What is the positive influence of drinking alcohol?

I recently stopped drinking alcohol altogether. Now I find sex dull and less exciting. How might I overcome this?

• I'm a 32 yr old man.  Throughout much of my life I've been single, but involved in many casual relationships and one night stands.  I would say 90% of my sexual encounters have been under the influence of alochol to some extent.  It was always free, flowing, exciting... I was always very engaged and 'in the moment' Now I'm in a long term relationship (2 years) and recently decided to stop drinking (not because I was alcohol dependant, for other reasons), not drinking has actually been quite easy for me.  But now I find sex a bit boring, its more 'mechanical', it doesn't really flow how it should, I don't feel as though I'm performing as I should.  Odly enough, my erections aren't as they used to be (I thought alcohol was supposed to have an adverse effect!), I even fail to acheive an erection sometimes. I'm finding this adjustment quite difficult, I just don't feel like having sex very much these days.  Is this normal for someone quitting alcohol?  What can I do about it?  I'm worried about the effect this may have on my relationship.

• Answer:

  I'm going to guess that it has nothing to do with stopping drinking and a lot to do with your age, your increasing maturity, and the duration of your long term relationship.  Or, to put it another way, you were an adrenaline junky, seeking a lot of thrills and stimulation through casual sex and drinking and other high risk/high novelty behaviors, and you are in the process of growing out of that - thus the LTR and the abstinence - and you you find it boring and crave the old excitement. In a nutshell:  humans have three overlapping mating systems. Lust is the oldest.  It is the desire to have sex with attractive strangers; it is dominated by adrenaline and testosterone and strongly inhibited by the forebrain, based on cultural conditioning.  Alcohol weakens that inhibition.  Familiarity kills lust rather quickly. Romance is the courtship impulse.  It comes into play between semi-strangers, as we carefully reveal parts of ourselves to the other and vice versa.  It is dominated by a mix of adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, and low levels of serotonin.  It is somewhat inhibited by the forebrain, which is making a running calculation as to whether to choose this partner or to stall for more info or to cut this romance short and try for someone better.  Too much familiarity gradually kills romantic passion. Pair bonding is the "happy ever after" part that is supposed to follow romance.  It depends on trust and intimate knowledge.  This is the system that keeps couples together for the long haul. It evolved to a large extent from systems that originally facilitated parent-child bonding. Oxytocin and vasopressin are the key neurotransmitters here, and they are generated in the brain by – and help reinforce – physical contact, pleasure, safety, caring, love, trust, and loyalty. Because safety, trust, and intimacy are so important to the third system, high adrenalin is an antagonist that blocks this kind of bonding.  When you consider that adrenalin is a key part of the first two, you see that thrill-seeking can be a problem. These systems originally evolved in circumstances where young people matured sexually in their late teens and paired off almost immediately and started families.  Often, simply because of the small number of teens in any age group, it was fairly evident who was going to be paired with whom long before there was any real need for courtship.  Lust applied to strangers when two unknown groups encountered each other, which was rare.  Romance applied when young people left one band for another and had to woo a partner, but it was brief and it typically ended in marriage.  So sex and love for most humans and pre-humans was dominated by the pair-bond relationship and the third type of attraction. Lust and romance were exciting, but for most of prehistory they happened seldom and fairly briefly.  No one had a chance to become "addicted to romance."  But now the situation is totally different.  We mature many years earlier.  Kids start dating in middle school and live in a haze of lust and serial romances for 10, 15, sometimes 20 years before trying to make the transition to pair-bonding love.  They build an entire lifestyle out of the adrenaline roller coaster you described, with casual sex and short flings, and they have plenty of time to become addicted to its thrills.  But they don't learn a thing about how to do the kind of sex and love that sustains passion in a long-term relationship. If I'm right about your situation, the main thing you need to do is to figure out how to create the right kind of serious passion in your relationship.  And the best answer I can give you is to refer you to some things I've written before: There are some great testimonials here, demonstrating that it IS possible: Good luck!