So, picture this! I was sitting over a glass of wine with a friend a couple of weeks ago. We were both lamenting the fact that she hasn't yet fallen pregnant, something which she and her husband have been wanting to do for some years now.
"The thing is Lou!" she said, with the usual straight-forward approach, which always makes me grin. "To fall pregnant, you have to have sex!"
"Hmm," I said in agreement. "Damn! I take it you and Jack are not?"
"No!" she said, sounding at once sad and disappointed. "No, we're not! I'd be lucky if it happened every few months, and even then I feel like it's a duty for him!"
Well as a woman many years her senior, I found myself wanting to give her a huge hug. I think this disappointment, this feeling that her time-clock is ticking, the negative impact that it has on her self-esteem, is perhaps much more common than she realises. Therefore, it is something worth talking about in this space.
Put simply, it's an awful place that my friend is in, on so many counts. Firstly, sex is not something that we easily talk about in our society. We might joke about it, but unlike the state of our mortgage, the rising interest rates or the next holiday being planned, we don't often raise intimacy as a problem among our family and friends, to seek their feedback. Further, just as talking about it is not always encouraged among our friendship circles, when things are not going well we are often fighting stereotypes. The one with the high libido according to our social norms is traditionally the man of the outfit for example. She's the one who is supposed to be saying "not tonight dear I've got a headache", or to be thinking up any excuse which will work to get out of the expectation. In reality, at her age and stage, she'd like to have sex every day in fact, and there is nothing at all wrong with that, except that it goes against the grain and is therefore seen as surprising. Finally, my friend has only been married a few years. To talk about these problems, is to admit both to herself and to others, that the relationship may be in trouble. So, she's left with the feeling that there is something which she lacks, when in fact a healthy sex life is important to most of us in relationships, if we're honest.
Of course when she does gather her courage and talk about her concerns with her husband, she may then find that she has taken the lid off the box as it were, and that she is then not so able to force everything back into it, so that they can go on as they were before. If we are lucky, Jack might add his thoughts and feelings into the mix, but these too can be challenging for my friend to process. Alternatively, he may be silent, feeling like he is being blamed for the situation, and unable to get his thoughts into words. This in turn can leave my friend believing that he doesn't care, and making up all sorts of endings to the story, which are not relevant because there are two people writing their story, and both have an impact on how it ends.
Now while I may not have the answers to help my friend in this situation, I did just want to make a couple of points. Firstly, this is not a subject to ignore. Only through raising it as an issue, do we get to change these stereotypes. For most of us, sex is an important part of a relationship. Although your partner or a friend might say
"Oh that's just what happens, I'm too exhausted after work," you don't have to accept that as okay for your relationship. I often say when people shrug sex off as unimportant,
"If sex isn't important, then why don't we all marry our best friends?"
The other point that I wanted to make is that there is a lot of help out there for you, should you need it. While people often latch on to the idea of seeing a sex therapist at this time to help reignite the interest in their relationship, I believe that this misses the important step of honing communication skills. As I said above, sex is not something we easily talk about. Both members of a couple may need some help learning to express their needs, and working out whether they can close the gap that exists between them currently, or whether their needs are too different, to actually go further with the relationship.
Have a great week everyone. Remember that the strongest connections are the ones where we are able to raise our concerns, and where they will be taken seriously. Take care of yourselves and of each other, stay safe and as always, stay connected.