When Parenting Your Partner is Killing Your Desire

You love your partner. You're pretty sure you're still attracted to them. So why does your body say no — and why does it feel so connected to the fact that you've reminded them three times this week to do one thing?

It is connected. The slow creep of feeling like your partner's parent is one of the most consistent desire-killers I see in my practice. In this episode I'm breaking down the three forms it takes, where each one comes from, and what actually moves the needle — whether you're the one carrying the household or the one wondering why your partner never wants sex anymore.

In this episode:

• The three patterns I see most: chore-based parenting, "good-boy syndrome," and anxiety-based reassurance-seeking — and how to recognize which one you're in
• Why your nervous system cannot be in caretaking mode and erotic mode at the same time, and why wanting to want your partner isn't enough to override that
• The flip side: why the person in the "child role" often has high desire and gets stuck in a loop they can't see from the inside
• Where this comes from — work-life balance issues, patriarchy and male learned helplessness on one end; the developmental roots of not being able to self-soothe on the other
• Why the frustrated-complaints approach keeps not working — and what I've seen actually work instead
• What moving out of this dynamic looks like, depending on which side of it you're on

Topics: parenting your partner, desire killer, low libido, not attracted to partner, emotional labor, mental load, resentment and desire, nervous system and sex drive, somatic intimacy coach, intimacy coach, relationship coach, male learned helplessness, self-soothing, attachment anxiety

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Transcript

Welcome to Pleasure Uprising. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens, intimacy coach, somatic practitioner, and your guide to getting out of your head and into your body, your desire, and your real capacity for connection. This show is for people who are done performing and ready to actually feel it. Let's go.

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode. We're going to talk about something that I think is really, really common and kind of low-key flies under the radar for a lot of couples who are struggling with either mismatched libidos, or just sort of missing each other sexually, or feeling like the spark is gone, and haven't identified some common dynamics in their relationship that may be contributing.

Some people absolutely know that this is happening and know that it's contributing, but it's also really common for not everybody to be aware of it — or definitely not both people in a partnership sometimes. So we're going to talk about inadvertent parent-child dynamics that nobody really signed up for in a romantic relationship, and what that does to your sex life.

You may be one of those people who sometimes is hanging out in the kitchen, maybe your partner is standing with the fridge door open asking what is there to eat, or you get a text from them asking something they absolutely could have figured out on their own, like where are my pants, or they give you this sulky look because you said not tonight after they did some basic adulting — and it feels to you like they wanted sex as a reward. If any of those things are happening, and you're also feeling a low-key ick from your partner, you may be in a situation where you are inadvertently in a parent-child dynamic with your partner.

And if you're somebody who's recognizing themselves in the partner role — where you may be kind of leaning on your partner to parent you inadvertently — that may be contributing to what's going on with your sexual dynamic. On the surface, for some people, these things seem very unrelated. Chores and sex may feel kind of unrelated. They're not. They're a way of being together in a partnership that really impacts your intimacy. So we connect the dots today.

We're going to talk about where parent-child dynamics can come from, the three main forms of them, and what to do about it, whichever role you find yourself in.

A Quick Caveat: This Is Not About Age Play

I want to start with a little caveat, because we are not talking about age play here — Mommy Dom, Daddy play, playing baby, any consensual dynamic that uses parent-child roles explicitly and erotically. That is 100% different from what we're talking about today. When you're intentionally playing with age play, those are chosen, negotiated, and can be exactly what people want. That's a whole different, intentionally chosen kink.

We're going to talk today about what happens when you've accidentally slid into unwanted parent-child dynamics, and it tends to be sort of a low-key, deeply unsexy ugh. I see this in all kinds of relationships, but it is most common in hetero relationships — though I have seen it in queer relationships as well. It can also come in and out in pretty much all kinds of relationships based on capacity — things shifting in your work-life balance, for example — and can really impact your connection and intimacy even if it's not an ongoing, multi-year dynamic. So it's worth knowing about and being aware of even if you don't feel like this is currently happening in your relationship. It's a little trap that jumps out and bites people sometimes, and it can be pretty easy to slide into by accident.

The Three Forms of Parent-Child Dynamics in Relationships

I want to say upfront that I don't feel like there's any reason to be ashamed of this accidentally happening in your relationship. If you are really wedded to having your partner parent you and feel entitled to it, that is a problem if your partner doesn't agree that's what they want to be doing for the rest of their life — but it's really easy to fall into these things just from our upbringing, and I don't want to shame anybody who's in this.

