Sex is extremely important in marriage, I believe, yet it goes through changes as the marriage evolves over time. In the beginning of a relationship, married or not, sex is very exciting, romantic, can last for hours, frequent, spontaneous, adventurous; it's new. It's exciting to get to know someone in such an intimate way. Happiness is usually part of this early sex picture too and when we put together these emotions - happiness and excitement - with sex and we mix them all up - we create a lovely imprint upon ourselves of what we expect it to always be. A joyful fun time. The imprint, while a wonderful memory, I think, hinders us and sometimes keeps us from moving forward in the ever-evolving relationship of marriage. We're expecting sex to be like it was in the beginning. The great part about being married for so long is if we work through the lulls, upsets, miscommunications, sex can get better and better and even move to a spiritual level, and not just get worse or a become a thing of the past. We've found this to be true in our marriage.
Although we've got different appetites for love making, how frequently we have it is the one aspect that we've always had to communicate about the most. The other morning, after making love late one night, (the only time for it now) I woke up and said, "Tag! You're it!" With the busy-ness of our days and life now with our kids most evenings we're so tired to do anything but give each other a goodnight kiss, if we're lucky. Through the years when we've gotten too busy to get to sex we've had to make appointments to make love. Usually we'd say to the other, "Okay by Sunday night have to get to it." Sometimes this works, but what we've found is many times we're both tired and neither of us wants to initiate love making. Who's responsible for starting all that energy? And also so late at night there isn't much left to give. However, letting it go and not making love for over a week starts to affect us and we become irritated and annoyed with the other. We get "backed up" as an old friend used to call it. We had the idea then that we should try taking turns. Whose ever turn is was had to initiate sex within the time limit agreed upon by both of us. That helped tremendously making it less of a responsibility for one of us all the time. Taking turns initiating sex keeps an element of playfulness in our marriage - like that imprint that I have from the early days. Tag, you're it honey!
Max Said
I am always extremely grateful that we have kept our sex spark alive. It certainly has evolved into a truly amazing and fulfilling part of our relationship. A joyful and spiritual physical manifestation of the dance of balance between the masculine and feminine that a happy marriage can, and should, be.
I remain a bit puzzled about the physiological quirkiness of the male and female sex drive trajectories. When I was at my testosterone peak and fairly preoccupied with sex, I did not really have the best outlets for it. Even though we started having a physical relationship while I was at this energized age, we unfortunately had guilt about what we were doing because of our religious beliefs at the time. It took some time for me to work those negative sex associations out. And now, here we are with all the wonderful, but sometimes exhausting, commitments of parenthood in a house that feels a bit small when it comes time for us find an intimate space to make love, and you are pretty much raring to go :)
I have always been a bit self-conscious about the fact that you have tended to want to have sex more often than I did. It never seemed to jibe with most of the stories I heard from other men where the tables were pretty much always turned the other way. But I think that part of what is behind other men's obsession with sex, or their complaints about not having enough, is what you touched on - they are expecting it to be like the first blush intimacy. When things start to evolve into something different neither partner is completely sure what do to with it. The pressures of life set in and because sex is no longer the thrillingly motivating force that it was in the early days, it gets dropped out. Since we did not let this happen, largely due to your relationship management instincts and skills, I have never felt like sex was scarce and have therefore never felt the need pursue it all that aggressively.
But of course the dilemma is that you want very much to be pursued by your lover. When we have the time and space, this comes pretty naturally for me (see the Quiet Time blog post :) At home with the day-to-day busy goings on and the proximity of our close-knit family, it is a bit more of a challenge. But, as you often do, you have hit on the pragmatic answer to this with our alternating initiation roles.
Well, it's getting late, and I'm it, so signing off from the blogosphere for now.
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