Mirena IUD Side Effects Ended Sex Life?

I’ve had a reasonably long email back and forth with a reader. The key points being:

They are both physically healthy and he works out.

He’s been doing the Alpha Beta thing and it all seems fine on the that front.

There was a prior sexual assault of some sort in her history before him. She says this is why she doesn’t want sex sometimes.

She gets wound up by stress. Money-job-her mom issues.

The sex was really good up until their son was born five years ago. Both frequent and exciting.

After the son was born she got a Mirena IUD.

They have only had sex 30 times in the last five years.

They had a night out drinking together recently and the sex was amazing.

So we have a puzzle my friends, a puzzle.

It sounds like you are all good on the fitness and Alpha / Beta fronts. Just keep doing what you have been doing.

I think the prior sexual assault is just being used as an excuse – she’s clearly had an excellent sex life with you at some point, so if the assault didn’t matter then, why should it matter now? I don’t mean to stay that it wasn’t traumatic for her, just that it’s just being used as a red herring to justify why she isn’t having sex with you now. If she’s still having an issue with it, she needs to address that in counseling or something, rather than not ever have sex with you.

The money / school / mom issues, are all just general life stress. Stress may reduce sexual frequency, but it doesn’t stop it completely overnight for years on end. So we can discount stress as the primary cause of the issue. You can try a few drinks on the weekend to unwind, but a bodywork approach may be more helpful. She needs to make exercise a priority and you could also massage her. Basically get her out of her head and into her body more. She’d probably feel less stressed if she actually let herself get laid properly - but that’s all a chicken or the egg thing.

All that leaves are the two big changes that happened around the time your sex life ended which were, (1) the birth of your son and (2) going on the Mirena. Obviously we can’t trial the removal of your son to see if that has an effect (!), so I think you have to trial the removal of the Mirena.

Mirena is flagged as causing a loss of libido as “common” on a number of websites. eMedTV pg3 and Drugs.com. Plus hormonal birth control can change the type of man that she is attracted to through the alterations in her sense of smell for finding genetically matched partners.  So prior to the hormones, you = smell sexy… but on the hormones, you = smell unsexy. So her libido could in theory still be reasonably active, she’s just not turned on by you so much because of the hormonal birth control. There’s a 5% chance of lowered libido with Mirena as the FDA warning letter to Bayer states.

The Mirena lasts for five years anyway, so she’s about due to have it removed. You could try a copper IUD if she still likes an IUD as an option, though 30 instances of sex for one medical procedure is a bit of crappy cost/benefit outcome. You might almost be better off without hormonal birth control and trying condoms for six months and then see how things stand. (I am very much against vasectomy by the way, not a good option for you.)

Start with the Mirena as the key problem for now. It seems to fit the data and it’s the only thing you can test for. I’m not saying Mirena needs to be yanked from the market or anything like that, but if she’s in the 5% that get their libido turned off, obviously she’s got to get it out of her body. You have to be very firm with having that addressed, because if it is the cause of all this and she puts another one in…

…it’s five more years like the last.