Form One: Chore-Based Parentification

Really, really common. This is where one partner is avoiding adulting, and so the other partner has to take more of the burden for the stuff that just needs to happen in a household. This typically happens with cohabitating partners — there's more of a burden for the home, the kids, the planning, all that stuff on one partner, and it's not balanced or intentional.

Sometimes this can be really balanced and intentional, because you have one person who's working outside the home and one person who's working inside the home. But a lot of times everybody's working, and this often falls on women — though not always, and I have definitely seen the reverse happen. It's where one person is taking on way more of the how to get the kids to school, how to get the laundry done, what are we eating for dinner, making all that stuff happen — and they do it, and then they get slowly, slowly more resentful over time.

Here are some examples — these are pretty extreme, but it happens in a lot more subtle ways too. She makes your dentist appointments for you. There's a dentist I follow on Instagram who had this kind of viral post about a man who came in and didn't even know why he was sitting in the dentist chair, because he hadn't made his own appointment — it turned out his wife had made it for him. I would bet money that his wife does not want to sleep with that man, because he is not adulting. Another example: your partner has to remind you ten times to pick up your own parents from the airport. Or you make all the meals, and they're standing there with the fridge door open asking where's the ketchup instead of looking for themselves. Your partner doesn't look for things they've lost, they just ask you where it is. Your partner watching the kids acts like they're amazing for babysitting their own children. These are red flags in a relationship. This is I am not adulting, and I want you to pick up the slack — and that is deeply unsexy for the vast majority of people. If that's happening, you have entered into a parent-child dynamic with your partner, and then you might wonder why they don't want to have sex with you. Well, that's why.

Form Two: Good Boy Syndrome

Form one I see most often with women taking the over-chore role, though definitely not always — I've seen men do it, and I've seen it in queer relationships for sure. Form two I almost always see from a man, and this is what I call good boy syndrome. That's not a clinical term, that's just my term. But it is the dynamic where you're expecting sex almost like a reward for good behavior, and then there's this sulking dynamic — kind of like the golden retriever who didn't get the biscuit — if someone says no, I'm not up for it right now.

It's kind of like, I mowed the lawn, I took out the trash, I folded my own laundry, so of course you should want to have sex with me. I'm a good guy. It could also look like, I paid the bills, so I'm entitled to sex. It's this emotional coercion thing — it feels really passive-aggressive and manipulative, and it's generally very unsexy. This person is doing some of the adulting, but then expecting your body as a reward, as if they don't need to just adult on their own because they're an adult. There's this vague sense of obligation mixed with resentment for the partner on the receiving end of this, and it is one of the most reliable ways to shut someone down. That's form two.

Form Three: Anxiety-Based Validation Seeking

Form three I see across the gender spectrum — no real gendered patterns here. This is anxiety-based, where the inner child of one partner is kind of running the relationship. It looks like having a need for validation that your partner likes you, won't leave, etc., and seeking it through whatever behavior you've attached to as validating. So you need to text me at a certain frequency, or I lose my shit. You need to have sex with me at a certain frequency whether you feel like it or not, because otherwise I'll feel bad or invalid. You need to tell me I'm attractive at some regular frequency. You need to basically alleviate my anxieties for me, because I'm not managing them myself.

This is different than just sometimes needing reassurance. Everybody sometimes needs reassurance. It's okay to sometimes be vulnerable, it's okay to sometimes need reassurance. But this is when it's taken to extremes — when you really can't feel okay without the validation, when you're really hyper aware of needing a particular form of validation regularly from your partner, or you really don't feel okay. It's not uncommon for that validation to actually be the act of sex — like, I need sex three times a week or I feel like you're rejecting me. But it could also be texting, affirmations, or whatever kind of thing.

It can feel really desperate. And I want to invite you to recognize that when somebody is coming from a place of anxiety and really wanting you to solve that for them with your body, it almost feels like you're medicating them — like you are their medication, not really at choice. And that is deeply unsexy.

How Do We End Up in These Dynamics?

We're all adults in these relationships. How do we wind up here?

