Sex with my fiancée is dull and infrequent. Is it all downhill from here?

Suzi Godson gives her reasons on why sex with a partner can become infrequent and if you are sexually compatible or not.

Q. I’m getting married this summer but sex with my fiancée has become dull and infrequent.

Will it all be downhill with her from now on?

A. It could get worse. Right now you are having infrequent sex. By August, you may be having infrequent conversations. 

Planning a wedding is rarely an aphrodisiac. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The angst and anticipation involved in a walk up the aisle can wreak havoc on any relationship.

Look back over the past year and try to work out whether the decline in your sex life corresponds with your decision to tie the knot.

If you feel that anxiety about the relationship or apprehension about the wedding could have distanced you from each other, you need to try to communicate those fears to each other.

It is natural to have doubts about a commitment as big as marriage, but it can be really difficult to discuss them with each other.

Neither of you wants to undermine your commitment, and admitting to nerves might set off alarm bells.

However, emotions have a way of manifesting themselves and, if you are worried about any aspect of your capacity to live happily ever after, it is better to get things out in the open sooner, rather than later.

If the wedding isn’t the trigger and you have been living with each other for some time, then you may just be suffering from over-familiarity.

An increasing number of couples cohabit before they get married.

This is a good thing because it means couples are fully informed about all aspects of each other’s behaviour if they choose to marry.

And it is a bad thing for precisely the same reason.

Overexposure highlights previously unnoticed imperfections. Charming little quirks run the risk of becoming irritating. And sex, once so urgent and mercurial, becomes less frequent and less highly pitched.

This is not necessarily negative. Keeping up the kind of sexual athletics that occur in the first six months of meeting would be exhausting.

In a long-term relationship sex has to move to a lower, more sustainable level of intensity or no one would get anything done.

If you and your girlfriend have been together for aeons, your relationship has probably moved into the plateau phase.

But if this is the case, you should also experience occasional upswings in the frequency and intensity of your sexual relations.

For example, when you proposed and your girlfriend accepted I would be surprised if you didn’t celebrate with a love-in.

And as Mr and Mrs Newlywed you can expect to have a lot of sex on your honeymoon.

A nice hotel room, cocktails by the pool, hot sun and a greater degree of nakedness do wonders for an ailing libido.

Sex may be more intermittent when you get back to real life, but you can expect subsequent upturns when you move house, have a fight, make up, change jobs, have a baby, visit parents, get promoted, drunk, fired, lose weight, or go on holiday. So it’s not downhill all the way.

Feast or famine, sex in a long-term relationship is not perfect, but it works, so I really wouldn’t worry about quantity.

Quality is different. You use the word “dull’ and that bothers me because if you don’t like what happens when you make love, and you haven’t been able to improve things in the time you have been together, you need to question whether you and your fiancée are sexually compatible.

If the honest answer is no, I would advise you to think carefully before getting married.

However traumatic calling off a wedding seems, it is a piece of cake compared with divorce.

* Send your queries to [e-mail]