Maintenance sex is emotional investment

Q. When I first met my husband, we were both always ‘up for it’. But now I feel that I engage in ‘maintenance’ sex to please him, rather than because I want it myself. 

Once we get going, I always get into it, but I worry about having mismatched libidos in the future. Surely, after five years together, we should both still be wanting it all the time?

A. Life would be easier for everyone (except divorce lawyers) if married men and women had synchronised sexual desire. But life isn’t easy. In any long-term relationship, sexual appetites are influenced by different factors: external stressors such as work, or money worries; internal issues, such as low mood, poor health, or hormonal fluctuations; or interpersonal problems, such as relational conflict, parenting challenges, or familial responsibilities.

With so many variables, it is unrealistic to think that you will always feel like having sex at the same time. Yet, sex is the core of your connection. It differentiates your relationship with each other from all the other relationships in your lives, so it has to be protected. Ergo ‘maintenance’ sex.

Maintenance sex is less of a compromise, and more of an investment; a deposit in the love bank that will tide you through times when your libidos are out of sync. It can be a grey area. Most women have been raised to believe that they should never have sex when they don’t want it, so the idea of sex being a ‘marital duty’ jars. There is, however, a definitive difference between sex to preserve intimacy and sex that is entirely unwanted. You sum up that difference yourself, when you say: “once we get going, I always get into it.”

At the beginning of a relationship, sex is spontaneous, but what you are experiencing now is ‘responsive desire’, where the motivation to have sex begins after the sex has commenced. You allow your partner to begin sexual stimulation, because you know that’s what he wants, but you are equally aware that sexual intercourse brings rewards of affection, physical closeness and bonding.

As your husband begins to touch and kiss you, the anticipation of those emotional rewards ignites your own feelings of desire and, within a few minutes, you are having sexual intercourse because you want it just as much as he does.

Maintenance sex should never be about ‘just doing it’, but, unlike men, women do have the capacity to ‘go through the motions’. Women who presume that men only want a quick orgasm can engage in intercourse, while withholding intimacy. Although they think their partners don’t realise, or even care, most men are acutely aware of how engaged the woman is in any sexual interaction.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, most men value the emotional connection during sex just as much, if not more, than the physical release they experience at orgasm.

Sexual stereotypes are also responsible for the assumption that men ‘can’t’ engage in sex that they don’t want, because they are physically incapable of faking an erection.

Actually, men are equally susceptible to ‘responsive desire’ and even when they claim to be too tired to do anything other than lie on the sofa and raise a beer to their parched lips, with the right combination of affection and stimulation they can be coaxed into feeling aroused, too. Unfortunately, because women generally experience lower levels of desire than men, they are less likely to make the effort to stoke their partner’s desire and this can contribute to a downward spiral, where mutual apathy unwittingly erodes the sexual side of an otherwise decent relationship.

Good sex is defined by quality, not quantity, but, as a rule of thumb, two healthy married people in their early 30s should be having sex a few times a month, minimum (half of married couples in their 30s have sex from a few times per month to weekly). Although there is a correlation between declining sexual frequency and the length of a relationship, it is not necessarily linear.

Some couples, for example, experience very little physical intimacy when they are younger, but when their children leave home they discover the joys of sex in a way they would never have imagined.

As you get older, you will find that the sex you have increasingly mirrors the lives you choose to lead. So, for example, you’ll have more sex if you prioritise time together, less if you turn into helicopter parents. As long as you both remain willing to respond to each other’s sexual overtures, your determination to safeguard your relationship will overcome fluctuations in your libidos.

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