By SUZANNE JANNESE for YourTango.com.
Why does everyone pretend they’re having great sex all the time?
The greatest marriage taboo seems to be admitting you can be happily married, but not swinging from the metaphorical chandeliers each night. As anyone with small kids knows, sleep is the biggest seducer of all when having to choose between mustering energy to attempt to have an orgasm or catching a few extras ZZZs. (Psst: The Zzzs win every time.)
Two months passed since our baby was born, and my husband and I hadn’t had sex. No biggie, I thought. But then 3 months passed, and before we knew it, a freakin’ year of celibacy had gone by. (I attribute part of this to the fact that my husband works odd hours and we were parents to a newborn.) I was horrified. How would we ever get back on track?
By the grace of God we did, but during our drought, I took a good hard look at my marriage and discovered our lack of sex actually impacted our marriage … for the better. Here’s how:
1. We stopped using sex as a weapon
After the baby was born, I started to feel sexually rejected by my husband. I got fed up trying to make a move on him with no reciprocation so I simply stopped making any attempts, thinking ‘that’ll show him.’ But when he didn’t seem to care, I panicked. Was he having an affair? Nope. Turns out, he was just exhausted from working crazy hours and I was acting like an angry, rejected wife, and SHOCKER: those two things together don’t equal friskiness.
I eventually realized I was witholding sex as a sort of powerplay, but it had backfired. The more I pretended I didn’t want him, the more he pretended he didn’t want me and it resulted in a stalemate. We finally hashed it out and my husband admitted he hadn’t exactly been attentive to me and apologized. Turns out, what I viewed as rejection was him just being lazy! Just hearing from him that he still desired me was all I needed to overcome my raging anger toward him. From that point, we decided that date night had to be the most important day of the week and started to schedule in time to be with each other, with no expectation of sex. Taking the pressure to make sweet, sweet love at the end of the night actually made it *more* likely that we wanted to do it. Go figure.
Top Comments
My first marriage had a lot of sex in it.... I generally was not there however! (cheater) My second marriage was preceded by amazing sex which slowed... then almost completely stopped right after marriage - due to his addiction to pain killers. We went months without it. I constantly fought over it and begged him for any crumb of affection. It was exhausting.
Finally - I found my match and we generally have it 2 to 4 times A DAY now. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
If you are in a sexless marriage - GET OUT. Life is too short to be miserable. If you are in a marriage and regularly refuse your spouse then YOU are breaking your vows. Let them leave. It took 20 painful years to come to this conclusion.
I have never been happier.
Haha the add for firework school in the middle of this article is hilarious :D bring back the fireworks, geddit?! Lol