When Your Libido Takes On a Life of Its Own (or, Rather, Plays Dead)

When Cristina Ferrare, former model and co-host of the TV show “Home and Family” lost her mojo, she felt utterly alone. “My husband would initiate sex, and I would say I have a headache,” said Ferrare, 49. “He would think it was him . . . that it was something he was doing.”

Then, a couple of years ago, when a doctor on her show noted that lack of libido could be a symptom of perimenopause, the time of hormonal transition leading to menopause, Ferrare blurted: “That’s me.”

The response to Ferrare’s public confession was instantaneous and huge. She was deluged with mail from women as young as 23 describing their crashed libidos. She appeared on “Oprah” and “Dateline NBC” to talk about the problem.

According to experts, libidos wax and wane naturally throughout one’s life. Sexual desire shifts with physical as well as emotional changes.

“Everybody at some point in their adult life will be tuned out and turned off,” said Edward O. Laumann, a University of Chicago sociologist. “That is something that probably needs to be dealt with on a couple’s level rather than going to the doctor.”

“I was just so tired,” recalled a 32-year-old Santa Monica woman, who had her first baby three years ago and didn’t feel much sex drive for eight months. “I found my husband handsome, attractive, and I would think about him during the day. But come 6 o’clock, it was ‘Don’t come kissin’ on me.’ ”

Ferrare went on to write “OK, So I Don’t Have a Headache” (St. Martin’s Press, 1999), in which she detailed her road to sexual recovery. She credits a combination of diet, exercise and a prescription for testosterone cream for reviving her sex life.

Testosterone, described by one psychiatrist as “the hormone of desire,” is the substance that works in the brain to stimulate sexual interest and sexual responsiveness in both sexes. Women produce estrogen and testosterone in the ovaries and adrenal glands, but both decline dramatically after menopause. (Women of childbearing age should not take testosterone because it interferes with fetal development.)

But pills and creams are no substitute for compassion and good communication.

When one 60-year-old man and his wife, also 60, noticed a mutual decrease of libido, they talked about it.

“My wife, who was on hormone replacement therapy, experienced loss of libido more precipitously with menopause,” said the man, who lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife. “I got serious about it when I started having problems. Mine was declining, but it was hard to see day to day. My wife thinks it’s her fault, that she is not as glamorous or there is someone else. I tell her it isn’t her, that it is just the psychological and mechanical aren’t working as well.”

Both spouses were given prescriptions for testosterone cream (blood tests revealed his testosterone levels were low; her hormone replacement did nothing for her dead libido).

Things can be more complicated for women who have had their uterus and ovaries surgically removed (testosterone production decreases by a third when pre-menopausal women lose both ovaries).

“My sex drive was never that great,” said a 41-year-old Thousand Oaks mother. “But it is even worse now after the surgery. My husband just quit trying because he knows that if he makes the wrong move, it will turn me off and make it worse. He says he is going to give me the time I need to learn to want it again. He knows I am getting my hormones straightened out. It has put a strain on our marriage in the past.”

All the experts say that sexual desire is a delicate balance of physical and emotional states. If couples can learn to reach each other emotionally, by talking about their loss of desire, said sex therapist Gina Ogden, they may find ways to connect physically.

“Some of the best relationships I know,” Ogden said, “are of people [who] feel satisfied because their sexual experience is informed by spiritual values such as love, caring and commitment.”

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Kathleen Kelleher can be reached via e-mail at kellehr@gte.net.