Latest / The XX Lab / Lost the Attraction to Your Partner? How to Tell If It's Hormones | Dr. Sarah Hill
Transcript
- AUDIO SXX EPXX SAHIL THE PILL AND ATTRACTION EXPLAINER: If you've been on social media lately, you probably have heard some version of this warning. Go on the pill and you might choose the wrong partner. Or come off the pill and you might suddenly realize you're no longer attracted to the person that you're with. I'm Dr. Sarah Hill, and I'm a research psychologist who studied women's hormones and sexual psychology for more than 25 years. I'm also the author of This Is Your Brain on Birth Control and the Period Brain. And so I'm somebody who reads the research literature. I've done some of the research myself. And I'm not just some asshole from the comments section who's seen a couple of TikTok videos and therefore thinks that they are a hormone expert. Let's talk about what we actually know. First, how do hormones actually influence attraction? Yes, hormones can influence attraction, but they do not determine attraction. And they're probably not influencing attraction in the dramatic light switch way that social media sometimes make it sound like they do. Instead, your hormones are not flipping a switch on and then flipping it off. They're really more acting like a thumb on a scale. They can change the weight that you give to different qualities that you value in a relationship, but they do not fundamentally change what you value altogether. For example, at some points, sexual chemistry might carry a little bit more weight and be more important to you than it is at other points. And research suggests that estrogen may play a role in placing a greater weight on those qualities. At other times, closeness, comfort, and security may carry more weight with you. And research suggests that progesterone and the hormonal state created by the birth control pill may play a role in placing a greater emphasis on that. So hormones can influence what grabs your attention and how heavily you weight it. But this is a very different story than saying that your hormones replace your preferences with those of somebody else. Right. And this distinction matters because I think that one of the biggest mistakes that we make with hormones is that we imagine that there's some wiser hormone-free version of ourselves that lives beneath all of the hormones, and that if we could strip away all of the estrogen and progesterone or the birth control pill. That then we can discover what we really want. But that woman doesn't exist because we are always hormonal as women. The woman that you are in across your menstrual cycle is hormonal. The woman that you are when you're pregnant is hormonal. The woman that you are in paramenopause is hormonal. And the woman that you are on hormonal birth control is hormonal. None of these women gets to be declared the real you. Instead, we are our hormones. And this is actually really intuitive. Because this is something that happens even with qualities that have nothing to do with hormones. Right. Think about a person that you're with, right? And sometimes you look at this person and you think to yourself, my gosh. I'm so attracted to you. How did I get so lucky? And then there are other days when you look at the exact same person and all of a sudden the way that they chew seems like a fundamental character defect and you can't imagine how you ever chose them as a mate. And chances are your relationship didn't change overnight. Instead, something about your internal state changed. Maybe you're exhausted. Maybe you're stressed out. Maybe you're in a terrible mood or you just got a lousy performance review at work. suddenly all of these different things about your partner will start to grab your attention because your mood has changed. Hormones do something similar. They change what becomes salient or noticeable about a potential partner or partner that you already have. This doesn't mean that the feeling isn't real. It just means that the feeling is state dependent. And that brings us to the first thing that you're gonna want to do and that is learn to not treat your feelings like a verdict. If your attraction suddenly feels different, whether that's going on or off the pill or during a particular part of your menstrual cycle, Notice it, but get curious. Don't immediately decide that you've uncovered some hidden truth about your relationship. Let's say, for example, that you've been off the pill for three weeks, you're sitting across from your partner at dinner, and all of a sudden you're thinking, I don't know that I'm attracted to him anymore. And because you've seen 12 TikTok videos telling you that coming off the pill reveals who you're really attracted to, you're halfway through composing the breakup text in your head before you even finish your meal. Don't do that. You have only one data point from a body whose hormonal environment is changing. You need to give yourself time to see whether the feeling persists. Does it still feel true at different points in your cycle? Does it still feel true a few months from now? Does it disappear when you're sleeping better, less stressed, or feeling closer to your partner? Three weeks off the pill is not truth serum for your relationship. Right. The question isn't how do I feel about my partner today? The better question is what has been true often enough that I should start believing it? Right. The second thing that I want you to do is learn to separate libido from attraction because these are two different things. They're cousins, not twins. Your libido is your sex drive, and your libido is something that's going to wax and wane, something that's influenced by our hormones, but also influenced by things like stress and sleep and illness. medications that we're on, what's happening at work, whether or not our kids have been making us insane all day, and about a hundred other things can influence our sex drive. One mistake that we oftentimes make is interpreting our attraction as being the same thing as libido, where we think I don't want to have sex with my partner as being equivalent to I'm not attracted to my partner anymore. But these are not necessarily the same things. Here's a useful question we can ask ourselves to make that distinction. Is my lack of interest specific to my partner? Or is sex in general basically fallen off the radar screen for me? If you don't want sex with your partner, but you also don't really want sex with anybody else and you really haven't been fantasizing very much and you're not masturbating and sexual cues that would normally get your attention and turn you on are just a big that's a Pretty good clue that what may have changed is your libido, not your attraction. Or you can even run a little thought experiment. Ask yourself, if I magically had eight hours of sleep, no stress, no responsibilities, and a really nice hotel room for the night, would I want to have sex with this person? If the answer is, my gosh, 100% yes, then your relationship