“My husband and I have a long-distance relationship due to work. Also been facing issues with a dry vagina. In addition, I had a baby a year and a half back and due to that, my desire for sex has gone low… I wish to seek help in this regard”
I routinely get such queries from women and many a time from their aggrieved husbands on the loss of erotic spark in their marriage.
Such marriages become roommate marriages than intimate marriages.
For many married women with children, their sex life often takes the back seat. One of the reasons is the new model of “parenting” where we aim to give it all to our kids, leaving little to no energy for us, and our spouses including our relationship.
A relationship has two vital components
- Companionship – All the day-to-day hustle of building a life, family together – raising kids, grocery shopping, planning for future, expenses, sharing a meal etc.
- Eroticism – This is the spark, the zing, the passion romance – which in most marriages last for the “honeymoon” period. Sexual intimacy is a part of eroticism, feeling sensual, romantic, and intimate with yourself and your partner.
Due to social conditioning and taboos around sex, many women consider sex as just another chore on the list. They have a struggle integrating sexuality as a part of daily life, and this is quite obvious with the kind of feed we get bombarded with around sex from movies and porn which shows it as “special” but not “integral”.
But sexuality is an integral part of you and your relationship. Sexuality starts from the time, you have conceived that is you are born because your parents had sex. Is this idea radical or foreign to you?
As a result of this stigma around sex, the intimate life of many married women with their partners suffers excessively. The responsibility of looking after the children, taking care of household chores, maintaining a career, and a thousand other stressors that mothers face every second of the day can leave them depleted of all energy. When their partner does try to initiate sex, a lot of women see it as a barrier that stands between them and their well-deserved rest. Even if they want to be intimate with your partner, their body might be unwilling, mood, bleak, and mind, distracted. None of these are conducive to a sexually charged environment. But the good news is that with a couple of changes and commitment from your side, it is possible to get your sex drive back
The very first thing to do is identify your sexual drive type. There are two types of sex drive:
- Spontaneous
- Responsive
Spontaneous sexual desire
The first category is people who need to feel mentally turned first to feel physical arousal. The second category is people who need to be physically aroused to feel sexual desire. One of the most common mistakes that couples make is initiating sex in a way that their partner does not like. If you are in the first category, and your partner directly touches your genitals as a way of initiating sex, you are more likely to be turned off than crave more. Dirty talk, compliments, and teasing touches are more likely to create arousal in you.
Responsive Sexual Desire
If you fall in the second category, having your erogenous zones stimulated would be what lights sexual desire in you. Imagine your partner giving you a nice back massage. Most of us associate sex with intercourse, what if sex is associated with touching your body in a way that creates pleasure in your body? Intercourse may or may not happen but pleasure always happens. Also, not many people know that women are often of responsive sexual desire. So you may have a hard time getting in the mood, but once your partner starts pleasuring you, you will be like “Umm, this feels good, why don’t I have enough of it?”
So follow the Nike Tagline “Just do it”
Identifying your partner’s sex drive types help immensely as it lets you know how you can correctly turn them on and initiate sex. Let your partner know about your sex drive type and see how much easier it gets to respond positively to your partner’s advances.
The next trick to having a good sex life is thinking about it. Your sex drive is not something that turns on and off like a switch. It is something that grows and wanes. If you want your sex drive to grow, feed it sexy thoughts! Sexuality does not start in a closed room with lights and clothes off and some acrobatic action. Sexuality is around us the whole day, in our desires, thoughts, feelings.
Do you flirt with your partner? And why not?
Send naughty texts back and forth with your partner during the day, tease each other about what’s waiting at home when you finally meet, and fan the flame of anticipation. Think, in detail, about everything you want to do to your partner and everything you want to be done to you throughout the day. By the time you both get home, you will be buzzing with erotic energy, waiting to be spent on each other. We have fallen for the myth that sexuality is spontaneous, but sexuality is also intentional. Intention means priority, it means you acknowledge that it is important and are willing to put effort into something that is vitally important for your relationship.
You should also learn to make time and invest in your sex life. You should not let your position as a parent interject too much like your existence as a sexual being. Because the energy of parenting is different from the energy of love, you need to have the right boundaries so you move in and move out of one zone to another zone and not get stuck in the zone of parenting.
Make opportunities to have the house to yourself and your partner once in a while. During this time you can send your children to visit their grandparents who are just waiting to spoil them or make arrangements to have them spend time with their friends for a few hours. Hiring a babysitter, while not popular in India, would also breathe life into your sex life. For a change of scenery, or if you want the extra excitement of sneaking around like teenagers, you could always rent a hotel room for a few hours during date nights.
There are no magic potions that would rejuvenate your sex life. But there are so many options available for you to change things up and bring sexual excitement back into your relationship. All you have to do is make the effort.
This article has been authored by Pallavi Barnwal
Pallavi Barnwal is a globally renowned sexuality educator, TEDx speaker, sexuality researcher, and intimacy coach. She is the founder of the sex-positive platform getintimacy.com that works on destigmatizing conversations and spreading awareness around sexuality. She has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines – notably being BBC, Huffington Post, Vogue, Vice, TimesofIndia, The Hindu, GQ, to name a few. Her mission is to help people have more intimate satisfaction in their lives
