I've followed this thread and have been impressed by the honesty and its in this spirit that I offer my opinions :
I disagree with the theory that women lose their sex drive as they get older. I've always been into older woman and in my 30's I met a lot of women on the internet in their 50 and 60s who had ridiculous sex drives, dogging swinging parties the lot .
I them met my OH and initially the sex was OK ( but only OK ) but she mainly instigated it. We still have sex once a week but its very vanilla and tbh we dont really get much out of it. In fact one of the worst things I've done to her is for me to fall asleep whilst I was having sex with her on top of me
but we do it to keep that part of our marriage alive as we both know that once that goes its harder for it to come back.
The problem for me is that although I still love my wife after 9 years and I still find her attractive but we stress about all the normal stuff in life, money,kids , houses ,health etc. And that stuff kinda takes away the excitment in our relationship and the sex suffers. The other thing that kills the excitment is that after along time together we've done most of the sexualt things we wanted to do.
It is for this reason I believe that the woman on mumsnet for example are complaining about sex , it a result of everything else going on in their lives, not because their sex drive has disappeared, but because they are bored with the other stuff .
I really dont think men and women think that differently but the one thing that I know is a true difference is that men are able to break things down into compartments better than woman . So if sex isnt offered at home a man can find a replacement for that bit and still carry on with the other parts of the marriage, whereas a woman would find that harder to do and would see no sex (if she wanted it)as a sign the marriage is failing