I fully believe that married sex should be erotic, frequent, adventurous and a host of other things. However, sometimes there’s just not enough time for all of those things.
Life can get busy and occasionally you just have to have sex, because that’s what the relationship needs. I think some people don’t like that idea. They don’t like the idea of having sex just because they should.
We have been taught in our culture that sex should always be spontaneous, romantic and highly erotic. Now, all those things are fine, but they shouldn’t be a requirement for sex to occur. After all, when do all three of those align? Pretty irregularly in most marriages, I think.
I think there is a time and place for maintenance sex, if you can get over the conditioning of these three myths:
1. Sex always has to be romantic
Don’t get me wrong, I think sex should always be loving, but it doesn’t always need to be romantic. There’s nothing wrong with a quickie just because you need to reconnect in some meaningful way again.
I don’t even think there’s anything wrong with having sex just because you have an itch to scratch, as it were, or pressure to relieve. Why not? It’s still a shared experience and something you can use to grow closer together.
2. Sex always has to be spontaneous
We’ve been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that that sex should happen when both spouses are suddenly in the mood. The problem is that most women and some men are rarely, if ever, spontaneously in the mood for sex.
Most of them experience reactive arousal far more often than spontaneous arousal. Considering that women, particularly those who have been married for a decade or more, are likely to never feel spontaneous arousal, this myth creates a lot of sexless marriages. It’s not always the women either. There are many men who rarely, if ever, feel spontaneously aroused. We’re taught that men always want sex, but that’s not true either.
So, the idea that sex should always be spontaneous is not only ludicrous, it’s also very damaging. There is absolutely nothing wrong with lying in bed thinking “It’s been a while since we’ve had sex, maybe we should try tonight.”
Because just as sex leads to more sex, a lack of sex leads to even less sex. If you just wait until you’re “in the mood”, then chances are, you’ll be in the mood less and less.
3. Sex always has to be erotic
I believe married sex should be erotic, at least some of the time. We have an issue in marriages, that I think I’ll address in the next post, that too often, marriage has no erotic sex. Now, that’s a problem as well. But, that doesn’t mean that every sexual encounter needs to be a wildly erotic adventure.
Sometimes sex is … just sex. That’s not quite true. I mean sex is never “just sex”, whether you’re married or not. There’s always all this other “stuff”. What I mean is that you’re not trying anything new, you’re not focused on extending the pleasure, you’re just … well, trying to get an orgasm.
But, even that is a connecting experience. In order to help your spouse to orgasm, you need to be thinking about them, watching their body language, listening to their cues. You need to be serving them. While it may be more utilitarian than erotic, at times, it’s still loving.
Have you bought into any of these myths? Are they getting in the way of maintenance sex that could be sustaining your marriage through difficult times?