I’m glad you asked.
Well, since my last rant on the subject we’ve actually had sex several times. Unfortunately, only one of those occasions was in the last two months.
“Once in two months?” I hear you cry, à la Monty Python. “You’re lucky!”
Well, yes – but the problem with trying to move on from a drought of effectively some eighteen months or more is that any kind of a gap now becomes not an intermission between instances of loving coitus due to the exigencies of daily living but the end of everything .
It also builds up unrealistic expectations of what’s going to happen if we ever do get around to it again and that sets up another kind of tension – between having enough sex so that we can’t say we aren’t having any and not having enough to reasonably claim that it’s a meaningful part of our relationship. And that’s before we even get to the bit about what exactly constitutes ‘enough’.
Actually, we both kind of agree on that one – more than we have at the moment. Just like any other married couple really. Except we aren’t actually married and supermum could probably live without, if the choice was sex or crochet.
I suppose we have any number of problems in this area but a fundamental one has to be that we aren’t very good at it and express ourselves through a very limited sexual vocabulary. In fact we talk about it with a very limited vocabulary. We don’t go any further than “sex”, “it”, “Don’t touch me there” or “Can’t we just do it and stop fiddling about?”
So, as a great believer in the power of books to alleviate just about everything, I embarked on a campaign to expand our vocabulary. I went through a phase of leaving subtly entitled tomes like “The Sex-Starved Marriage” or “Passionista” or something to do with cupcakes lying around the house in the two or three places where supermum might be guaranteed to pick them up whilst looking for something else. That stopped once dudelet learned to read. In any case, they didn’t do much good. The Cupcake one (I can’t remember the name – it’s somewhere around the house but supermum’s hidden it) contained a ninety page breakdown of the mechanics of oral sex (both kinds) that both of us were too embarrassed to read or own up to having read (okay, I read it. I’m only human. Or male, at any rate, which is almost the same thing). Then there were the testimonies of ‘sexually empowered women’. Did I mention it was written by sexually empowered women? Supermum reported feeling fifty kinds of inadequate in comparison and I didn’t feel much better. Unfortunately, this particular tome is fairly typical of the genre.
Passionista had a smidgen of some pretty practical advice – I especially liked the idea about hugging and whilst I haven’t asked her, the drought-breaking sex of three months ago was kicked off after supermum just hugged me, fiercely and continuously, for about ten minutes – God it was powerful! But the book still suffers from relentless stories of erotic athleticism and inventiveness that, frankly, aren’t much help if you aren’t that physically comfortable with each other in the first place. The Sex Starved Marriage was even worse, sparing us blow by blow (sorry) instructions but ladling out glutinous homilies about the obvious over and over again. The book’s thesis – marriages without sex kind of starve to death so, like have sex already, people! – is sound enough. But that’s all there is! And the author spins it out for 224 excruciatingly pious pages!
The one book that actually struck a chord last year was, strangely, a library book I got out called Eat Chocolate Naked: And 142 Other Ways to Atract Attention and Spark Romance by Cam Johnson. Now I’d normally rather pull my fingernails out than be seen pushing this type of text through the library loan desk but last year, you might remember, I was really desperate. And this book, basically a list of 143 fairly silly things to do to spark romance, actually worked. Not all of them were practical – you’d need grandparents for some of them (in a baby sitting sort of way) but they at least got us talking again. I even went so far as to set up a spreadsheet with a random number generator with the idea that we’d try and do one daily (most of them didn’t involve sex – we’re talking attention and romance here).
And it started to work.
Until we all got gastric flu and spent Christmas throwing up and hallucinating. That kind of killed the mood for the next six months (see previous posts – nothing worse than something starting to happen and then stopping dead again).
So what am I going to do about the rut we’ve so easily slipped back into again?
I’ve ordered our own copy. In fact, I think I’ll buy two. And I’ll keep you posted.
And if you’ve got this far, you’ve earned a Nick Cave song. So here’s Grinderman.
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