Monday, August 31, 2015

Near Daily Sex

We counsel married couples to 'aim for near daily sex', but what does that mean exactly?

It doesn't mean that we make love every night, seven days a week and 365 days a year! It is rather a mindset, in that our default expectation each day is that we will be making love. 

Life happens, and circumstances intervene, and some nights we are just plain tired, so in practice we probably average only 4-5 times in a normal week, and sometimes one of us is sick or travelling and we go a whole week or more without making love, but the mindset is still important - rather than our default expectation being that we will not make love unless something special happens to put us in the mood, we expect that we will make love unless something extraordinary intervenes to stop us being intimate.

And that mindset is with us through the day, so we consciously build margin into our day so that we will have the time and energy left to make love, and we think about what we want to do that night, which helps to prepare us by building anticipation and desire, and we make sure that we head up to bed early enough, and together. And C is in the habit of wearing matching and attractive lingerie every day, with the expectation that I will be undressing her later!

As I have blogged before, many (most?) women in a long-term relationship, C included, do not regularly experience spontaneous physical desire or arousal ('horniness') in the way that us guys know it. So if we waited for C to be physically 'horny' before making love we would have a whole lot less sex. But once we start making out, she quickly gets into it and gets mentally turned-on and then her physical arousal follows, from which point she wants and needs sexual release as much as I do. Aiming for near daily sex means that C is in the mindset to start making out with me even though she is probably not 'in the mood' to start with, and to see where it goes, which is usually in the right direction!

And this becomes a habit. In case you think near daily sex is only for the first passionate years of marriage, we have been married 19 years and it is part of the entrenched fabric of our marriage relationship. 

So the narrative is one of us asking if we can skip a night when we are not up for it, rather than one of us begging to do it.

Research says that it takes 66 days for a behavior to become a habit, so I challenge you to commit to 'aiming for near daily sex' for the next 66 days, and see what happens in your bedroom narrative.




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