Sex File: Trying for a baby turns him off

'You need to forget about fertility and make sex about pleasure rather than procreation.'

Making babies is as much about the method as it is about the outcome!

My husband and I are trying to get pregnant. Obviously, when I'm ovulating we're having loads of sex, but that concentrated period seems to mean that he's much less up for it the rest of the month — disappointing for me.

Trying to get pregnant can be hard on a relationship. It's easy for it to slip into an anxiety-inducing spreadsheet of ovulation windows, temperature charts and fertility trackers. Even when two people are healthy and all the biological stars are aligned it can take ages to conceive. For every 100 couples having sex two to three times a week, approximately 20 will conceive within one month, 50 will be pregnant in six months and 80 within a year.

I'm not sure how long the two of you have been at this, but keeping up a rigid schedule of timed intercourse for months and months is a total turn-off. Lots of people struggle to perform on demand, and there is evidence that pressure can exacerbate the risk of sexual dysfunction. However, one recent study from Guy's and St Thomas' hospital, which tracked the experiences of couples who had been trying to conceive for more than a year, found that while timed intercourse significantly increased the odds of sexual dysfunction when compared with regular intercourse, it made absolutely no difference to the time it took for women to get pregnant.

My advice is to change how you approach this. Cramming all your intimacy into a few days, or even a week-long period, is not very romantic. And it's not, therefore, surprising that sex loses its appeal during the rest of the month as it becomes something useful rather than joyful. It's understandable that people try to target when they have sex to increase the likelihood of getting pregnant, but remember that the human race managed to perpetuate itself for millions of years before we had any understanding of ovulation.

There are evolutionary hypotheses that suggest men do instinctively know when a woman is fertile, whether that's because of changes in perceptions of attractiveness, smell or pheromones. Last year, Lara Schleifenbaum at the University of Goettingen dismissed them as nonsense. She conducted a pretty conclusive study of 25,000 diary entries from 384 couples and found absolutely no evidence that men are aware of their partners' fertility status. Although Schleifenbaum set out to interrogate whether men "notice women's within-cycle cues to fertility", she ended up finding a much more compelling explanation for how women manage to get pregnant. Although the men didn't notice any change, the women reported robust mid-cycle increases in desire.

What these studies show is that if you want to have a baby, micro-managing ovulatory windows is more likely to turn you off than get you pregnant. Yes, you do need to have sex to get pregnant, but you also need to forget about fertility and make sex about pleasure rather than procreation. For a few days a month at least, I suggest that you try skipping penetrative sex completely. Focus on foreplay, oral and manual sex, intimate touch, kissing, massage. Take the pressure off — particularly around the middle of the month. If your husband is the one timing sex according to the number of days since your last period, tell him that from now on you want to be guided by changes in your sexual appetite. Have sex whenever and however you want, but when you feel an unusually "robust" peak in sexual desire, go for it.