The Secret Remedy to a Dead Bedroom

One of the biggest challenges long-term couples face is maintaining a sense of erotic connection while managing the realities of everyday life. The longer partners live together, the easier it can become to slip into a “roommate” dynamic where responsibilities, routines, and stress crowd out intimacy.

When couples find themselves in a so-called “dead bedroom,” people often assume the problem is purely sexual. But sometimes, the issue starts long before anyone gets into bed.

A recent study published in The Journal of Sex Research suggests that division of household labor may play an important role in shaping sexual desire.[1] Who’s doing the cleaning, childcare, and mental labor around the house may have more to do with intimacy than many couples realize.

Division of Labor in Relationships 

Research has consistently found that in heterosexual relationships, women tend to perform a disproportionate share of household labor, even when both partners work outside the home full-time. This includes not just visible tasks like cooking and cleaning, but also the often invisible labor of managing schedules, planning, organizing, and anticipating family needs.

These responsibilities can become physically exhausting, mentally draining, and emotionally isolating, especially when one partner feels their contributions are unnoticed or taken for granted.

Over time, that imbalance may start to affect not just relationship satisfaction, but sexual desire as well.

What the Study Found

The researchers actually conducted two separate studies examining how division of labor relates to sexual desire in cohabiting mixed-gender couples. One followed 163 couples over the course of a month, while the second surveyed 617 individuals at a single point in time.

In both studies, participants reported on:

• their division of household labor
• their level of sexual desire
• their attitudes toward traditional gender roles

The researchers suspected that beliefs about gender roles might shape how people experience unequal labor divisions. For example, someone who strongly believes household work “should” fall primarily to women may react differently to an unequal division of labor than someone who values a more egalitarian partnership.

Key Findings 

Mothers who took on a larger share of household and childcare responsibilities reported lower sexual desire overall. Interestingly, this pattern did not emerge among women without children, suggesting that parenting-related labor may be especially taxing.

The same pattern appeared for men, too: men who took on more childcare responsibilities also reported lower desire. This finding highlights an important point: exhaustion and chronic stress can suppress desire regardless of gender.

Women who held less traditional views about gender roles experienced lower sexual desire when they were responsible for more household labor. By contrast, some women with more traditional gender-role beliefs actually reported higher desire when they performed more domestic labor. This doesn’t necessarily mean unequal labor improves desire. Rather, it suggests that people may experience household dynamics differently depending on whether those arrangements align (or conflict) with their personal beliefs and expectations.

One of the most interesting findings involved cleaning. Women who did more cleaning tended to report lower sexual desire, whereas men who did more cleaning reported higher desire.

The researchers suggest this may reflect how cleaning is socially perceived. For many women, cleaning is often treated as expected and invisible labor. For men, however, contributing to cleaning may be more likely to be noticed and appreciated by their partner. Feeling appreciated in relationships matters, and previous research suggests that appreciation can help buffer some of the negative effects of unequal labor divisions.

As the authors explain, “This pattern may reflect gendered expectations around cleaning as an invisible or taken-for-granted task for women, but a more discretionary or appreciated contribution for men, as feeling appreciated has been shown to buffer the negative consequences of unequal division of labor in relationships (citing Gordon et al., 2022).” [1]

Can Doing Chores Really Fix a Dead Bedroom? 

For some people, changing the division of labor in a relationship may be key to reigniting desire.

Desire doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Stress, resentment, exhaustion, unfairness, and feeling emotionally unsupported can all shape how people experience intimacy.

For many couples, the issue isn’t simply “low libido.” It’s that one partner feels overburdened while the other may not fully recognize the extent of that burden.

Redistributing household labor more equitably (especially invisible labor like childcare, planning, and cleaning) may help create the conditions that allow desire to flourish. In long-term relationships, feeling like teammates often matters just as much as feeling like lovers.

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References

[1] Liepmann, A., Cross, E. J., & Muise, A. (2026). Division of household labor and sexual desire: The role of gender and benevolent sexism. The Journal of Sex Research, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2026.2656775