You probably won't be surprised when I say part of it is patriarchy — but it is. We have cultural conditioning that lends itself to these types of parent-child dynamics, especially in heterosexual relationships, but again, not always. People who are assigned female at birth are socialized predominantly to focus on caretaking and on other people, making sure that they are comfortable and happy. This is often not even very overt in families, but it is incredibly powerful and has been passed down through generations. Things like making sure the table is set might be something a girl child is expected to do. Cooking and cleaning are often taught to girls more than they're taught to boys. So sometimes the chore-based parentification actually just happens because somebody doesn't know how to do some of these basic things.

It can also get skewed when one person is stay-at-home. If one person is home and the other is working, it can sort of become expected that they do all the things, and it can get imbalanced — and then it can slip into an expectation that stays even after circumstances change. Or maybe there's some neurodivergence, and it's really hard for somebody to maintain the executive function of tracking what kid needs to go where, whether the dry cleaning got picked up, those kinds of things, and the neurotypical person winds up taking on the lion's share of that.

One of the things I want to say about how we get here is that there's always a contribution of enabling by the chore doer — by the person putting up with it. Sometimes that's because we were trained that way, through gender socialization, or through our family dynamic, or our culture of origin, to people-please or to not have limits. But we have to own that we are enabling it if we are, because in order to stop it, we have to spot it. If we don't own that we're enabling it as the person doing the chores and getting resentful and feeling parentified, then we lose all of our power to do anything about it. And that doesn't mean just yelling at your partner and making them the bad guy. A lot of times that's how people start to deal with it — instead of actually having healthy limits, they just get mad, and that's often very ineffective. It's a two-way street. Somebody has to allow themselves to be parentified.

For form two — good boy syndrome — men are socialized to feel entitled to sex and to rewards for good behavior, because boys have such low expectations for good behavior relative to girls in our modern society. Because the expectations for boys are so low, when they actually behave like reasonable human beings, a lot of times they're trained in their family of origin to expect some sort of reward or approval — and in adulthood, sex from their partner. It becomes almost like her duty to reward him for being a quote unquote good guy. It's actually a form of learned helplessness for men, which is pretty icky. It removes the expectation to just adult at a normal adult level, and that's patronizing to men. Men are perfectly capable of adulting. A lot of them don't realize it, but they are.

For form three — the anxiety piece — somewhere along the way, this person didn't learn how to soothe themselves. They've let their inner critic run amok, and now they're trying to outsource soothing themselves, wrangling their inner critic, to their partner. That's not only deeply unfair, it also doesn't work. No one else will ever be able to wrangle your inner critic. We only get to truly feel better in ourselves when our own inner adult steps up and parents our own inner child with kindness and firmness. You can learn how to do that. You can learn how to parent your inner child, to self-validate, to self-soothe.

It's useful to know where this comes from, because it's not always a dysfunctional family dynamic. It can come from seemingly very loving families, because overindulgent or placating parenting also leads to a lack of self-soothing ability, just like inconsistent caregivers, emotional neglect, or conditional love can. When caregivers immediately rescue a child from every moment of distress, the child never develops the capacity to calm themselves down — they learn that emotional relief has to come from somewhere outside them. So a delayed text from your partner in adulthood can feel like a catastrophe. High drama and neediness become the reliable way to get connection and care in that kind of system. Very different childhoods, same result.

Why Parent-Child Dynamics Kill Desire

The reason these three forms of parentification can kill desire — and I want you to understand why this is so hard to overcome just by wanting it to be different — is that when we shift out of feeling like an equal adult with someone, we wind up shifting into a sense of managing them, which feels like a burden. When we shift into managing, we are not in the state that desire actually needs to be present and grow. What gets shut down is that felt sense of I am safe to be erotic here, and I feel mutual adult curiosity with this person. What replaces it is I have to manage or caretake this person, and I am burdened by having to adult for them. Those are not compatible states. You can want to want your partner, but find out that your body has made a totally different decision because you feel regularly like you have to parent them.

A lot of times this is happening under the surface, and people don't even realize these things are related. They don't realize that feeling overburdened by a partner who's not stepping up, or a partner who's sulking when they don't get sex as a reward, or a partner who's constantly seeking validation — they don't realize that's actually putting a big brake on their libido. But it is, in almost all situations where you feel parentified by your partner. The nervous system is not going to prioritize pleasure when it's in management mode, and that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. That's exactly what your nervous system is supposed to do.

