I am chronically ill and still want sex. My SO said, “No one would want to have sex with you.”

TL/DR: In a relationship of 12 years, sick with Long Covid for over a year, and my partner doesn’t want to have sex with me and thinks no one would, due to my illness. Feeling heartbroken, frustrated, and stuck.

I have been disabled with Long Covid for over a year now. It has completely changed my entire life. I loved my job (borderline workaholic) and was physically active (hiking, biking, and walking a lot). Now I am chronically exhausted and have to spend 80-90% of the day laying down and resting. I often have headaches and sensitivity to light and loud sounds (my partner jokes that LC turned me into a vampire). It’s heartbreaking how much I feel like a shell of myself. I used to be bubbly and hyper and funny, but it’s like Covid sucked so much of the life out of me. The brain fog makes me forgetful and spacey, as well as flattening my affect. On top of all that, my partner now has to take care of the chores I used to do on top of their own. These unfortunate circumstances make life stressful and logistically challenging/burdensome, and I am really grateful my partner has stuck by me and continues to provide support.

My partner (59F/nonbinary, uses they/them pronouns ) and I (42F) have been together for about 12 years. I already had a higher libido than them before I got sick, and we had sex about once or twice per month then (I would have preferred more). But since I got sick, we only had sex one time in over a year.

There are a lot of ups and downs with the symptoms of Long Covid (which I’ve learned is common for people with ME/CFS and other post viral syndromes), so I have okay days, bad days, and then really bad days. In the beginning, I would try to initiate sexual intimacy on the days I was feeling okay, but my partner always turned me down. After months of this, I asked about it and they said they felt bad knowing I was sick. I’ve tried to explain that I’m experiencing so much loss and so much difficulty in my life, sometimes when I’m feeling okay I just crave feeling good. There’s almost no pleasure left in my life, I’m aching for it sexually. I want to feel alive and happy and connected.

On my birthday, over six months into me being sick, I got dressed up and asked my partner if we could make out and mess around and they said no. I was hurt and also surprised they wouldn’t even try on my birthday. They said something along the lines of, “well, you wouldn’t want me to if I’m not into it, right?” It hurt my feelings that they couldn’t even try to get in the mood. There have been plenty of times in our relationship when I wasn’t totally in the mood but I went along with fooling around when they instigated in the hopes that I’d get in the mood. Of course I don’t want to force anything, it just hurt that they wouldn’t even consider trying. Also, there’s a huge range of sexual activity we could engage in, and it seems like everything is just off the table.

We had a big heart to heart the other day about the sustainability of our relationship and I shared my concerns about our sex life (both since I’ve been sick and before). I said I wanted to talk about the possibility of opening up our relationship. I’ve always been poly and my partner has not, so when we got together twelve years ago I agreed to be monogamous because that was my partner’s preference and I was fine with a sexually fulfilling monogamous relationship. But now that we’re not having sex, I would be interested in exploring this. To which my partner said, “No one would want to have sex with you.” I started crying and my partner was confused and kept saying, “What did I say? Why are you crying?” I needed a break for a few minutes and then I explained that their statement was ableist (so what, chronically ill people don’t get to have sex?), unkind, and it hurt my feelings. They agreed and apologized.

But I can’t forget about it. I can’t let it go because I think they really believe it. I get that they don’t want to have sex with me (that’s abundantly, heartbreakingly clear). But I’m sure there are hot, kind tops out there who would be happy to have sex with me. I’m cute, sweet, dirty, and responsive/sensual AF, so I may not be up for acrobatics, but there’s plenty I can do.

I am grateful for all the ways my partner is supporting me, and I can empathize with how hard it is to be in a relationship with someone who is this sick and with no cure in sight. I get that I’m not the same person they got with back then. But I am still a living, breathing person with a sexuality and desires that are valid and that someone out there might respond differently to than them.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to meet someone I could trust sexually given how housebound I am. So in the meantime, I’ve gotten into listening to romance audiobooks and building my own alternate universe where there’s romance and sexual intimacy that has nothing to do with my partner.

I told my partner that they feel like a roommate and a good friend, but not a romantic partner to me anymore. That after a year of trying and getting shot down, I was conditioned away from feeling romantically for them because the repeated rejection hurt too much. I told them I was seriously thinking about breaking up (as hard as that would be, logistically and emotionally right now). They begged me to stay and give us a chance. I honestly don’t know how they think that is going to work when my heart is so far out the door and they’re not changing their behavior.