I broke up with my long-term boyfriend and the end of 2011, when I moved out of our apartment. We got back together a few times over the next few months but ultimately it ended. Since then, I have not been in a serious relationship and have gone through some rough patches.
I never have had a high sex drive, in that relationship we went through patches of months without sex, which really hurt my insecure boyfriend. We also experimented with a lot of more out there things, when my spark was temporarily back. Since leaving him, I’m been more sexually active but I still do not have a high sex drive.
My behaviour after breaking-up was very promiscuous, I could see five different people in the space of four days and think nothing of it. I didn’t have sex with anyone more than three times. Any guys who wanted to actually reach out to me emotionally were met with indifference. Message after message from them would be ignored, despite them being nice guys.
I don’t seek sex because I’m horny, I see sex as a conquest, to make me feel in control. I think this is the reason why I have so much trouble combining sex with intimacy. Just sex or just intimacy I can handle, but when someone tries to combine the two (and there have been far too many) I completely clam up and have no idea what to do. Contaminating the intimacy with sex makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. The amount of times I’ve been told that we have a special connection actually makes me feel ill.
That creates a lot of guilt in me for not being able to reciprocate someone else’s feelings. Over the last 20 months in particular I was experiencing severe depressions split with increasingly severe hypomania, until I was hospitalised in August and diagnosed with bipolar. I had to move home, leave my job and go back to uni.
Now, I’m dealing with people who have stood by me all that time, being completely ignored by me, who still think I’m special enough to want me romantically. I haven’t made contact with my old friends at all since August – these people are my outside contact with the world. One person has put my head in a spin, the more intimate he becomes, the less I want sex, but sex is a huge part of a relationship for him. If I walk away, I’m back to social isolation. I like the guy, but I’m not sure I like him enough… otherwise I wouldn’t have been sleeping around so much when we first met and dated.
tldr; Can this be fixed? Romantic relationships are supposed to blend sex and intimacy, sex is supposed to be a form of intimacy. I can handle the sex… occasionally, but adding the intimacy, the emotions, the unity… it seems far too difficult.
