This story is an “as told to” and anonymous. The mom in this story is a mother of one, in her 40s, living in the Midwest.
My husband and I have been married for 18 years. We really struggled to get pregnant, and went through years of infertility and struggles before we had our miracle baby when we were both 42. All of those years of timing sex and trying to hit our fertile window really took a toll on us, and during my pregnancy and our son’s first two years of life, I think we had sex maybe three times.
We both felt sort of weird about it and went to couples therapy. Our therapist was great and told us that listening to us talk to each other — and about each other — was refreshing, and that she could tell we had a strong, healthy marriage. I’ll never forget her asking us why we were there and we both shrugged and said, “Well we aren’t having enough sex so we wanted to figure out why.”
She asked us if we had asked each other about it and we said we figured it was just from raising a baby, all the sex struggles from before, and exhaustion. She laughed and said that was normal, and then asked us if we considered ourselves Type A people who had to have a “plan for every issue.”
Wow, how could you tell?
We went home that day and got straight in the bed while our toddler was napping. I asked my husband if he wanted to have sex and he shrugged and said sure, and that sort of opened up the conversation. We both realized that trying to conceive had ruined sex for us, honestly. It just felt stressful and all the fun was gone, so we spent the whole time in bed talking to each other about what would feel good to do.
And that’s how we ended up having about an hour of foreplay. And we realized that was really what both of us wanted.
It’s not that penetrative sex wasn’t nice, but there was just something about that form of sex that really made us lose our horniness. PTSD? Maybe. But we also realized that when we were trying to conceive, we didn’t do a lot of foreplay — it felt more like “just get it done so we can get pregnant and move on.” So now we focus a lot on foreplay. Like a lot a lot. We will kiss for hours, touch each other, take our time — we will also do oral sex to completion if we’re in the mood. But for the most part, we’re just getting each other super, super turned on without having an orgasm.
And then we masturbate next to each other.
We feel closer than ever and are super intimate. We’ve always been a touchy-feely couple, so realizing that we could change up the “rules” of sex and make them work for us has been huge. We feel closer than ever, and I love that our sex life isn’t just a quick fuck at bedtime and then rolling over to go to sleep. We’ve gotten to know each other’s bodies better in the last three years than we did in the first 15 years of marriage, and I’ll take that over penetrative sex any day.
