Married Sex: How to Avoid and Break Free from the Dreaded Sexless Marriage
We All Carry Baggage
Try as you might, you cannot avoid carrying some things around with you. Even the most enlightened of humankind admit to little neuroses knocking on the door of their minds from time to time. The trick to dealing with them isn’t so much about banishing those little buggers from your life forever; it’s more about what you do with them and hearing what it is they’re trying to tell you.
What does this have to do with sex in marriage? Oh, just everything.
The Honeymoon’s Over
If you landed on this website, and you’re married, reading this little blog post, you’re likely all too aware of the honeymoon phase having come and gone. With how long engagements last these days and how late in life people are tying the knot, the honeymoon phase may have ended before you even went on your actual honeymoon!
Now the two of you, adults with more concretized worldviews and with a grab bag of traumas and life experiences to draw from, are orbiting each other with a bit more distance. This is natural even in the healthiest of couples, and if it’s done right, it’s healthy.
Picture your orbit like an ellipse. It’s not a perfect circle (like our own’ planet’s!).
In a healthy dynamic, the two of you should dance back and forth between intimacy and distance; not so close for so long that you’re suffocated or crushed by your gravitational codependent forces, and not so far that your marriage enters a winter from which it will struggle to recover, if it can at all.
The Big Chill
The grab bag we mentioned earlier can weaken our gravity toward one another if we aren’t doing our personal work. Yes, there is work to do regarding the interplay of relationships, but if you as an individual are not seeing to your own mental, emotional, and spiritual health, you will weaken your own gravitational pull on your mate, and the elliptical dance of interplanetary bodies will fall so far out of balance that atrophy sets into the system. Even death.
Sex is not simple.
Yes, at times, a release is barely more than exactly that, but it’s never only that.
Men, you might have entered into this article expecting to hear some kind of trick to turn your lover on again. Women, you might have thought you were going to receive some kind of insight that would turn your perceptions inside out and give you an “a-ha” moment.
Sorry to disappoint.
it was Carl Sagan who said, “"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.”
Everything in your relationship in interconnected with everything else.
The universe of your relationship is what leads to the apple pie of a healthy sex life.
We have to start at root causes to get your sex life back on track. Do you need to get more fit? Maybe. Do you need to listen better? Probably. Do you need to engage in a list of behaviors that will help the situation? Or change your beliefs? Or… you get the picture.
All of those things will probably help. But what will get us there fastest is identifying how we can carve out space for intimacy again in your relationship, in all its forms.
Put sex last on that list, and ironically, you might just find it happens on its own.
(Spoiler: most of the time, that’s the hack.)