Sound familiar? If you’re reading this, you probably keep a count too. Maybe yours is in weeks. Maybe it’s in months, and you quit doing the math because the math got embarrassing. And odds are you’ve got the same theory Mark has in that last panel.

The rest of this book is about why Mark’s got it wrong and what to do instead. Seven chapters, about fifteen minutes. First up: how desire actually works.

It can run the other way. Some men have a kettle, and plenty of women have a switch. But in long relationships, it often splits like this.

Look at it from her side. You’re asking about desire before anything has started. She checks, honestly, and there’s nothing there yet. That’s how it’s supposed to go: nobody’s turned on the burner.

What you hear is “I don’t want you.”

After enough no’s, you’re both bracing. You come in careful, already half expecting the answer. She can feel it from across the room, and now every touch, even a shoulder rub during The Diplomat, reads like the opening line of a negotiation. From here, most guys go one of two ways. Neither one works.

Mark didn’t ask anything. He kissed Jen while she was on the phone with Anthem about Leo’s ear tubes. Then he went upstairs to run the bath. Chapter 2 is about why.

She says it nicely, and all it means is “not right now.” What Mark hears is “I don’t want you.” He’s pressing the gas, and her foot is on the brake. Nobody in the room can see either pedal, Jen included.

The model started with men. When researchers got around to women, they found that on average women score a bit higher on the brake and a bit lower on the gas. Try it yourself: push the gas all the way down, leave the brake floored, and watch the needle.

Guys who’ve been counting the weeks tend to spend years on the gas: better timing, a smoother approach, flowers, the good body wash. Hardly any of them check the brake.

Researchers have asked women about this directly.

One pair of themes is worth underlining: feeling desired versus feeling used. A hand on her thigh while she’s working lands on the “used” side.

Two years later the same team published a questionnaire for women. Two of the brakes it measures kicked in for Jen that Friday.

Some of those brakes Mark can’t reach. Some he installed himself, one sigh at a time. And a couple of them he could remove for under thirty bucks.

The last time started at his sister’s rehearsal dinner. Mark gave the toast, which he’d written on his phone in a Marriott parking lot. It was good: short, a little mean about his sister’s ex, a little sweet about their mom. Forty people laughed.

Jen watched him from table six, in a room where nobody needed her to find anything, pay for anything or wipe anything.

The questionnaire that found the brakes found the gas too. Part of it is her: how easily she gets turned on in general. Part of it is you: how you talk, how you treat other people, how you smell, what you’re like when you take charge of something. And part of it is the setting, somewhere that isn’t the usual place.

On Saturday Mark sat in the Kroger parking lot and split the back of the receipt into two columns. The brakes came fast. The gas took some thinking. The toast. A weekend in Asheville four years ago, in an Airbnb with a broken hot tub. The garbage disposal he fixed during her work call, and the “thank you” she mouthed at him. The way he smells after a run, which she once admitted she likes and then denied.

He didn’t show her the receipt. He turned the monitor down one notch and got to work on the rest.

The first person to use the lock was Jen, so she could call her sister without Ava barging in halfway through. One line in the left column can be crossed off.

It’s the smallest fight a couple can have. Nobody raised their voice, nobody said anything unkind, and in the morning neither of them will bring it up.

Both of them will remember it, though. Jen now knows that if she says no, she gets the sigh. Mark knows the no is coming before he even reaches over. By now each of them is answering the last ten Sundays more than the person in the bed.

In Johnson’s view, both partners are trying to save the relationship, each in their own way. The one who chases can’t stand the distance and keeps checking: are you still there? Do you still want me? The one who backs off is trying to keep the peace and avoid another round of failing.

From the outside it looks like one person wants and the other doesn’t. From the inside, both are scared of the same thing.

So who does the chasing? Usually whoever wants something to change. In one early study, spouses pushed harder when the conversation was about a change they wanted, and pulled back when it was about a change their partner wanted.

If you’re the one who wants more sex, you’re the one chasing, even if you’re not a pushy guy about anything else. It’s just a role in the dance, and you can step out of it.

Draw Sunday night on a napkin and it looks like this: what each of you does, and what’s going on underneath.

Johnson’s point was that nobody in this dance is the villain.

That’s why EFT starts by helping a couple spot their loop and team up against it. In real life it sounds pretty simple.

That study was about how she says no. The same moment has a second half, and it’s yours: how you take it.

If every no costs her a sigh and a chilly Monday, touch turns into a risk, and she’ll start avoiding the risk. Nobody has measured this half yet. But it’s the half you can change tonight.

On Thursday, Mark decided to try it.

Eleven minutes later Mark was asleep, his hand still on her back. Jen lay there for a while. Then she moved his hand to her waist and went to sleep.

Mark asked a good question, and he meant it. But to answer it, Jen has to find him a task, figure out which one is safe to hand over, explain it, and then remember to check that it got done.

And it’s 7:04 p.m. She’s been making decisions nonstop since Leo woke up at 5:40, and she has maybe forty minutes of them left in her.

In these couples, the women did more of this thinking overall, especially the noticing ahead of time and the following up. Deciding was split about evenly.

