“Couples with mismatched desire is 100% the most common theme I see in therapy,” says Christophers. A difference in desire, or ‘mismatched desire’ as it’s commonly referred to by therapists, can take many forms. Usually, it manifests as one person having a lower libido than the other person in a couple. Or, whether someone is in a relationship or not, they may notice they don’t have the same sexual desire they’ve felt previously.

“There are lots of factors that affect desire, including stress, the quality of a relationship, busy lives, hormones and ageing,” says Christophers. “But there are so many things people can do to try to reawaken it.”

Finding solutions begins by understanding what is behind someone’s change in desire and then trying to reawaken it by focusing on pleasure. Christophers uses the analogy of a loss in appetite. “Instead of asking ‘What’s wrong with me?’, we can start to think of the different things you like to eat, what you last found delicious and the cooking smells you’ve noticed. So, we connect it to our sense of pleasure. It’s the same with desire: we look at when someone has experienced desire in the past and what ingredients have gone into it. For example, someone may realise they need to de-stress to feel desire. Others might realise that if the house is messy it decreases their desire. Then they can start to make some sense of it.”

Understanding our ‘patterns of desire’ is important. For some people desire is spontaneous and nothing in particular is needed to trigger it. For other people desire is responsive and they need specific things in place to set it off. For example, people with responsive desire may need to watch a certain film or need certain things to happen to their body to spark arousal. “Understanding the difference between responsiveness and spontaneous desire is a really great thing for people because they can start to plot it out with their partners,” says Christophers. “One of the main issues that comes up with mismatched desire is when someone says their partner never initiates. But, if somebody has more responsive desire, they may be less inclined to be the initiator because they need certain things to trigger desire in the first place.”

An expert sex therapist reveals the problems they hear time and time again (and how to tackle them)