Maintaining Physical Intimacy in Long-Term Relationships
written by Micah Brown
When you’re just starting out with a new relationship, the physicality of it is, to borrow a colloquialism, hot and heavy. There’s that phase where it seems next to impossible to keep your hands out of each other’s pants and all you want to be doing is fucking. Whether it’s in the car, in the woods, getting each other off in a movie theater, or a quickie in the coffee shop bathroom, that desire to constantly be engaged in sexual activity is well documented in new relationships.
But what happens as time goes on? Many people see a decline in sexual activity with their long-term partner as time moves forward. While there is some part of this that’s due to age, that’s not the only factor. Even older couples who are getting together for the first time go through the “honeymoon phase”.
Several factors can lead to lower sexual activity within a relationship over time. Having kids, your career, family pressures, money concerns, and other life stresses can begin to sap the energy you had for sex and direct it to other places. In addition, you may feel as though your sex life has become stagnant because you’re not being adventurous anymore. Where you might have shoved your hand down your partner’s pants in a cab a few years ago, the thought of that now may seem horrifying to you.
Sex is a very important part of most relationships – the caveat here being those people who identify as Asexual and who have low to no libido and may spend most of their lives never having nor wanting sex. For the majority of us, however, we have desires and wants that are sexual.
As our sex lives slow down, we may even find that our fantasy life begins to speed up. Often, despite the decline in sexual activity between partners, the urge for sex and sexual release doesn’t diminish. People often turn to masturbation, pornography, and erotica in these situations to get the release they are craving.
Rediscovering Our Sexuality
Kids, school, jobs, grocery shopping, making food, keeping the house clean… All of these things are important, but they all take energy away from us. Think about what your responsibilities were when you got together? How much have they changed from when you first started dating to this moment in time? If you’ve been together for a long time, it’s likely that those changes are pretty significant.
One of the best parts of an early relationship is the spontaneity of sex. Want to pull over and fuck in the car? Awesome. No worries about getting caught or getting arrested. What about now? If you have kids you’re trying to get home to, spending the night in jail isn’t going to go well for you or your babysitter. Also, your job is probably much different than it was then, meaning that missing a day because you were in jail isn’t going to be great for your career.
Plan Your Sex
Now that some time has passed, that spontaneity has disappeared and now you worry that without it, sex won’t be as fun anymore.
That’s not at all the case. One of the solutions you can consider for getting your groove back is to schedule sex. It sounds terrible, but it’s something that has been shown to work. Scheduling sex can even help increase the likelihood of spontaneous sex! The more sex we have, the more sex we want, and the more sex we’re going to have. Maybe it won’t be in the car on the way home from a date, but maybe it’s in the car in the garage once you’re back from the date.
Again, the idea of planning sex sounds so clinical, but you can create whatever kind of experience you want with it. Start out with a massage, rediscover your partner’s body by way of touch. Serve some decadent sweets in the bedroom as you explore and kiss and caress. Try a game of strip poker or even pick up one of those adult dice games where you role the dice and it gives you an action to perform on one, and a body part on the other.
However you want to “schedule” the sex, don’t think about it as “Sex from 8:00pm to 8 :15pm on Friday” or something like that. Turn it into a date and a sensual experience that builds up to the sex itself.
Get Physical
Yes, sex is physical. Sex is not the only physical activity you can do with your partner. For example, you can cuddle, you can bathe together, you can give a massage…
Find time to spend with each other being physical even if it’s not overtly sexual. Surprise your partner with a full body massage and leave the choice of whether or not sex occurs up to your partner. Draw them a bath so that when they get home, they can sink into the warm water and you will be there to wash their hair and bring them tea or wine.
It doesn’t even have to be as planned or as eloquent as those examples. Hold hands when you take a walk in the evening. Watch a movie and cuddle, run your fingers through their hair, rest your head on their shoulder or let them rest theirs on yours.
Put your phones down and pay full attention to whatever activity you’re doing at the time. Watching a movie and cuddling? Touch your partner instead of your device.
Get Intellectual
The greatest sex organ is the brain. Exercise your brain. Do things that challenge you and make you think. Read a book to each other and then discuss the chapter you read. If you’ve watched an impactful movie, take time after the movie to discuss the themes and how it made you feel.
Play games! Playing board games or word games together help you get insight into how you both think and can turn into a conversation. There are some amazing games out there designed for couples that will help you to reconnect on an intellectual level (not to be mistaken with the more, ahem, adult themed games discussed earlier).
Read poetry or Shakespeare or Shakespeare’s poetry and talk about it! Challenge each other to write poems back and forth for a week.
Look for activities that you know you will both enjoy and try to avoid activities that one of you actively dislikes or hates.
Stay Playful
We are told as we grow up that we need to become more mature to be able to function in society. While there is some validity to making certain you’re being responsible, all the research shows that we need to continue to find ways to play even as adults. For some, this might be a round of golf, or joining a municipal baseball team or action troupe.
When it comes to sex and sexuality, finding ways to remain playful is also very important. Yes, the romance of sex is sensationalized in media often to the detriment of what actual sex looks like and how much play can be involved. We’re not just talking about kinky fun times or role-play, here. But just finding ways to have fun and laugh. Our bodies are weird and funny things that don’t always behave the way we want them to. Being able to find ways to laugh about the strange and ridiculous things that happen during sex is vitally important.
Making sex fun beyond the pleasure of it will only increase the pleasure and the closeness. Play strip-poker or naked twister. Decide to play a two-person game of truth or dare (or invite some friends if you want - we don’t judge).
Whatever it is, in the end, make sure you find ways to keep the fun as well as the sexuality of it.
Wrapping Up
Things are difficult for many of us in the world right now. Finding time to reconnect with our partners on all levels is vitally important to surviving the stresses of the world. Finding ways to reconnect with your sexuality is going to help you and your partner reduce stress, increase endorphins, and help you find better ways to communicate.
Try not to take sex too seriously even though it is a serious subject. Keep the fun, keep the laughter, and keep the playfulness of it all intact.
