Rewind: The Other Half of Sexless Relationships

Dear Sugars

WBUR

Boston, Wbur, Sugar, Cheryl Strayed, Society & Culture, Dear, Relationships, Advice, Steve Almond

4.6 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode was originally released on October 28th, 2017.

Sex-starved, meet sex-hounded. Recently, the Dear Sugars inbox was flooded with responses to the two-part episode “Sexless Relationships” with Esther Perel. In those episodes, the Sugars answered letters from people who were longing for sexual intimacy with their partners. But many readers asked why we didn’t address the other side of sexless relationships: the people who want less sex than their partners.

In today’s episode, we hear from a letter writer who feels pressured by her partner to have sex.

“Every night — EVERY NIGHT — when we get in bed, he rubs my back to see if he can arouse me,” writes the letter writer." "Enough is enough.”

Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond dig into the power dynamics that play out when one partner constantly demands sex. Then, they attempt to answer the question, “Is there such a thing as wanting too much sex?”

Transcript

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0:34.9	The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.
0:39.7	The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
0:43.3	I'm Steve Alman.
0:44.5	I'm Cheryl Strayed.
0:45.6	This is Dear Sugars.
0:49.3	Oh, dear song, won't you please?
0:57.0	Share some little sweet days with me.
1:04.0	I check my bellbikes every day.
1:11.6	Oh, in the sugar, you see in my way.
1:18.6	Hi, Steve.
1:20.1	Hi, Cheryl.
1:21.5	So we're kind of doing one of my favorite kinds of episodes today, and that is an episode that is in its own right about something,
1:30.6	but it's also in response to a previous episode we did. Yes. It's the episodes I think of as
1:36.2	the listeners are now all angry at us. Well, not exactly, but maybe the listeners are saying,
1:42.4	hey, I'm over here. You talked about this issue, and I'm grateful for that, but you missed one part of it. And of course, we always miss one part of it. We can't get everything in every episode. So listeners might remember last season, we did a two-part series on sexless relationships or at least relationships where there was a
2:02.5	sense of the relationship being starved of sex. We had Esther Perel on both parts one and two, and she
2:10.1	helped us answer two letters. Both of the letters were by people who felt like they wanted more
2:16.6	sex than their partner wanted. Yes, they were the sex
2:19.3	starved. And of course, the question is, how does it feel to be the sex pressured? The sex hounded.
2:25.1	The person who's saying, whoa, you want it more than I do. And I don't maybe, in some cases, wanted it at all.
	...

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