Variety isn’t always the spice of (sex)life

My boyfriend and I are fairly adventurous in bed — but always in the same way.

We’ve developed various routines of what we enjoy and now rarely deviate from them. Are we in a rut? Is it a bad thing?

No, it doesn’t mean you are in a rut. Sex is not a performance and no one is judging you, so if the routines you enjoy feel good, then they are good.

Increasing familiarity has an inevitable impact on the way you have sex. The more two people get to know each other, the easier it is for them to turn each other on, and over time, most couples end up developing predictable routines, or using a handful of reliable techniques because they know they guarantee a mutually pleasurable outcome. The fact that you rarely deviate from these routines simply suggests that they are still doing the trick and as soon as they become boring, one or both of you will begin to innovate.

Sexual closeness, communication and the certainty that sex will have a mutually satisfying outcome, are the most enjoyable aspects of sex in a committed relationship. However, our tendency to idealise the raw lust that marks the inception of a new relationship is at odds with the easy intimacy that most committed relationships settle into. Also, because sex is, by and large, a private act that happens behind closed doors, the concern that other people might be having more interesting, or even just more sex, can leave us feeling a little uneasy. Because human beings are horribly competitive, we can’t help wondering whether our “good enough sex” would be good enough for anyone else.

Worrying how the sex we have compares to the sex other people have is pointlessly masochistic, but how we perceive ourselves in comparison to others has a direct effect on our perception of ourselves. Research shows that while having more sex makes us happy, thinking that we are having more sex than other people makes us even happier. In fact, as soon as a couple believes that they have less frequent, or less novel sex than their peers, their level of sexual satisfaction drops by 14 % (Wadsworth, 2014).

To measure ourselves as “more than” or “less than” our peers in any way, we need a benchmark to help us guage where we stand. That’s difficult, because sex is a multi-faceted experience, which means different things to different people. Even so, sexologists, sociologists and psychologists, regularly go to great lengths to try and establish what constitutes a normal sex life. Most recently, Yale PhD Pepper Schwartz and Harvard PhD James Witte carried out a global survey of 100, 000 participants in an effort to establish the secret to sexual and relational satisfaction. The results included such revelations as 40% of men like doggie position, 30% of women like missionary, 91% of women and 79% of men give oral sex, 35% have practiced anal sex and 86% are intrigued by the idea of kinky sex.

Ultimately, factual measures of sexual behaviour never tell us very much because sexual satisfaction is a uniquely subjectiveexperience. Right now, you and your boyfriend are enjoying a period of rewarding sexual consistency and you should enjoy it while it lasts. Life rarely stands still and it is generally only after a couple have been blindsided by major transitions, minor conflicts, occupational hazards or unanticipated separations, that they find themselves pining for the effortless sex that they once took for granted.

Experimentation is always an option if you feel like it, but remember, your current sexual pattern has evolved because it works well for you both. Viewed in that context, it’s not actually a problem, it’s a solution.

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