Sex File: I want to wait to sleep with her but she is getting impatient 

I had a bad break-up before this relationship followed by some meaningless flings

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I have started dating a new woman. We are in our 40s. Before this relationship I had a bad break-up and some unfulfilling flings, so I want to hold back from having sex for a while. However, she seems to be losing patience and says we need to know if we're compatible in the bedroom as well as in the rest of our relationship. Am I wrong to delay sex?

Sexual compatibility is really important, so I can understand why your new partner wants to find out whether that aspect of your relationship is going to work sooner rather than later.

I'm pretty sure your previous relationships didn't fail because you were getting it on - they likely failed because you were not right for each other. If you can, instead of allowing your past to hold you back, try to think of it as a learning experience - thanks to those failed relationships you are now clear about what you are looking for in a partner.

I appreciate that you have been hurt and may be scared of investing in this relationship in case it fails, but stringing it out without committing to it could feel quite insulting to your partner. If it doesn't work out, you get to withdraw without losing anything. In the meantime, she has held out for however long "a while" is in the hope that it will give you time to heal, not realising that you are trying deliberately to hold back from getting too emotionally involved.

She is right to try to take things to the next level because genuine sexual compatibility is not something that you can predict. You can do all the planning you like, but most of us will have experienced the disappointment of finding someone who appears to tick all the right boxes, only to discover that having sex with them was disastrous. Similarly, people who seem to have nothing in common on paper end up getting married and living happily ever after.

Every relationship moves at its own pace, but I can't help having doubts about the viability of a relationship where one partner is really keen to have sex and the other doesn't want to. In the early stages of a new relationship the drive to have sex is normally so strong that rational thinking goes out the window. Your brain tells you to hold back and wait a while, but your body has no intention of listening. If the sexual chemistry between you were there, I don't think you would be able to resist. A 2017 British survey of 1,300 people found that 35% of 35 to 44-year-old men had sex on the first date and 60% had done so by the third date.

The ease with which you can resist your partner's invitations suggests one of two things. Either you are not interested in sex in general or you are not interested in sex with your new partner. If it is the former, I would suggest asking a GP to check why you may be struggling with your libido. If it is the latter, I would suggest that in answer to your question, yes you are wrong to hold back because I don't think it will achieve anything.

If you really do still feel that you don't want to have sex with your partner, that could be because you simply don't have sexual feelings for her, and it would be better not to continue the relationship. Or it could be that you are trying to delay things in a misguided attempt to protect yourself. Either way, you need to speak to her, share your concerns and talk it through together. It's only fair that she knows where things really stand.

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