Zoe and her husband, Charles, can’t keep their hands off each other. They were like this in the early stages of their relationship, too – “there was something wrong with us” – Zoe jokes about their prolific lovemaking. But this new, “giddy” phase is different.
“It feels like we’ve just started again. But with all this history, and this amazing child, and all this other stuff that binds us together,” she says.
Less than a year before I spoke with her, those bindings were coming loose. Zoe had a young child and she was working a difficult, high-stress job. To top it off, Charles was not helping. He chafed against the constraints of early fatherhood and parenting brought up difficult feelings about his own childhood that he struggled to understand.
“He started projecting all his insecurities on to our marriage,” Zoe says. He’d complain about how they hardly went out, hardly had sex. “All these things that are just a phase of your life when you have a small child … I was just getting so frustrated, because I felt like I was his carer and the carer of a baby.
In the end, she told him she could not cope any more and that there was no space for her emotional wellbeing. She was just worried about him, or catering to his needs, or catering to the baby’s needs.
She said: “It would just be easier to have me and the baby, to be honest.”
After some time apart, Charles realised he had to make changes. First, he tried to enlist Zoe in his self-improvement efforts. He asked her to write a list of everything she was doing around the house, so he could understand the tasks he had not been helping with. Her list being long enough without the addition of writing another list, Zoe refused.
Charles started seeing a psychologist and soon realised Zoe had been right about the housework too. “It was a long road of therapy, and he did a lot of work trying to understand the mental load … figuring out how to be a grownup, and a dad, and a husband all at the same time,” she says.
Eventually, “we got there. I finally have a teammate, an actual partner who picks up the slack without being asked, and who does things for us without being asked, and who takes control of situations without me having to tell him to.”
“It’s kind of hard not to be horny for someone who’s put in all this work to be a better person,” she says.
To me, Zoe’s story is a 21st-century fairytale. But not every Cinderella who finds herself stuck doing most of the emotional labour – alongside childcare, housework and work outside the home – can convince her handsome prince to pick up his broom and start sweeping.
Zoe is one of 55 women to have told me about her love life in the last two years. Some of those women were newly coupled up, some divorced, some permanently single and some in long-term relationships. And at least a quarter of those women had been in situations like Zoe’s at some point – long term relationships where they felt there was “no space” for their needs or desires. While Zoe’s story is far from the only happy ending these women shared, it is the only one that did not involve a breakup.
Aleks Trkulja, an Australian sex therapist, says it’s not uncommon for female clients to come into her practice with low desire or other sexual function issues that are clearly relational, not individual. Several other therapists have told me similar stories.
Therapists are trained not to be directive, says Dr Lori Brotto, a Canadian clinical and research psychologist who works with women experiencing low desire. While a girlfriend can tell a woman, “He’s a jerk, get rid of him,” Brotto can’t do that, “even when I’m thinking that”.
Rather than telling someone to leave, “it’s about asking the questions in a way that helps the person realise that actually their partner is contributing quite a bit to their low desire”.
The dynamic Zoe was experiencing before Charles stepped up is something Brotto sees frequently in her clinic. It is part of why she contributed to the heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire in women partnered with men.
Published in 2022 by some of the world’s leading researchers on human sexuality, this theory lays out how several gendered expectations placed on women (and men) serve to obliterate women’s sexual flourishing.
Dr Sari van Anders, a Canadian scientist, is the heteronormativity theory’s lead author; her work is in neuroendocrinology, sexuality and gender/sex. Over a video call, she explained to me that while the pressures that create gendered roles are social, they end up having a biological impact too.
For instance, being sexually aroused is a form of stress in that it’s different from how you usually feel. “People don’t walk around sexually aroused all the time, even those of us who might be sexually aroused very often,” van Anders says.
But if you’re stressed out, over time your body decreases the amount of stress hormones it releases in response to any given situation – regardless of whether that stress is good (like arousal) or bad (like coming home to a cockroach in the sink because someone didn’t do the washing-up at breakfast).
Women tend to experience much higher levels of chronic stress than men do, van Anders says, which can mean that over time, women’s bodies are just less able to react to things that might once have given them sexual feelings. “It’s not just our feelings that get burnt out, it’s also hormones and bodies.”
This isn’t the only change that takes place in unequal households. While her research is still in its early stages, van Anders is beginning to explore the ways in which certain forms of caregiving – a conflation between the role of sexual partner and mother – might also decrease women’s sexual responses.
“There’s evidence that parenting is associated with … a suppression of sexuality for most people,” van Anders says. This is a good thing – you do not want parents craving sex around their children. While it is hard to test for, there is some evidence to suggest that when women start to view their partners more like another child to care for rather than as an equal, the same suppression of sexuality might happen then, too.
While research into this phenomenon is only just beginning, the circumstances are nothing new. In 1987, when Shere Hite, a sex researcher, surveyed thousands of women, she reported that in 76% of households where women worked full-time or cared for young children, those women felt there was no concrete arrangement for sharing the domestic load. The assumption was that women would do the work and men would, possibly, help.
Hite also wrote that 76% of women felt there was a “maddeningly unfair” disparity between the emotional support they were expected to provide and the emotional support they received in return.
In 2012, economist and author Eve Rodsky also surveyed women around the world for her book Fair Play. She also wanted to understand the division of household labour in heterosexual couples. What she found was “the same shit, different decade”.
As Rodsky puts it, when households are not functioning fairly, accountability and trust break down. “And that was when I would see the lack of intimacy,” Rodsky says. People rarely want to have sex with someone they resent or a person they see as just another chore on a long to-do list.
The link between household labour and sexual flourishing is something Erik’s mother might have known intuitively when, during his teenage years, she told him: “If you ever expect to spend quality time with a woman in bed, then you have to be the one making it.” As in: doing the laundry, drying the sheets, bringing them in and putting them on the bed.
I spoke with Erik because I put a callout on social media asking women to nominate men they thought were exceptionally good in bed; Erik’s new girlfriend put him forward. While this egalitarian attitude towards housework is far from the only reason Erik impressed his partner, it certainly did not hurt.
While men in Australia spend an average of 3 hours and 12 minutes a day on unpaid labour, women spend 4 hours and 31 minutes. What’s more, men’s efforts tend to be concentrated on higher schedule control, more rewarding activities like car maintenance, home maintenance and gardening, while women take on the lower schedule control, less joyful chores like housework, cooking and shopping.
Good sex takes time, space, physical and emotional energy – something many women, particularly working mothers, are missing from their lives.
Eve Rodsky calls this conscious cultivation of time and distance “unicorn space” – inspired by the Ancient Greek concept of eudaemonic wellbeing. Having unicorn space means having not just the time but the emotional support to pursue your own passions.
In her research, “the more you have a strong sense of self and identity, the more people were reporting sexual intimacy”, Rodsky says.
If the burden of unpaid domestic work was split down the middle, just think what an extra six hours a week could do for straight women’s love lives. One woman wrote to Rodsky saying that after reconfiguring her domestic load, she finally had the time to join a rock band. In her letter, she said: “Sex is so much better when I get offstage in leather pants.”
This is an edited extract from All Women Want by Alyx Gorman, published by HarperCollins and released on 5 March 2025 in Australia
