“Why aren’t we having sex more often?”
by Mira and Charles on October 26th, 2009If love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, what about sex and marriage?
Well, for many of us it starts out like a horse and carriage and ends up like a horse and pogo stick.
You start out filled with passion and the desire for intimacy. Then the nonsense of daily life takes over: arguments about who’s going to pick up the dry cleaning, who should’ve paid what bill. Then babies come, and too often sex flies out the window completely. You’re too busy, too tired, too often pissed off at each other. The next thing you know it’s been a very long time since you made love, and the more time passes, the harder it is. At least, that’s how it is for many of us. No wonder it seems that marriage is a machine for creating babies and destroying sex.
But is sex an inevitable casualty of marriage? Absolutely not. It doesn’t have to be this way at all.
So what is the culprit? And what do you do about it?
First of all, stop blaming each other. It’s rarely all the other person’s fault, and never useful to look at it that way.
Here are the real culprits: There are 13!
And that’s actually good news for you. You can’t solve your problem if you don’t know what causes it. And so this means that now you can target just why your sex life isn’t as active as you’d like it to be. We’ll give you solutions next time. And it will be a solution targeted to your situation.
Now please rock the vote on this one. Let us know which of the 13 reasons below best explains why you and your partner aren’t having sex very often these days. Here they are:
1. You’re so busy and stressed out that it’s hard to get into a sexy, let’s-connect frame of mind.
2. You’re mad at each other and feel hurt, so you need some real healing to happen before you can feel sexually open to each other.
3. You’ve fallen into a sexual rut. Making love is too mechanical and predictable. You’re disappointed, which leads to discouragement, which leads to your not doing anything about it.
4. One of you wants to make love more often than the other and this has set up a dynamic where one is always pushing and the other resisting.
5. You don’t experience each other as sexy anymore.
6. Everyday life is almost overpoweringly mundane, and you have trouble breaking through to the intimacy and sensuality necessary for love making.
7. Your sexual chemistry wasn’t so hot at the beginning and now you’re dealing with this.
8. There’s been a decline of libido with age.
9. It gets harder over time to come up with new things to do in bed, and you have a need for newness.
10. You’ve fallen into a dynamic in which each of you is waiting for the other to make the first move.
11. One or both of you in fact is looking for a way out of the relationship.
12. Sex is not good now for a specific but temporary or treatable reason: something physiological or anatomical; there is a sexual dysfunction; a problem in current life circumstances; illness; etc.
13. Having sex and talking about why you’re not having sex never happen because while this is an important issue, it’s infinitely postponable. It’s not urgent, and many other things in your life are urgent, so you don’t get around to it.
Let us know which of these applies most to you. Which would you guess applies most to most people?
In the next blog, we’ll give you solutions that work for each.
You need to know that in two of our books we go into detail about how to deal with sexual issues in your relationship. Those books are
Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad
and
In both you’ll find the kind of practical help you’re looking for.
