How unsupportive partners can stress you out — and kill your sex drive
In many ways, Viv*, 23, and her boyfriend have a great relationship. They make each other laugh and share a lot of inside jokes; they enjoy the same TV shows; and they make time for adventurous dates. But, she says, there’s one problem: “I simply do not trust him with anything that correlates to an adult relationship.”
Despite being 11 years her senior (so, 34), Viv says her boyfriend — who she’s been with for two years — never takes responsibility for anything. “He doesn’t help me out when I’m stressed or busy; he doesn’t anticipate any of my basic needs; I have to remind him about important things five or six times, like booking a trip, cleaning up, or asking our landlord to fix something. He’s just not a reliable person.”
Sound familiar? Nope, it’s not just the plot of the 2006 hit movie The Break-Up, it’s also the plot of our lives! We’ll all likely recognise this pattern either through our own experience of it or via, as Viv calls it, the notorious “stereotype of the heterosexual couple dynamic” in which women tend to shoulder the burden of not only domestic labour but emotional labour, too (recent stats show that women do 60% more unpaid work than men and bear more responsibility for the mental load of anticipating and monitoring tasks in the household). And, as you might expect — or know all too well — this dynamic has consequences. “We have periods that feel very bliss-like and peaceful, but then other times when we’re arguing almost on a daily basis,” adds Viv. “In those periods, I find myself thinking, ‘Is this how I want to spend my early 20s?’”
It’s not just the relationship at risk, though. A recent study revealed that unsupportive partners like Viv’s boyfriend aren’t just a taxing annoyance, they’re actually bad for your health. Researchers found that a perceived lack of partner support can lead to physical stress, as evidenced by higher levels of cortisol (the hormone produced when you’re stressed) in the body. This is the antithesis of how a partner should make you feel.
“The social support within intimate relationships can buffer against the negative consequences of stress on health,” says the study’s co-author Richard Mattson, a psychology professor at Binghamton University in New York, adding that, when effective, this support can actually prevent a bunch of stress-related medical problems, as well as improve immune functioning, cardiovascular health, and overall wellbeing. When lacking, though — or simply when a partner feels like the support is lacking — these relationships can be “counterproductive”. “An unsupportive partner is a big risk factor for physical and mental health problems,” affirms Mattson.
Vic is certainly no stranger to the effects of this, especially after her boyfriend didn’t step up when she had an abortion last year. “I’ve developed anxiety and have a lot of sleepless nights, which in turn has affected my productivity at work,” she explains. “I’ve binge-eaten to cope and gained 25kg. I’m the manager of this relationship, trying to make things work while my boyfriend reaps the rewards. His life has dramatically improved since being with me, but mine has just gotten worse.”
Clara*, 31, experienced a similar thing with her now-ex-boyfriend. “When we met, he was broke, not working, and had lost his driving licence through drink driving,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “I helped him start a business, get his licence again, and then paid for the bulk of a car that we shared. In return, chores were split incredibly unequally, we got a dog and the care almost entirely fell to me, and I didn’t even have a desk in the house to work at.”
“It took a huge toll on my mental health,” Clara continues. “I was very unhappy. We’d argue a lot and he’d frame it as me being ‘a nightmare’. He’d say things would change, but they rarely would. Or he’d make an easy effort, like making dinners, but then I’d have to tidy up all the mess that resulted. It just eroded any time we did have together because there was this undercurrent of resentment and bickering. It was only really when it did eventually end that I fully realised how much I’d given him and how much I hadn’t gotten.”
There are, of course, a number of reasons why someone might not be able to offer the kind of emotional and physical support their partner needs. They could be struggling with their own mental health, enduring stress at work, or have recently suffered a bereavement. Vic partly puts her boyfriend’s behaviour down to his recently diagnosed ADHD, which, she says, negatively impacts his memory and ability to multitask. But one partner can’t be neglected indefinitely.
“When you don’t have a partner that pulls their weight, it means you have to carry double the load,” says sex and relationships therapist Lucy Rowett. “You feel like you’re completely alone and that your partner gives nothing back.” This can create a stress cycle: you’re stressed about taking on all the domestic work and mental labour of organising, which can make you resentful of your partner, which can lead to arguments, all of which = more stress.
