It’s probably circumstantial if…

1. You can point to exactly when it started. A new baby, a health scare, a brutal quarter at work, a death in the family — if there’s a specific event both of you could name without hesitating, that’s a real cause doing real work, not a mystery.

2. Desire still flickers, even if nothing comes of it. A moment of real spark that doesn’t go anywhere is a different animal from total, flat absence. The wanting is still there; it’s just not winning against whatever’s currently louder.

3. You’re still warm outside the bedroom. Casual affection, easy conversation, still choosing to spend time together — if the rest of the relationship is intact, the gap is more likely about bandwidth than about each other.

4. Neither of you is quietly rewriting the relationship’s history because of it. If the dry spell hasn’t started bleeding into how you talk about the relationship overall — “we’re just not that close anymore,” said in passing — it’s probably staying in its lane.

5. The explanation hasn’t needed updating in months. “We’re slammed until the move is done” still describes something real if the move genuinely isn’t done yet. The explanation only becomes a red flag once it’s outlived the thing it was explaining.

It’s probably structural if…

6. Neither of you can actually name a trigger. No event, no season, no obvious pressure — just an absence that’s been quietly normal for a while now. Absence without a cause is the clearest sign there’s something underneath it worth naming.

7. It’s outlasted whatever originally explained it. The new job settled six months ago. The baby sleeps through the night now. The explanation stopped being current a while back, and nobody’s updated it — which usually means it’s not really an explanation anymore, just a habit of not looking.

8. The distance has spread past the bedroom. Less casual touch, flatter conversation, more logistics and less everything else — when the gap shows up in more than one place at once, it’s rarely just about frequency.

What to actually do with this

If most of your signs point circumstantial, the honest move is patience plus a check-in once the pressure lifts — not a crisis intervention. If most point structural, the dry spell isn’t the actual problem, it’s the symptom, and it’s worth naming what’s underneath it directly rather than waiting for time to fix something time was never going to touch.

For the full breakdown — including the edge cases where these two categories blur together — see The Dry Spell Isn’t a Verdict. If “we’re just busy” has been doing more covering-up than explaining lately, that’s covered directly in You’re Not Too Busy for Sex.