Welcome to Conversations with Dr. Jennifer, a collection of interviews on the topics of relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and more.

All featuring Dr. Finlayson-Fife.

Welcome, everybody. We're here to talk about loss of attraction. This is obviously a topic that's

really important to a lot of people. I think it's a charged topic in part because there's so

many factors that have to do with something

as nuanced and delicate as attraction. Attraction is something that maybe we wish we had more

control over than we do, and yet it's so important in a marriage that's thriving and intimate and happy. And so I want to talk about just some sort of

foundational ideas before I take up any of the question. And, you know, acknowledging that some of

these may relate to your situation and others will not.

And again, it can be a little bit sensitive on both sides of this.

So let me just start with the first idea, which is that we're not,

all of this are not attracted some of the time to our partner.

Right.

So it's just true that in a long-term marriage, you're going to have moments where you do not

feel attracted, what your spouse is doing, is actually killing desire.

Again, that kind of delicate energy that can get destroyed with the wrong pommant,

with the bad smell, with the annoying behavior that you hate so much.

And so, you know, in any honest marriage, absence of attraction is going to be a part of it some of the time.

And so even if your spouse is very attractive in some conventional sense,

if you're paying attention, there's going to be, this is why movie stars can get divorced. This is

why supermodels are not necessarily with someone that's attracted to them, because who you are as a person has a lot to do with

attraction. And also habituation has a lot to do with attraction. So when we get bored, when we start

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