Because all of those approaches are trying to generate desire in a nervous system that's still in threat mode. It's like trying to have a relaxed dinner conversation in the middle of a fire alarm. The environment isn't set up for it.
What actually helps is addressing the nervous system first. Getting your body out of fight-or-flight. Breaking the association between sex and stress. Creating the conditions where responsive desire can actually show up.
This is what Phase 1 of my Desire to Fire Method is entirely focused on. Not sex. Not desire. Not your relationship. Just getting your nervous system regulated enough that the door to desire can open again.
It sounds almost too simple. But the women I work with are consistently surprised by how much shifts just from this one piece. Energy comes back. The dread starts to lift. Touch stops feeling so loaded. And then, gradually, "I want to want it" starts becoming "wait, I think I actually do want it!"
That's not magic. That's biology working the way it's supposed to, once we stop fighting it.
You Don't Have to Keep Living in the "I Want to Want It" Space
If this post described your experience in a way that felt uncomfortably accurate, that's not a coincidence. This is exactly what I work on with women inside the Desire to Fire Method.
Here's what I know: 'I want to want it' does not fix itself. But it does get fixed, when you address what's actually causing it instead of throwing more date nights at it. If you're ready to stop waiting for desire to show up on its own and start doing something about it, the Desire to Fire Method is how we do that. Start here.