And if you're in form three with the validation seeking — the person in the child role is often wanting sex, and every time their partner says no, it actually feeds the anxiety, which intensifies the reassurance seeking, and then deepens their partner's sense of burden. It turns into a negative feedback loop where both people end up feeling really stuck. The solution is often hard to see from inside that loop, but it's not actually that hard to do — somebody needs to learn how to self-soothe and stop seeking validation so heavily externally. That really desperate sense of validation seeking is what's fueling the pattern.

What to Do About It

First, just accept that if it feels like a bit of a parent-child dynamic in your relationship, it is not helping your sex life. It is often, to use Emily Nagoski's terminology, a giant brake on desire.

If it's your partner taking on the more childlike role, you're going to have to look really hard at where and how you might be contributing to enabling that, where you're tolerating it, and have a very compassionate conversation about it — not an angry, accusatory conversation, which is not actually going to get you what you want. You may need some help figuring out where you really need to set limits, and having those conversations in a compassionate way. What it needs to look like is: you have to start feeling allowed to say no, you need to start feeling allowed to say what you need from them, you need to start being able to trust your partner to follow through, and you need to know what you will do to take care of yourself if they don't. I've seen this work really, really well. We do it by first identifying what limits need to be set, and then practicing having those conversations calmly and vulnerably — ideally with a practitioner first, so you can get a felt sense in your body of how you can actually show up in those moments. That will help you show up more calmly and compassionately in the actual conversation, rather than frustrated, activated, accusatory, and resentful — which is usually what's been happening, and which typically elicits the teenager-style resistance and defensiveness.

If it's you — if you're listening to this and noticing, I may have accidentally slid into some of that, maybe I got really busy at work for a few months and sort of stopped doing anything around the house, or I've been doing this kind of thing and it might be contributing to why my partner isn't super turned on lately — starting with some self-reflection is really helpful. Ask your inner adult to take a real good look at your patterns. That's not easy to do — it's pretty hard to look at our own patterns — but your inner adult is absolutely capable of it. However, there will be aspects you literally cannot see on your own, and then it becomes useful to have outside help or to open a really vulnerable conversation with your partner where you say, I really want you to tell me some of the ways it would feel good to you if I could step up — and then actually follow through and do them.

We want to also ask yourself not just what's not working, but why you've been persisting in that pattern. If you really can't see it or where it comes from, a therapist is a good choice to help you get some insight before you try to change things. When you're ready to change the actual behaviors, a coach tends to be more useful — and it may or may not be a relationship coach. If the main struggle is managing relational anxiety, validation seeking, your experience of intimacy and sexuality, then yes, it may be someone like me. If the issue is more practical — you genuinely have no idea how to manage tasks, run a household, share the load, or parent — you may need a different kind of support, like an executive function coach, a parenting class, or maybe you just need to learn how to cook or hire a cleaner. Sometimes it really is that concrete.

And if you need to learn self-soothing as an actual practice skill — I do that, other people do that as well. Learning how to feel anxiety or doubt without immediately needing someone else to resolve it takes some time, support, and a lot of practice. It is 100% worth it, because it will change your life and make you feel infinitely better. Nobody who's outsourcing their self-soothing feels good. It feels desperate, because it is — you're actually not okay, and you know it. It feels so much better to be able to do that for yourself. It's so much more powerful and empowering. And it is worth it regardless of whether you're in a relationship or not.

Closing Thoughts

If you want to have a healthy sex life — really wonderful, juicy, yummy, playful intimacy — we can't stay in a parent-child dynamic with our partner. No one wants to have sex with someone they feel they have to parent on a regular basis. And no one really benefits from being infantilized in real life either. So it's not like you're doing a favor for your partner by tolerating this stuff — chances are it's impacting your libido, and that's not a favor to them. At the end of the day, everyone benefits from knowing how to have an adult relationship that feels free of resentment, and that is a beautiful thing.

All right, my friends, I'll see you here next week.

Hey, before you go, if you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to check out one of my favorite things I've ever created. It's a free guide called Get Out of Your Head, a starter guide to releasing the pressure, shame, and shoulds around intimacy. It has four reflection exercises that go deeper than anything you'll find in a typical freebie, and most people feel a shift just after part one. So go grab it at laurajurgens.com/guide — the link is in the show notes. And if you're ready to find out what your specific path looks like, I'd love to talk to you. Booking info is also in the show notes, and I will see you here next week.