How to bring your lust alive
You know the feeling. The motivation’s just not there any more. You love each other madly, but whereas when you first met you were swinging from the chandeliers 24/7, now you’re lucky if you do it once a week… or once a month… or once a year.
This week’s Sex Tip’s gives you ten magic ways to recover that fading desire and put the spark back into your sex life.
1: Make more time. Life’s so busy and stressed nowadays that you can simply deprioritise the bedroom. But you have to! Get out of the habit for too long and it’ll be more and more difficult to jump each other. So unromantic though it seems, get the diaries out and schedule lovemaking in, at least one night a week.
2: Make more space. Giving attention to children (or to the dog, or to grandma) is vital – but it’s hard to really feel lustful if you’re constantly getting interrupted by your seven-year old wanting a glass of water, or your seventeen-year-old wanting help with his homework. Yes, a very young child needs to have access to you all the time. But older children, pets (and grandmas) can be told not to disturb you for an hour or so. There’s nothing wrong with a lock on the bedroom door.
3: Make sure there’s nothing physically wrong - lack of libido can be down to a medical condition or a medication. Thyroid imbalance, diabetes, depression can all be to blame so if you follow all the above steps and still don’t want to, your next step should be a trip to the GP. You might not only sort your sex life out, but also get treated from a hidden health problem!
4: Go back to basics. Particularly if you’ve been together for a while, you can start cutting corners in the bedroom department. So reintroduce the traditional arts of kissing. of fondling, of exploring each other’s bodies, of spending more than a few minutes on foreplay. If necessary, put a ban on intercourse for a month so that you have to relearn how to get each other worked up, have to rediscover how to bring each other off by hand and mouth.
5: Check your individual pleasure levels. Are you both getting what you need? If one (or both) of you aren’t being touched in the way you like… aren’t having the rhythm or the pace or the pressure of stimulation you like… aren’t having an orgasm regularly... then it’s no wonder you’re not motivated to have sex. In loving couples, both of you should be orgasming at least 50%of the time. If you’re not then get that sorted.
6: Concentrate more. Apparently some lack of desire is simply down to our minds wandering while we’re having sex. Try focussing on the here-and-now, on what your partner is doing to you or what you are doing to your partner. If you find yourself thinking of other things, just bring your attention back to the sensations – closing your eyes will help, as will having background music which helps you relax.
7: Try something completely different. American research suggests that sexual novelty can stimulate the same hormones in your body that get triggered in that first exciting few months of sex with a new partner. So change location – go on holiday. Change timing – if you normally make love at night try it in the morning. Change activity – get one of the many sex manuals (including mine…) and put post-it notes on bits you each like. Or, of course, hit the sex-toy websites and introduce some novelty play into your bedtime activity.
8: Finally, try one-way sex. Sometimes it’s a strain to be both concentrating on your own pleasure and your partner’s. One solution – recommended by sex-therapists to their clients, but relevant for everyone – is to try focussing on one partner alone. This might be one ‘session’ for him, one session for her… or half of each session for her, half for him. But whose-ever’s turn it is gets all the attention on them, and can ask the other for whatever they want – just kissing, oral sex, any intercourse position… Of course don’t abuse this – if you know your partner hates some move, don’t’ ask for it just to be awkward. But being able to relax and just ‘receive’ for a while can bring the desire positively flooding back.
PS: In the intro to this sex tip, I said it was aimed at couples whose partnership is solid but whose desire needs boosting. If you fall into a different category – desire going down and arguments going up… less lovemaking and more resentment… no sex and no love – then you need to sort the relationship before you can possibly get the sex back. Log on to Relate’s website on www.relate.org.uk.