Libido
Libido is sexual desire, that energy that makes you want sex, alone or with someone, and it varies enormously from one person to another and from one moment to the next.
Libido comes from Latin and literally means "craving", "desire". It's the drive that pushes you towards sex, towards someone else's body or your own. Freud turned it into an instinctual energy, a force that pushes and collides with social rules, and Jung widened the word to cover all of a person's vital and creative energy. In everyday language today, we mostly use it in the simplest sense: wanting it, or not wanting it.
It doesn't work like a light switch. For plenty of people (and particularly for women, though not only), desire doesn't show up on its own before the act: it wakes up during, once the caresses have started and the body is warming up. That's called responsive desire, as opposed to spontaneous desire, the kind that surges up for no reason in the middle of a day. Both are normal. Waiting passively for a lightning bolt of lust can mean never initiating anything, whereas agreeing to start with a massage, a long kiss, a moment of skin against skin is often enough to light the fuse.
Libido moves around, all the time, and for very concrete reasons. Tiredness, stress, a mental load running on a loop, an unresolved conflict in the relationship, pregnancy, menopause or andropause, certain medications (antidepressants, some hormonal contraceptives), too much alcohol, low spirits: all of that can weigh on it. On the flip side, sleep, regular physical activity, novelty, holidays, an argument made up, a bit of waiting and carefully maintained frustration often get it going again. Sexual routine, meanwhile, lulls it to sleep so gently you don't even notice.
In a couple, the burning issue is almost never the level of desire itself, but the gap between two libidos. The one who wants it more feels rejected, the one who wants it less feels under pressure, and the cycle sets in. What helps: talking about it outside the bedroom and without blame, saying what turns you on rather than what's missing, separating moments of tenderness with no agenda from explicitly sexual moments, and making dates (yes, planning them, it works better than you'd think). If the dip lasts, comes on abruptly or causes real distress, a doctor or a sex therapist is the right person to see, there's often an identifiable cause.
Not to be confused: libido isn't physical arousal. You can want it badly and have a body that doesn't follow, or the opposite, an erection or lubrication without the slightest desire. It isn't the frequency of sex either, nor an indicator of performance or love. Neighbouring words: desire, sexual appetite, drive, eroticism. As for "libidinous", it carries a pejorative colour that libido, in the modern sense, doesn't have.
Synonyms : sexual desire, sexual appetite, sex drive, sexual urge, erotic impulse
