Women going off sex in heterosexual relationships is such an established trope in our culture that it has become a sociological cliché. The whingey husband, begging for sex, the bored wife faking a headache, hell! It’s a punchline! Like expensive hobbies and iPhone batteries, a woman’s libido starts strong but dwindles to little more than a frail blip of interest over time.

But I have a theory. I don’t think women get bored of sex; I think they get bored of performing sex, and that is a very different thing indeed.

When it comes to sexual pleasure, we are socially conditioned to believe that men enjoy sex and want more of it than we do. That message is all around us: “boys will be boys,” “men have needs”, “men think about sex every ten seconds,” and so forth. Women’s libido, on the other hand, is framed as changeable, fragile, and fleeting. “The mood has to be right.” “She has to feel loved,” etc.

So, it may interest you to know, dear reader, that there really isn’t much evidence to back up the claim that men have higher libidos than women do. It is a subject that has been studied at great length and most research doesn’t find any difference between libido levels at the beginning of a relationship, at least. Clinically, women are every bit as horny as men are. Of course we are! The human race couldn’t continue if only half of us were interested in getting our thing on.

But it does seem that we get bored of sex with the same partner faster than men do. One 2023 study found that “women’s desire is more variable relative to men’s, at least in the long term”. Factors like childbirth, hormonal shifts, and bearing the brunt of domestic labour are all considered to be contributing factors in women experiencing a drop in desire. And that all makes perfect sense. Who is in the mood for a quickie when you have a newborn treating your exhausted body like a buffet bar?

But I think there is something else in the mix. Our libidos may be evenly matched, but we do not yet have pleasure parity between the sexes. A fact that is borne out by the orgasm gap, which isn’t so much a gap as a splintering chasm with sharks at the bottom. Research published in The Archives of Sexual Behaviour found that while heterosexual men orgasm 96 per cent of the time they have sex, while heterosexual women are only achieving the same 65 per cent of the time. So, is it any wonder that women get bored quicker? I think not.

We know that women are regularly faking orgasms, as, according to which piece of research you read, anywhere between 58 and 80 per cent of women have done it. Hell, I’ve done that one myself, and I did it because I wanted my partner to feel like he’d done well. Then I found myself in an infinite faking loop where I couldn’t stop doing it because then he’d want to know why I was no longer lost in peels of ecstasy and I’d have to cop to the fact that I had been pretending the whole time. So, I kept doing it. Ridiculous, really.

Women are taught that pleasure is something they supply, rather than something they can and should be asking for. We learn to be grateful for some flattery, a little enthusiasm, and a partner who knows roughly where the clitoris is. The bar is so low, deep-sea salvage divers couldn’t reach it. We know that women struggle to put their own needs first and it can be incredibly difficult to tell a partner that you don’t like what they are doing, or want something else, so most of us don’t. We just put on a good show.

We make encouraging noises and say “oooh yeah, baby” when what we really want to say is: “Can you please stop that immediately.” We simulate enthusiasm rather than run the risk of sounding demanding or difficult, or God forbid, confident!

At the beginning of a relationship, this kind of performance is sustainable. Novelty and genuine desire do a lot of the heavy lifting and wanting to please a new partner will do the rest. We might think that his subpar skills will naturally improve over time and that maybe he will learn that “harder” doesn’t mean “faster” all by himself. Spoiler: he won’t.

Long-term performing is exhausting and eventually and even the most accomplished actress simply cannot face another curtain call. Then we see a decline in libido. There may be genuine reasons for this: hormones, stress, lack of sleep, etc. But sometimes, her losing interest in sex is really her dwindling enthusiasm to produce a convincing imitation of sexual fulfilment. One is a lack of appetite, and the other is a refusal to keep pretending the food on offer is delicious when it’s not.

It’s not that she was never enjoying herself but rather was never really having the kind of sex she wanted. It was always about him. That has been my experience, anyway.

The issue here is that women have been trained to view their pleasure as optional, mysterious, even unnatural. So, we accept crap sex as normal and then wonder why we get so bored of it. Men view sex as a conquest while women are treating it as a diplomatic mission. The end result is an encounter where one is having a fabulous time, and the other is just trying not to hurt his feelings. This isn’t genuine intimacy – this is performance management.

Faking pleasure might be a quick fix and avoid an awkward conversation, but it doesn’t just deceive a partner, it teaches them the wrong lesson. It is a misleading performance review and that’s not fair to anyone.

There is a broader pattern here that is worth interrogating. Women cannot be expected to sustain desire for an activity in which their role is to do a considerable amount of emotional labour and provide more pleasure than they receive. This is true of relationships in general, not just the sex part.

The answer is not for women to improve their acting skills but for them to work on reframing the entire experience as one of equals. This means speaking up and vocalising what we want. It means no longer faking orgasms, but being honest about what is working for you and what is not. We all need to be better at receiving sex feedback and understanding that it’s not an insult.

Sex is not a performance.