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If you have sex, chances are, you’ll have a good day. But scheduling it makes it feel like a chore. And unlike any other chore or fitness enterprise, you conceive it more as self-indulgence than self-improvement, and as such, even if you’re already in a relationship, it’s hard to find that chin-out determination to get it done. Yet sex is an appetite like any other, a necessity like any other, a nourishment like any other. If you let it go dormant the effect on your relationship might be as if one or both of you are on a permanent diet – and also lonely. That might be fine for both of you, but for many of us, sex is a thing worth prioritising.
At its core, before you introduce any other domestic obstacles, it’s a two-person job, so you have to be attuned to one another; you can’t just decide unilaterally. To take this in ascending order of hurdles; if you’re a childless couple, the main block is going to be each other – not being in the same mood at the same time, not being in the house at the same time. This is true for your entire relationship, not just sex; I once interviewed a fertility doctor, who described working with a couple, trying to find an appointment time for when one was ovulating and both were in the country. They scrolled through several weeks before they managed it. “I felt as if I was beginning to get to the bottom of why they couldn’t conceive,” she said.
Sex does not have to begin and end in the bedroom, says Michelle Bassam, a psychological and sexual therapist of 25 years’ standing: “You can maintain intimacy throughout the day by being tactile. Showing interest in your partner can be enough.” And of course, the flip side – not showing interest, never giving your partner your full attention, never touching them unless, Larry David-style, it’s because you want sex in the next 90 seconds – can also derail things.
Obviously, having small kids is the passion-killer people fixate on, because it’s the most precipitous decline. One minute you were two hot people, shagging whenever you felt like it, then, wham! – you’re always tired, you’re boiling with resentment, you may have a toddler in your bed, and on the rare occasions you’re both awake at the same time without distraction, you might not be in the mood. Plus, a crisis of body image and identity, all might rush at the relationship. “It’s considered a really risky time, for couples,” says Jodie Slee, a sex therapist of 16 years, says, “not just sexually.” But start by being practical. Slee gives this staggering statistic: “If a woman gets an extra hour of sleep a night, that increases her libido by 14%.”
The body image consideration is real: “Motherhood is not seen as a sexy thing,” Slee says. Realistically, this lands on women, who go through a physical ordeal that puts you off sex, makes you look crumpled and smell a bit like dairy for who knows how many months afterwards, and puts you in a new category, “mother”, that culturally isn’t even allowed a sexual identity. “I think it’s OK for women to be a little bit selfish, and think: ‘I’m going to have a little bit of time to keep me in my pre-child self.’”
But everyone, child-bearing or not, needs to acknowledge how much has changed, and the pain there may be in that. Build a network so there are people you are happy to leave the kids with overnight; don’t let a sex drought, some of which will be physically inevitable, turn into a black hole that you tiptoe around; don’t mediate other resentments through sex, by withdrawing physically because of the one million other non-sexual things there are to be annoyed about.
“Make sure the workload is equal,” Slee says, “so that one person is not doing all the night feeds and the labour. I think it’s OK for parents to be a little bit selfish, and not have this martyr approach to parenting, so the children get every single bit of you.”
As kids get older, and become teenagers, their demands on your time are probably fewer, but there’s often a layer of self-consciousness. “Parents have a responsibility, one would hope, to hide the bedroom side of things,” Bassam says, “But it’s very important that children and young teenagers are given a template from their parents, so they know what intimacy is. It can be as simple as someone putting a hand on your shoulder as they walk through the kitchen.”
Those child-rearing years, though, are no longer the end of the obstacle race. The number of young adults still living with their parents has increased by more than a third this century. “So many people don’t like to have sex at their parent’s house,” Bassam says – a situation often aggravated by displaying family photographs in the spare room.
It’s also a fact that a certain natural prudery makes us much more comfortable asking others to accommodate dietary or habit preferences than we are asking to just have half an hour upstairs, for the love of God. People will move mountains for you if you’re gluten intolerant, and they’ll roll their eyes but accept it if you meditate, but you cannot say, “both of us are just going to disappear for a bit”.
This holds for any multi-occupant household: you have to communicate your expectations in the you-as-a-couple sphere. If you feel like your couplehood is being constantly obliterated by a group’s demands, that’s going to make you not want sex, or alternatively, want sex in a needy, annoying way that isn’t erotic.
There’s a truism that once you start scheduling sex, you’re doomed, but not everyone agrees. “If you reframe it,” Slee says, “you’re not scheduling, you’re prioritising, and you’re showing one another that it’s important.” In long-term relationships, “your desire is more responsive than it is spontaneous; so if you’re waiting for the mood to spontaneously take you, you could be waiting a really long time.”
Planning for sex also “stops the pressure of ‘Oh my God, it’s been two weeks, it’s been three weeks’. The more pressure there is, the more anxiety there is, the less likely it is to happen.”
Now you just have to keep the flame alive, which is done by what people used to call “erotic defamiliarisation”, which was just a science-y term for novelty. “Novelty is the thing that creates the honeymoon period – your body is flooded with dopamine, which is spiked by novelty. Over time, your body gets used to that much dopamine and there is no novelty,” Slee says. “That doesn’t have to mean dungeons and sex clubs and swinging – that’s what people think you mean when you say it, and it can be that. But novelty for some couples will be using a different room, wearing a different outfit.” The advantage of being familiar to one another is that you’re allowed to try something that doesn’t work. Even a misfire will show that you’re on your partner’s agenda.
The first couple Slee ever worked with were in their early 80s and had been together for 50 years. They were having sex every other day, “they were only in therapy because they wanted to spice it up – and it was already pretty spicy. One of them had had a hip replacement, so there were some new limitations,” but a sex drought wasn’t one of them. I guess we’re including them as the motivational ideal for a long and happy marriage, but also, it wasn’t magic, they just got there somehow: they never let the sun (or two suns) go down on a dry spell.