Mark takes out the trash when it’s full, and anyone can see that. The noticing, the finding and the checking are all Jen, and that part is invisible to both of them.

Other researchers describe this load as invisible, never finished and without clear edges. In plain English, the tabs in her head stay open at work, in the shower and in bed.

That doesn’t make chores a currency. “Do the dishes, get sex” has no good evidence behind it.

Nice Guys know this trap from the inside. You empty the dishwasher, fold two loads, put the kids down, and then lie there at 10:30 waiting for all of it to count for something.

The therapist Robert Glover has a name for this: a covert contract. You do something nice and silently expect to get paid for it. When the payment doesn’t come, you feel cheated by a deal she never saw, let alone signed.

Mark picked one area and took all of it: every doctor and dentist appointment for both kids. All four hats are his now.

It doesn’t have to be doctors. It can be school stuff, the car, birthday parties, the bills or weeknight dinners. What matters is that it’s hers right now, and that it moves to you whole, from the first thought to the last check.

He made mistakes, of course. He booked Ava’s checkup on the day of her field trip, and once he had to ask where the insurance cards were. But when the job is yours, so are the mistakes, and he fixed them himself.

Two weeks later, a reminder popped up on Jen’s phone: time to book Leo’s cleaning. She’d set up that reminder system two years ago. She looked at the screen. Then she looked at the family iPad on the counter, where Mark’s calendar was open.

She deleted her reminder.

For Mark, it’s a shoulder rub. Jen has seen this episode so many times she knows every line, and she’s already working out how it ends. Kind of hard to relax like that.

A touch that might be an opening line has to be managed. Managing is work, and she already has a job.

Most guys in this spot decide she doesn’t like being touched anymore. She probably still does. What she’s lost patience with is touch that has a sequel.

Which is a shame, because couples really do need touch. The research on it is almost boring: study after study, same answer.

Now for two studies about sex. Oddly enough, both of them turn out to be about affection.

So touch is doing real work. But in this house, every touch comes with a little tag that says “…and then?” Jen can read it through a sweater.

We won’t walk you through the exercises. That’s a sex therapist’s job, and Chapter 7 covers how to find one. The main idea, though, travels well into everyday life.

Do this enough times and she stops waiting for the sequel, because the touch is no longer a hint. It also helps to say it out loud once, so she isn’t left guessing.

Mark didn’t ask for anything, so Jen didn’t have to turn him down. Judging by the bowls, the kiss landed.

Mark and Jen are in an Uber home from Dave’s 40th in German Village. He’s had three beers and a speech he’s been drafting in his head for a month. Somewhere on 315, it comes out.

It’s the fourth time they’ve had this fight, and it always opens the same way: late, tired, a little drunk, with a verdict where a question should be. From there it goes where it always goes: “never” against “we did in August,” his hurt against her tired.

The couples who later split came in sharper and colder, right from the opening lines. Researchers call that a harsh start-up, and it sounds like a verdict: you never, you always, what’s wrong with us. A softened start-up is a complaint without the blame: here’s what I feel, here’s what I need.

She can even say “me too,” and just like that, you’re talking.

Jen says it to nobody in particular. Mark is on his phone.

Gottman would call that a bid, his word for any small attempt to get the other person’s attention: a comment, a sigh, a question about nothing. There are three ways to answer one.

Why is there a bird in a chapter about sex? Because the big talk rests on a thousand small ones.

Mark puts his phone face down and walks over to the window.

Mark started the next talk himself, and he picked the time on purpose: not in bed, not right after a no, and definitely not in a moving car. He rehearsed less than he had for the Uber.

He opened with how much he missed her. Then he asked what was on her brakes these days and listened to the whole answer, including the part about him. He told her what he’d already taken off her plate and what he’d take next. The list of complaints stayed in his head, and nothing came with a deadline.

He did the math again, a different kind this time. She’d started the pills last spring, right around when “maybe this weekend” became her answer to everything.

Sertraline is an antidepressant, an SSRI. Drugs in that group are among the best-known reasons a woman’s desire can drop. That doesn’t mean the bottle explains everything. And it’s never a reason to ask her to stop taking it. A medication that’s helping her is doing its job.

What the bottle does change is the story in Mark’s head. For months he’d read his count as a verdict on himself. Remember the brakes from Chapter 2? Some of them come with a pharmacy label.

At 1 a.m., Mark googled “low libido wife” and got a lot of forums and three ads. The medical sites are shorter and calmer. Here’s what they list as common reasons a woman’s desire drops:

There’s a point where a book stops being enough. These are the signs it’s time for a professional:

How you ask matters as much as where you go.

Mark never mentioned the bottle. One Sunday afternoon he said that sentence, more or less word for word, and then stopped talking. Jen was quiet for a long time.

She booked Dr. Alvarez, her OB-GYN at Riverside Methodist, for Thursday at 8:40. Mark blocked off the whole morning on his work calendar and moved his team sync. They put a couples therapist on the list for later, in case one door wasn’t enough.

He hadn’t done the math in a while.