When She Has the Stronger Sex Drive; Part One.

Step #3. Monitor Your “Attributions” (For Example: Don’t Assume You Know Why His Desire is Low)

Typically, when a wife comes into my office concerned about her husband’s lack of sexual desire she tells me she is afraid he is attracted to men, is getting his sexual needs fulfilled elsewhere, or is no longer attracted to her body. We call these explanations of someone else’s behavior attributions. We view their behavior and attribute certain explanations to it. Our attributions can be accurate or inaccurate. Attributions can be positive and can affirm the marriage, or they can be negative and destructive.

My doctoral research focused on desire discrepancy in married couples. My findings showed that the greatest source of pain in couples was not based on who had the higher or lower desire. In essence, the high-desire spouse’s level of desire was not the cause of the distress, and the low level of the low-desire spouse caused only a small amount of marital distress. Actually, the greatest predictor of distress related to sexual desire in marriage was not the distance between the high and low spouse’s level of desire. Instead, the greatest predictor of distress was in the attribution of the high desire spouse.

Practically, what that means is that if you are the high-desire spouse in your marriage, what you think about your husband’s low desire is far more important than his actual desire level. Now, occasionally I do find that the wife’s worst fear about her husband’s low sex drive is true, but in most cases the reason is far more benign. The problem comes when, in their hurt, fear, and confusion, wives lock in on a negative attribution and don’t take the time to explore what might really be going on. They keep driving down the wrong road, demanding that their husband fix something that is not the core problem.

Thankfully, once you’re mindful of the attribution trap, you can easily avoid it.  Especially as you begin a good process for understanding where he is coming from — which is what we will cover in Part Two.

Read Part Two and Part Three or visit Shaunti.com.

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