Sex advice: My wife and I can’t seem to find time for sex

Too busy and too tired is a real excuse for all sorts of things, suggests sex therapist, Suzi Godson.

QUESTION: My wife and I can’t seem to find time for sex. In the mornings I leave early and in the evenings we are both ready to fall asleep by the time we have put the children to bed. At the weekend it’s an endless runaround of family, children, and friends. It feels like we are falling out of the habit. We’ve both agreed to make an effort to change, but we are not sure of the best way to improve the situation.

ANSWER: We spend our lives looking for the perfect partner — and then when we’ve found them, we are too exhausted by the constraints of work, the stress of debt, the demands of parenting, and the relentless drudge of modern life to find enough time to have sex.

In 2013, the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles found that sexual frequency in Britain fell by 20% between 2000 and 2010. Dr John Bancroft, of the Kinsey Institute, blames the fact that we live in an age where there is little unfilled leisure time, and in the past “sex used to fill that gap”.

He has a point, but does that really explain the rise in sexlessness? Research by Georgia State University estimates that 15% of married couples in the US have not had sex in the past year. And in Britain psychotherapist Professor Brett Kahr conducted a study which found that 21% of women and 15% of men don’t have sex at all, and a further 32% have sex less than once a month.

Growing awareness of the problem means that not a day goes by without the publication of yet another helpful article on how to “relight the fire”.

Easy to write —harder to do. Sexual desire is a delicate flame. It burns brightest in an intimate space, where two people can flicker from intense to playful and back again. But expose that flame to criticism, anxiety, stress, depression or the pitter-patter of tiny feet, and it is snuffed out in an instant.

If your relationship is otherwise healthy, simple changes such as going to bed at the same time as each other, banning laptops, phones, and TV in the bedroom, showering at night, sleeping naked, locking the door, and having a tidy bedroom with clean sheets can make a difference.

If you feel your relationship is struggling, scheduling is an option, but being honest with each other about what is going on is the solution.

“Too busy and too tired” is a real excuse for all sorts of things, but if you and your wife were as committed to your emotional and physical relationship as you are to other interests and responsibilities, you would find the time and the energy to have sex.

Meaningful sex will take about 30 minutes or less, yet according to Ofcom, adults spend 3 hours and 52 minutes watching TV each day. Priorities?

You admit that your lives are governed by your jobs, your kids, your family, and your friends, but if you want your marriage to thrive, you need to make your relationship with each other just as important as your other commitments. It is easy to justify the importance of working late to bring home the bacon, or helicopter parenting to give your child the best start in life.

It is less easy to justify paying a babysitter so that you can go to a restaurant around the corner, get drunk, talk affectionately, and then stumble home to have sex on the sofa.

Long term, though, paying the babysitter yields disproportionate dividends, because having sex is the best way to stay married.

It is a harsh truth, but once couples stop having sex, they increase the risk that one, or both of them, will eventually have sex with someone else. And we all know how that plays

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