Here’s the tell. You can usually name, if you’re honest for a moment, roughly when it actually changed — not a slow universal fade, but a specific stretch of time, often tied to a specific unresolved event: a fight that was never really finished, a betrayal of trust smaller than an affair but real enough to leave a mark, a long period where one of you felt alone in the relationship and never quite said so. The generic story (“this just happens over time”) doesn’t have a start date. Yours probably does, if you actually look.

The generic story is comfortable precisely because it has no start date and therefore no cause to examine. “It fades over time” requires nothing of anyone — not an apology, not an admission, not a return to a moment either of you might have preferred to leave alone. The specific story does. That’s the whole reason the vague one gets used instead, repeated by both of you, often without either person consciously deciding to lie — it’s just so much easier to reach for the shared, blameless myth than the specific, awkward truth sitting underneath it.

What it’s costing you is the chance to fix the actual thing. A generic cause has no generic fix — “time did this” offers nowhere to intervene. A specific cause, once actually named, at least gives you something to work with: a conversation that was never finished, a repair that never happened, a moment either of you could still choose to go back to.

The harder truth: your sex life probably didn’t die of natural causes. Something happened, and the vague story you’ve both agreed to tell is quieter and more comfortable than remembering what it was.

Here’s what’s available if you’re willing to look past the comfortable version: ask yourself, honestly, when it actually shifted — not when you noticed it was gone, but when it started. If a specific moment surfaces, that’s not a coincidence to set aside. That’s the actual place to start, however much less convenient it is than “these things just fade.”