Sex File: Thinking about siesta lovemaking is stressing me out

Mon, 04 Jul, 2022 - 06:11

Suzi Godson

I am about to go on holiday with my new girlfriend and she keeps talking about how we will be able to have sex every morning, afternoon and night. In real life, we don't live together and have sex three times a week and that is enough for me, and I am finding the pressure to perform so often daunting. But I worry she'll feel the holiday is a failure if I don't.

Let your girlfriend enjoy the anticipation, because it might turn out to be the best part of the holiday. People's expectations of positive events, such as holidays, are often much rosier than the actual experiences.

Right now your new girlfriend is revelling in the expectation that your break will be exactly like the pictures she saw on the website - long white beaches and azure sea, along with lazy afternoons in your hotel room. (She's not thinking about queues at airports and lost luggage.) You can maximise the buzz she gets before you travel by entering into the holiday spirit too. Research has shown that envisioning future happiness helps people to feel happier in the present. Anticipating a daily schedule of sun, sex and sangria is fun right now.

Because you don't live together, this holiday is something of a milestone and it will to some degree be a test of your relationship. Going away together will reveal the sides of yourselves that you don't ordinarily see. It gives you both an opportunity to see what happens when you are in new situations. It will also reveal what happens when one of you wants sex and the other doesn't. If that does happen, the best thing to do is to be honest. In 2020 the sex and relationship researchers Laura Vowels and Kristen Mark conducted a study on how couples cope with discrepancies in sexual desire. They found that the most helpful strategy was talking about why their level of desire was different and framing it around things such as tiredness or the time of day, so that it wasn't interpreted as a form of rejection.

It's important to remember that when your girlfriend says she wants sex, she may mean she wants to lie naked with you, in clean white sheets, with no pressure to do anything other than indulge in each other. She wants to kiss and connect, and enjoy skin-to-skin contact without the routine pressures of daily life. She wants to enjoy the kind of 24/7 intimacy that she doesn't get with you at home, and you can deliver that without increasing sexual frequency. That said, couples do tend to have more sex on holiday.

If you are worried about performance, keep an eye on your alcohol consumption while you're away. It's easy to get carried away when you are on holiday but alcohol depresses the central nervous system, which means it can prevent or delay orgasm in men and women. It can also make it more difficult to get, and keep, an erection. Although this happening once is not a big deal, the anxiety it causes about future performance can be. If you become paranoid about it, you will increase your levels of adrenaline, causing vascular contraction, which stops blood flow to the penis and ensures that the thing you are worried about is guaranteed to happen.

Finally, if you do only have sex three times during the holiday, take the time to document the fun, silly and special moments. Happy photos will make you remember your trip in a more positive light. Your lovely, sexy photos of your girlfriend will bring back romantic memories for both of you - however much sex you had.