My libido has largely picked up and walked off somewhere else. I’m waiting for it to come back from a trip to the corner store to buy cigarettes, but so far it hasn’t showed up.

It started in my late twenties after a series of flopping relationships and three years later I’ve hit my thirties and haven’t had sex in about three years.

The trouble is, I’m at a point where I’m looking ahead at the rest of my life and I don’t really feel like dying alone with seventeen cats. I only have one now, but we know how this story usually goes. Plus, while I don’t miss sex, I do miss affection and sleeping in the same bed with someone.

I also miss my younger, more libidinous self. She was a lot of fun and I have some great stories because of her, but I genuinely don’t know if she’s ever going to open the front door, Fantasia’s in hand, or not.

I’ve thought about exploring sluthood. I think it might have the ability to re-awaken my dormant sexuality. But unfortunately, where my body goes, my heart often follows and I don’t want to put my emotions through the kind of rollercoaster it might entail (which, now that I think about it, may actually be why I stepped off the sluthood boat years ago). On the other hand, there’s a whole world of human experience, monogamous or slutty, I am missing out on and I think that sucks.

Option #1 sluthood=libido=emotional rollercoaster/soul-sucking loneliness and despair/fantastic sex/valuable life experience. Option #2 long-term relationship=no libido=companionship/awkward sex due to lack of libido/inflicting my lack of libido on some poor guy resulting in relationship trouble, or Option #3 get another cat.

Are there other options I’m missing?

Thanks,
Conflicted

Dear Conflicted:

I’m going to try to answer your question without once using the words “get your groove back,” but you need to do me a favor, too.

I don’t know how cats became the ultimate metaphor for sad, lonely spinsterhood and dogs became the symbol for carefree happy couplehood, but cats are just cats and dogs are just dogs.  If you like cats, have a cat.

In my entire checkered past of dating, I’ve met exactly two dudes who were uncool with cats. One had a severe allergy.  Understandable. One made a joke about how he was hoping that I didn’t have a cat, since  I seemed really cool and he had trouble meeting cool chicks without cats, possibly as a Pick-Up-Artist-style trick to lower my self-esteem to get me to talk to him.  You know how you don’t get me to talk to you?  Pass off a shitty, lazy stereotype about single women in the hopes that I’ll try to prove that I’m not like all “those” women.  I was exactly like “those” women.  My answer was something like “Oh man! You’re right, I AM really cool, but I also have a cat.  Too bad!  We’ll never know what might have been.”

So your first step towards getting your mack back is to stop defining yourself as the the sad media picture of lonely single women whose singleness is a disease that needs to be cured and your cat is just one of the symptoms, like a furry tumor.  Even in a joking, self-deprecating way.  Even if Liz Lemon does it.

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