How slow is no sex?
There is nothing more selfish than a couple freshly in love. Particularly in that disarming period.
Where you both feel it, unequivocally so, but aren’t yet telling each other. Falling into one another with a dissipating sense of gravity and finding yourselves in the saccharine-sweet honeymoon phase.
Where weekday mornings are viable, the nights are long and weekends pretzeled. Like all good things, so too does the honeymoon phase come to an end, ripening with hindsight. From morning showers together to seeing your partner pee and brush their teeth at the same time. And doing the same. Where first-time declarations of love become routine farewells. Where we grow temperate to one another, expectant and comfortable. When fresh love becomes long term. When the sex slows, to a comparative halt. What then? Do long term relationships spell the end of passion? How much sex should we be having? Are we overthinking it? When am I not overthinking and under-fucking? Is there such a balance?
To the above - no, the limit does not exist, maybe, during and yes. Sex in all it’s varying states and ways is essential to any relationship, whether it be the presence or absence, connecting or dividing. But all you need to do is type ‘long term sex’ into Google and see sexless come up first to read the room. We are romantic hypochondriacs and masters of comparison. We measure and scale with our friends and online strangers working out what is and isn’t so normal. Dissecting ourselves, comparing notes, hosting spiralised inner monologues that go nowhere. Say Google had a conversion calculator for sex. A formula like the ones which thankfully convert anything into almost anything, would that make it easier? Enter in how much sex you’re having per week alongside your relationship duration to determine if your relationship is healthy. Functioning. Normal. The idea is fucking ridiculous but so is qualifying a relationship through how much sex you’re having.
Yet it’s still a circulating metric. Like somehow having sex four times a week means your relationship hasn’t expired yet a week without and you’ve got spoilt milk. In writing this I did a rough calculation of how much sex my boyfriend and I were having during our first year together versus now. Now being a lockdown that feels more like an echo chamber edging painfully close to a year. An approximate 85% decrease between the two phases. We have less sex in a week than we used to have in a day. Last week came and went without the deed. Am I worried? No. Sometimes life just hurts with and without reason that simply being held is all the closeness we need. This past year has made me eternally grateful that I have someone to hold and someone to hold me. This relationship has made me grateful for an intimacy that extends beyond physical touch. Something I’ve never had before now.
My boyfriend and I have been together for a little over three years (although this lockdown year feels like dog years). I’m twenty-nine and he is the first boyfriend I’ve spoken openly about sex with. That feels slightly embarrassing to admit but it’s true. I never learnt how to talk about sex. My parents’ wisdom was a simple, don’t get pregnant, which is now ‘why aren’t you pregnant?’ and our highschool sexual education was comical at best. Despite being sexually active, I wasn’t sexually fluent. The only way I started learning was by awkwardly opening my mouth and stringing clumsy sentences together until they felt less so. If the thought makes your shoulders pinch and chest tighten, go for a walk together and ease into it there. No eye contact and the open air seems to help. I mean how groundbreaking is this but communication works. Almost as groundbreaking as spring florals. It is so necessary to speak openly with the person you’re having sex with. If you are doing everything under the sun yet can’t utter a word about it to one another, something is up and not the good kind.
“Sex slows, not just in tempo but in regularity when intimacy stretches beyond the physical. Becoming emotional, mental and spiritual too. There is no magic number that qualifies a relationship. No intimacy by numbers, or universal standard we are judged by. ”
Sex slows, not just in tempo but in regularity when intimacy stretches beyond the physical. Becoming emotional, mental and spiritual too. There is no magic number that qualifies a relationship. No intimacy by numbers, or universal standard we are judged by. How much, whether in excess or tactical supply and demand is up to the consenting people in the relationship. Let me say that one more time. The consenting people in the relationship. No one else has authority or jurisdiction over someone else’s relationship other than the people in it. Understandably and naturally we confide in others but we need to confide with the person (or people) we’re with. Being honest with ourselves allows us to be honest with others. No one is a mind reader, nor should they be.
We need to demystify relationships as fated and meant to be because even though the reluctant romantic in me believes in the right people, the right place and the right time, relationships (of all kinds) take dedicated work and mutual effort. Not here and there but every day. Be intentional and wilful about the people in your life because love isn’t meant to be played in the reserves. Being in a relationship, having sex with someone, doing anything simply for the sake of it is a zero-sum game every time. It’s fucking scary being vulnerable, to be truly intimate with someone that they can almost see your brain tick. But the alternative isn’t fair on anyone.
In a time that feels more like a past life than a period of my own, I showed up in a relationship but I wasn’t really there. I was quietly checking out emotionally, mentally and finally physically. We never shared any spiritual ground to lose. Through no one’s fault and least of all his, time didn’t bolster us but rather revealed truths that were always there. I hate it when people call an ended friendship, relationship, marriage (the list goes on) a failure. When my past relationship ended, which spanned across my teenage years and early twenties, the failure would have been staying in a learned love that was detrimental and difficult to sustain. As I said, relationships take work, daily work but there is also a naturalness that can’t be named that comes with people built to last. Like your greatest friends that make sense through the seasons of your life. I do not hold any unknown truths. I have just felt it from both sides. A love with and without passion. Each one illuminating the other much like the sun to rain. A love without taught me to cherish a love with, which is no failure to me.
Relationships take work. Healthy sex requires opening your mouth, talking and listening. Kissing goes a long way. Every relationship encounters doubt. But it shouldn’t become a cornerstone of your relationship. Guilt is unhealthy. You should never feel guilted into doing something you don’t want to. You should never feel guilty about how much sex you should be having. Scheduling sex every now and then won’t cancel spontaneous sex, just supplement it. Honesty is liberating. So is a little bit of direction between the sheets. Sex doesn’t define your relationship, and for what it says about it? That’s for you and your partner to decide and no one else.
Closeness no longer begins and ends with sex, but extends beyond when we become long term. When time transfigures passion. When physical intimacy grows mental, emotional and spiritual. Entrenches it into your bones and breath. Enduring passion is finding, seeing and feeling the glory and delight in the ordinary. In cocooning into one another between sleep and wake. In knowing how to make their tea or coffee. In your secret language, spoken and unspoken. In the little routines that become rituals. In the rituals that become traditions. In reaching for them in the dark and finding them every time. In the long term.
Words — Sonya Prior
Image - Matt Butler
