Anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship (bonus points if you tied the knot, popped out a few, etc.), logically understands sex tends to slow with the passing years. It’s the hellish reality of deep romantic involvements. You enter as steaming, virile sex pots and slowly grow into your parents. Saucy!
While the best case scenario would involve both parties accepting less lustful romps and sleepily turning off the light each night, often times the more realistic is a happily snoring person on the right and seething, frustrated person on the left.
Rowan Pelling, former editor of The Erotic Review, answered this question in her latest sex advice column for the Daily Mail. A happily married woman with two small children wrote to Pelling complaining she only wants sex once or twice a month. Meanwhile, her husband wishes she’d be “normal” and put out a few times a week.
While Cosmo or something would suggest the woman buy lacy panties and sweet-smelling candles, Pelling instead focuses on the word “normal” and how “normal” simply doesn’t exist when it comes to sex and relationships.
“All long-term relationships have their own unique and mysterious dynamic,” she writes. “Both in the bedroom and out of it … I hate sex surveys because they’re always telling you that the ‘average’ person makes love ‘x’ times a week, without mentioning the way figures are distorted by new lovers at it like knives and long-established couples who may prefer a Hobnob in front of Coronation Street.”
She goes on to lament those “normal” bedroom marathon folks, and how she secretly thinks them all liars or exaggerators. Including a tarty French chick she worked with who ran into the office late, out of breath, with sex hair blabbing about her animalistic boyfriend all the time.
“Libido is a capricious thing,” she sighs. Not to mention being a woman also cramps a girl’s desire to get naked and acrobatic.
“They have one week, around ovulation, when they could happily have sex every night, “ Pelling says. “And ten days around the end of the cycle when they feel as desirable as a mildewed dishcloth … I dislike the notion of sex becoming some form of daily chore, as in ‘a) put out bins; b) see to hubby.’”
And with this, Rowan Pelling gives the green light to choose the Ben and Jerry’s couch combo over sex and never feel guilty about it.
Indeed, it’s often what we feel we should be doing, rather than the absence of whatever we’re missing, that jabs us most.
Related Stories:
Between the Sheets: The Basics of Couples’ Bedding
Not Tonight: What’s Behind Your Lackluster Libido
Rabbi’s Rx For Sexless Marriage
By Melissa Noble for YourTango
