Dry spells can occur for any number of reasons -- comparing everyone to your ex, signaling desperation, meeting only French-speaking people. Kate R., also 35, suffered a year-long drought when she moved to Montreal from Vancouver for a job. "I talked about sex a lot," she recalls. "It starts to consume your thoughts. Ideally, I'd rather be focusing on work. It became such a big part of my life."

It's still a much-discussed topic. "My girlfriend was just saying the other day how badly she wanted to have sex, that she wanted her thighs to hurt the next day and to get it so hard her head bangs against the headboard. We can get pretty nasty about it. But when it comes down to it, neither one of us is going to go into a bar and say 'Hey, you and me, let's go.'"

The jury's out on whether it's better to think about sex or try to banish all thoughts of the hokey-pokey. "It's different for different people," says Dr. Bianca Rucker, a Vancouver-based sex and relationships therapist. "Some might benefit from talking and thinking about it, while others might want it off their radar completely."

Unfortunately, neither Dr. Rucker nor Dr. Faizal Sahukhan, a therapist who specializes in problems in ethnic and cross-cultural relationships, has many practical suggestions when it came to coping with the lack of life's great stress reliever. "Yeah, it's a bummer," they basically said.

Focusing on one's social life or on creative projects or even doing yoga could help. "In yoga, you're basically funneling your energy from the genital area towards the total body experience," says Dr. Sahukhan. "It's like, if you're a goalie in ice hockey and you're wearing this chest protector. It's not that thick, but when the puck hits you it absorbs so the pressure in that one isolated part is distributed throughout the whole area. That's what yoga does with sexual energy."

And both therapists also thought a period of sexual inactivity was a good time for self-reflection and personal growth -- or figuring out why you're not in that ideal relationship or why you keep dating the wrong kind of person or why you repel the people you're trying to attract. Talk to a therapist, read a couple of self-help books, look for the patterns that have led you to the state where the highlight of your week is The L Word or Red Shoe Diaries.

And if that doesn't work, chin up and look at the bright side: at least you're not married. Now, there's a dry spell we wouldn't wish on anyone.