may not be the problem. Attraction is probably intact. You might just need a nap. Now I want you to imagine something different. Imagine that your libido seems perfectly intact. You're having sexual fantasies, other people are catching your eye. The idea of sex sounds great. It's just the idea of sex with your partner that you don't want. That's different information. Now I want you to note that this also doesn't necessarily mean doomsday. Attraction waxes and wanes in long-term relationships, but it is worth paying attention to. If hormones are a thumb on a scale, then you want to learn how your scale moves. And the easiest way to do this is to track yourself. And so I want you to do this starting tonight. Tonight, one minute before you go to bed, pull out your phone or a notebook and record five things. The first thing I want you to track is your cycle day. And remember, the first day of your cycle is the day you start your period. And then each day after that counts each subsequent day. So five days after you get your period, for example, is day five of your menstrual cycle. Then I want you to use a one to five or one to seven scale where one is very low and five or seven is very high. And I want you to rate the following things: sexual desire, mood, stress, and attraction to your partner. That's it. And I want you to do this for two full cycles, not two weeks, not two days, two cycles. And then go back and look for the shape. Not the bad days, the shape. Does attraction reliably dip at a particular point in your cycle? Does sexual desire rise while attraction stays relatively stable? Did the days when your partner drives you insane also happen to be the days when your stress is through the roof? You're looking for repetition. Because the fact is the feelings are real, but real doesn't mean permanent. Think about the difference between the weather and the climate. If there's a thunderstorm today, the thunderstorm is real. But that doesn't necessarily tell you very much about the climate that you're in. Attraction is similar. A temporary shift tells you something about your state. A persistent shift may be telling you something about your relationship. And you need to collect enough data to know which one you're looking at. Tracking is especially useful if you're considering starting, stopping, or changing hormonal birth control. Get your before. Track yourself for a cycle or two before making the change if you can, and then keep tracking afterward. Right now you actually have something to compare. Which brings us to the fourth thing that I want you to do today, to start making your hormones work for you. Because once you know your patterns from tracking your cycle, you can actually use that information to your advantage. First, I want you to lean into the good stuff. If you notice that there are certain points in the month when you reliably feel more sexual, more flirtatious, more interested in your partner, for God's sake, take advantage of that. This is a good time for you to be planning the date night, planning the weekend away. If you've got kids, this is a good time to get the babysitter. This is the time to wear the good underwear and wear the good perfume and really lean into the experience, lean into your inner sex kitten. Because the fact is most of us schedule intimacy around work and family obligations. And then we wonder why sometimes it feels effortless and other times intimacy just feels like one more thing on the to-do list. Right? Why do we do this to ourselves? If your body is already giving you a tailwind, for heaven's sake, use the tailwind. That doesn't mean that you can only have sex during some magical three-day window. Of course, that isn't true. It just means that there's no prize for deliberately making things harder for yourself. Lean in when you feel like it. Secondly, buffer yourself from the headwinds. Maybe you know that there's a few days every month when you're feeling a little bit more irritable and less interested in sex. Or you're considerably less enchanted by your otherwise enchanting partner, that doesn't mean that everything that you feel during those days is fake. But knowing your pattern gives you context. When your partner leaves the socks on the floor for the 875th time, and you suddenly find yourself wondering whether or not the two of you actually have fundamentally incompatible values, you can recognize, I know what's happening here. And then you can ask yourself, does this need to be dealt with today? Is the sock problem really that important? Sometimes the answer is yes. If there is something genuinely wrong, your menstrual cycle and your hormones don't make it any less wrong. But sometimes you can put a pin in it. If it still feels important next week, you can have the conversation about it then. You don't have to resolve every feeling the exact moment you experience it. And third, bring your partner into the mix. Don't wait until you're in the middle of a low desire week and start pushing your partner away to explain what's happening. Instead, you want to tell them ahead of time. You can say like, hey, I've noticed something about myself, and there's a few days every month when I tend to want more space and I'm much less interested in sex, and it just isn't about you. It's just the way that I'm feeling. And the feeling always passes. Now your partner has a completely different story available to explain your behavior. Right. Instead of thinking, my goodness, she's pulling away from me. Is there something wrong? Instead, he's able to say to himself, you know, she told me that this is gonna happen. This can really prevent the hormonal fluctuation from becoming a relationship problem. Because sometimes the problem isn't the fluctuation itself, it's the meaning that your partner assigns to it. So here's what I want you to remember when you walk away from this video. One, hormones influence attraction, but it's the thumb on the scale, not the light switch. Two, they can also change what grabs your attention and how much weight you give to it. Right? This means that a change in how you're feeling is worth noticing, but it doesn't automatically reveal a revelation. Right? So you're going to want to go and collect data before you draw conclusions about your own attraction. Also separate libido from attraction and learn your own patterns. You want to use these to your advantage. Where you lean into times when desire and attraction come easily, and then you give yourself some grace when they don't. Know when you've got a tailwind and know when you've got a headwind. And don't confuse either one of these with the direction that your relationship is going. Life gets a whole lot easier when you learn to work with them. And lastly, if you're thinking about coming off the pill, I made a whole episode about that. It covers what changes, what doesn't, and four things that I recommend that you do before you stop. You can find that video right here. I'm Doctor Sarah Hill. Thanks for tuning in.