If you have not felt as interested in sex as you once did, you are not alone. I regularly hear from individuals and couples who report their sex lives are kind of, well, disappointing. This was often not the case at the beginning of the relationship. I remember one female client (Barbara) who told me “I had the best sex of my life with my husband before we were married. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.” But now, they have sex very infrequently, and it doesn’t have the same level of enjoyment when they are intimate. Barbara just doesn’t feel the urge to have sex. What happened?

As a couples therapist, I don’t worry about the couples who sometimes fight, I worry about the ones who are too apathetic to fight. It is usually a sign one or both members of the couple have checked out of the relationship. Even in the best and happiest relationships, there is conflict. It’s inevitable, like death and taxes. The key to a healthy relationship, though, is to learn to manage the conflict. One of the things I like to do with new couples is to establish some rules or boundaries at the start of our work together. These are the rules of fair fighting. These rules are not original to me, you can find some version of them all over the internet. But, they are certainly a good starting point, and they are often not intuitive to couples embroiled in conflict.