Bloated, and Not Wanting to Be Touched

Month three, and I flinched

My husband put a hand on my stomach in bed and I moved it. Not dramatically. Just — moved it, the way you move a cat off a laptop.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. And what came out of my mouth was "I'm just tired," which was true and also completely beside the point.

I had been bloated for eleven days. Not the pre-period kind. The kind where my waistband was a decision, where I unbuttoned my jeans in the car, where I lay on the couch at 8pm with a hot water bottle like a Victorian. And somewhere in those eleven days I had quietly stopped wanting to be touched anywhere between my ribs and my hips, and then — because bodies are not filing cabinets — stopped wanting to be touched much at all.

What I got wrong about it

For about two weeks I thought this was a libido problem. I went looking for libido answers. Is it the drug? Is it my hormones? Am I one of those women you read about?

That was the wrong question and it cost me a fortnight of feeling broken.

The right question was much dumber: does my abdomen feel good right now? No. It had not felt good in eleven days. Why on earth would I want somebody's hand on it.

I am not saying desire is only plumbing. I am saying that when your gut has been uncomfortable for a week and a half, "I don't want to be touched" is not a mystery that requires a hormone panel.

The thing that reframed it

I went looking for whether anyone had studied this properly — GLP-1 constipation and intimacy, together. Nobody has. That is not me being lazy, that is genuinely the state of it.

But here is what I did find, and it rearranged how I thought about my own body. There is a randomized trial of pelvic floor physiotherapy in women with a painful pelvic condition, and the researchers measured urinary function, bowel function and sexual function together, in the same study, as related outcomes.¹

Together. Because they are the same muscles.

The pelvic floor is not a bladder thing that occasionally does other jobs. It is one hammock of muscle doing bowel work and sexual work in the same small space. When one of those is straining, unhappy or braced, expecting the other to behave normally is a strange thing to ask.

That is not a diagnosis. It is a reason to stop treating "I'm constipated" and "I don't want sex" as two separate failures of two separate systems.

What actually helped

Nothing exotic. Mostly I stopped attacking the wrong problem.

• I treated the bloating as the priority, not the intimacy. The constipation stuff I already wrote about — fiber, fluids, magnesium, walking — is where the effort went.
• I stopped scheduling around the wrong variable. Injection day is not the useful marker for me. Day four of feeling like a balloon is.
• I said the actual sentence out loud. "My stomach has felt awful for a week and I don't want anything near it" landed completely differently than "I'm tired." He was relieved. He had been assuming it was about him.
• I asked whether it was hurting, or just uncomfortable. Those are different and they go to different people. Uncomfortable is a fiber-and-time problem. Hurting is a phone call.

Where I landed

The bloating settled. Not to nothing, but to something I notice rather than something that runs my week. And the not-wanting-to-be-touched went with it, which told me most of what I needed to know about which one was causing which.

If I could go back and tell myself one thing at the start of that month, it would not be a supplement. It would be: you are not having a libido crisis, you are having an abdomen.

And if your bloating has genuinely not shifted, or it is pain rather than discomfort, or there is a hard swollen belly or vomiting in the mix — that is not a thing to reframe. That is a thing to call about, today.