While this isn’t wholly unique to heterosexual couples, and doesn’t always track with traditional gender roles (hey, women can be thoughtless too!), it does seem to be most prevalent in relationships between unsupportive men and their long-suffering wives/girlfriends. This is true in Mattson’s study, which suggests that women are more likely to be affected by the unsupportive partner/stressed partner correlation than men — though, he tells Cosmopolitan UK, this could partly be because women are more likely to utilise social support in times of adversity and stress (note: men not talking about their emotions is still a heteronormative cultural norm).
Although gender roles are slowly changing, for now, most of us are still brought up to see it as ‘normal’ for men and women’s relationships to be inequitable when it comes to things like caretaking, breadwinning, and household chores — something that can unconsciously (or consciously, as the case may be) filter into our adult lives. In fact, although most people in the UK agree that household labour should be divided equally, a 2023 survey revealed that 63% of women still do the majority of the cooking and cleaning. “This takes a long time to unlearn,” says Rowett. “It may take another generation or two for these cycles to be broken.”
This uneven split in domestic and emotional support has another depressing side effect: it also kills women’s libidos. As per a 2022 study, women in relationship with ‘man-children’ — known for their helplessness and penchant to weaponise incompetence by simply not ‘noticing’ when chores need doing (can’t they smell the bin?!) — report feeling a lower sexual desire for their partners. As it turns out, treating your girlfriend like a parent is a total boner-killer. Who knew?
So, if men are making their partners stressed and un-horny by being, well, shitty, why don’t they do something about it? After all, having a stress-free, sex-filled life is fun for everyone… right?
“Men might be resistant to acknowledging a problem and enacting change because they don’t like to think of themselves as inequitable people or bad partners,” says Emily Harris, one of the study’s co-authors and a psychology lecturer at the University of Melbourne. “So there’s a defensiveness that can creep in.” As gender roles can have a powerful impact on this, she adds, “it’s simply a matter of challenging some of those ingrained gender roles”.
“Another explanation is slightly more enraging,” Harris continues, “and it’s that men don’t want to change the status quo because they benefit from it. Men may not want more equity in the division of household labour because it means they have to do more.”
Viv’s boyfriend used to be more on the defensive side, but now, she says, he feels “more guilty” about the unequal division of support. Nonetheless, she explains: “My body doesn’t feel physically turned on being around him as I feel like I’m parenting him. Even though there’s been minor improvements in his behaviour, our sex life still feels stilted, awkward, and boring, as if it’s the first time we’re having sex.”
Ironically, the pair have started couple’s therapy to try and work through these issues, with one of the conditions being that Viv’s boyfriend would take charge of logistics — but he keeps forgetting to email their therapist back. Once, they were 30 minutes late to a session because he failed to tell Viv what time it was happening.
If your partner isn’t taking initiative in the first place and then still doesn’t make the effort even when you’ve asked them, what else can you do? Is it time to break up? It was for Clara and her ex. “The amount of free time I suddenly had when not living with him and sorting things out was astounding,” she says.
It wasn’t clear-cut for Clara at the time though, just as it won’t be for most people in this situation. “First, I’d be brutally honest with yourself about how this is impacting you,” advises Rowett. “Then I recommend thinking of some tangible things you want your partner to start doing; this way, when you have the conversation, you can tell them how it’s affecting you and then share some things you need them to start doing. I’d start with a few things at first and then build it up. Remember: this will need to be an ongoing conversation and negotiation between you two, and it won’t be solved in one conversation.”
Sadly, while this does seem to be the only solution (aside from dumping them), it still involves the unsupported, overworked partner taking on the mental and emotional work of organising such a conversation — and the work that needs to follow. A better solution, though, requires bigger cultural change. “There’s too much pressure on romantic relationships to meet all of our emotional needs,” says Alva Gotby, the author of They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life. “Life is also getting more difficult for many people, and they struggle to access care elsewhere, which means that there is even more pressure on those relationships to compensate for stress. We need to recognise that we need emotional support from a whole range of people in our lives, and maintain meaningful relationships with friends as well as romantic partners.”
As clichéd as it might be to say, the most important person to support is yourself. If your relationship has become more of a dead weight than something that brings you up, and if it’s having a noticeable impact on your stress levels and sex drive, you have to seriously consider if it’s worth it.
“Couples therapy is a useful tool that will help me long-term even if the relationship ends,” concludes Viv. “I’m just enjoying the happy moments for now, as I do appreciate his kindness. But I think a part of me has checked out.”
*Names have been changed
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