It’s been an interesting experience, having a vasectomy. Not only the procedure and the process, but also people’s reactions. Most of the reactions include some promise like “Just wait to see what it does to your sex life”, “When you recover, you can have sex whenever you want!”, “Now you can really be spontaneous with your love-making.” To which, I tend to just smile and nod, or send a polite “I can’t wait”, but for the most part, I think I know better. I’ve learned over the years not to believe in magic pills or sudden changes. While they aren’t impossible, they are rare, and if a couple is having a strained sexual relationship, it typically isn’t as easily solved as a vasectomy.
I got told the same thing when I got married “Oh, just wait, you’ll have lots of fun on your honey moon.” Well, our honeymoon was a bust. My wife got her period on our wedding day. Then I got the flu and got a fever on four hour drive up to our lodgings, and 3/4 of the way there, in the middle of a huge nature reserve (read: no towns for hundreds of kilometer, or miles, either one), our radiator burst. After being picked up by a nice family and driven into town, my new bride went back with the tow-truck to get our vehicle, because I was feverish and passed out on the bed. Then it started raining and continued for the rest of the week. That’s our honeymoon.
Then, when we decided to have kids, I remembered all the things people had said about wives trying to conceive. That they want sex all the time, any position, that it’s just sex around the clock. But, it turns out we’re super fertile, which I’m thankful for, because we have friends who are not, but there were no weeks of lots of sex. No crazy wife trying to get pregnant. Just boom, there we were pregnant. Every time.
While she was pregnant I was told “just wait until the 2nd trimester, pregnant women get super horny”, so I patiently waited. Again, no. I think the first pregnancy, we didn’t have sex during the last 2 trimesters, and then not for another few months after our eldest was born. It hurt her every time we had sex, so we didn’t. We went 9 months without sex, when I was promised a horny pregnant wife.
In short, I’ve had a lot of disappointments regarding sex, because I listened to people when they promised a magic pill. So, if I, or anyone else, tell you “do this and everything is suddenly going to change”, don’t get your hopes up. Real change takes time. It takes reprogramming your brain. It takes establishing new habits and lifestyles. It takes digging up baggage and dealing with it. It takes getting to know each other, learning to be intimate, rebuilding trust and learning to die to self.
Now, there are some rare events where people suddenly change. I hear about these miraculous sexual awakenings people have when they come off of medications, or go on others. Or a very rare few have paradigm shifts that turn their life and marriage around. But these stories are few and far between.
All I’m saying is, be patient. Put in the work, make it stick. Quick fixes usually mean short term fixes. The underlying issues take time and effort to deal with. But you’ll be glad you put in the work when things turn around. After 8 years of suffering through marriage, I think it took another 5 to finally sort things out once we had decided to start working on it. 5 years of knowing we weren’t where we should be and working, hard, to get there. And now…well, 5 years well spent, and we’re still working to get better. Thank God for giving us the perseverance to stick it out.