Some background:
I've had three boyfriends. I dated the first for a year and eight months, and we were sexually active for most of that time. I dated the second for around a month and a half, and we were sexually active for around a month. I've been dating the third for nine months now, and we've been sexually active pretty much the whole time.
By sexually active, I mean doing things like fingering, handjobs, oral, and PIV.
My first boyfriend was my first kiss, and my first everything-after-that. I was his first for some things too, apparently. While we were still uncertain about sex, he was really patient, but once we started having PIV sex reasonably regularly, he got kind of less patient. This wasn't an issue until I started using the Ring, at which point my libido, already much lower than his, plummeted. And sex started hurting. And it was nearly impossible for me to get turned on. Fortunately I left for college before our relationship self-immolated in the mess of his impatience, my frustration, and the low self-esteem of both of us. (Note that I got off the HBC at this point.)
( Potentially triggery for bf pressuring )Second relationship, started out with me getting super-turned-on by just about everything he did, although his inability to keep it up while wearing a condom was frustrating. So our sex life was pretty good, until I abruptly stopped feeling attracted to him and left him for my current boyfriend. (Not so proud of this, but nobody was apparently hurt by it, so I've made peace with it.)
Current relationship, again, started out with me getting turned on fairly easily, and he has an extremely active libido, so it was all good for a while, and if it happened that I wasn't turned on, well, he just took care of it himself. So that was all good. Then my sex drive started lessening again. Now it's summer, and we're long-distance, and the couple of times we've seen each other, I've had pretty much zero sex drive. Now I'm worried that it won't come back once we're in the same city again and able to see each other regularly.
It seems an awful lot like my libido is largely driven by novelty. New boy, new toy, new sort of kisses. This is a problem, because I love current bf a lot, and I don't want to leave him, and he doesn't think he'd be able to handle me being polyamorous (even though I feel like I have more than enough emotional attention for two relationships), so the only option that feels right to me is staying with him.
Erotica sometimes works to get me turned on, but not always, and it's always over really quickly. Moreover, I would be far too embarrassed to be looking at erotica while he was in the room.
Now, he claims that he'd be perfectly okay with not having sex with me. But the thing is, I really really like being turned on and enjoying doing sexy things, and it's really super frustrating that my libido is so... picky? lazy? inactive?
Moreover, if I'm not being turned on, and sometimes even if I am, it's really easy for something my boyfriend is doing with his fingers to hurt, because apparently my vulva (especially my clit) is supar-sensitive. It might just be that he's not very dexterous, except that I didn't have this problem back at the beginning of our relationship. He also can't give good oral and I feel self-conscious about how i smell and taste anyway. So it's hard to get good foreplay.
Actually, there's one other thing that's almost certainly a huge contributory factor: somewhere I seem to have got a sense of shame about sex and I've no clue how to shed it. It's been around since before I was sexually active, though it was almost certainly worsened by my first bf.
Any suggestions as to ways I can revive it? I'm not on HBC, I'm not on any mind-altering drugs. I can masturbate, but it's still really difficult for me to get turned on that way and sometimes the whole effort just peters out.