9. Money Is Tight / You’re Working Too Much

7. You Have Gender Dysphoria

“I take more of a top/giving role because when my partners focus on me, it quickly turns into dysphoria and emotional pain and crying. Which tends to ruin the mood.”

This issue is obviously much more prevalent among queer and transgender folks than straight and cisgender folks. Even cisgender women can have dysphoric feelings about their bodies that impact how comfortable they feel in the bedroom and what roles they’d like to play. For transgender people, it can be even more complicated depending on so many factors including but absolutely not limited to transition status.

8. You Have Kids

“My partner and I had a baby a year ago and it has been difficult to have sex regularly because of exhaustion with being new parents.”

Taking care of children is time-consuming and exhausting. On our grown-ups survey, pretty much every open-ended answer from survey-takers who have children mentioned how tired they were. People who have kids are really busy and really tired, y’all, and it can be hard to fit in sex, especially when you’re waking up every few hours to deal with a crying baby.

“I wish I wasn’t as exhausted from working such long hours and actually had the energy to have the sex that I could be having otherwise.”

Women don’t have the same earning power as men, which means most lesbian relationships involve two wage-earners working long hours to stay above water. We’re also more likely to be cut off from family financial support and to be discriminated against in the workplace! It’s very sexy.

10. You’re Long Distance

“I’d like to live in the same place (state/timezone) as my partner! That would make it easier to have daily physical intimacy and more frequent sex.”

There are less queer people in the world than straight people, period, which means distance isn’t always a dealbreaker like it is for straights. This means a lot more long distance relationships and a lot less opportunity for having sex! Long-distance relationshippers masturbate more than anybody else.

11. You’re On Your Period

Although not all women get periods and not all people who get periods are women, the majority of pre-menopausal women do get periods on a regular basis, and not all of them like to have period sex – around 25% would rather not, according to our survey. When you’ve got two period-having people in the same bed, you’re losing twice as many no-sex days as straight cis couples are. Unless you sync up. WHICH IS ITS OWN DELIGHTFUL EXPERIENCE.

12. You’re Monogamous

Gay men are uniquely talented at avoiding bed death in their long-term relationships, and they’re also overwhelmingly more likely to be non-monogamous. Although when the entire group was considered as a whole on our survey, monogamous and non-monogamous women had sex about the same amount, that changes once you hit the 3+ year ous couples have sex once a week or more, compared to 59% of those in non-monogamous people who’d been with their primary partner for 3+ years. Again it’s a bit of a chicken/egg situation, as couples with higher sex drives or who place a higher importance on an active sex life might be more likely to consider non-monogamy, or a lack of monogamous sex might inspire them to go non-monogamous.

13. Your Sex Drives / Libidos Are Mismatched

Goddess bless the couple who’s got perfectly-matched sex drives! Here’s a useful article about ten identified “libido types.” Sometimes, you just don’t match up, and sometimes that’s a dealbreaker, sometimes that opens up the relationship to other partners (if it wasn’t already), and usually it means some kind of compromise.

9. Money Is Tight / You’re Working Too Much