Let's Talk About Sex...Married Sex

Okay...the lack of intimacy in my marriage is starting to get to me, so I thought perhaps this would prove to be an interesting topic.

Alright, for starters, with only minimal dishonesty, I can say my husband and I waited until we were married. Allow me to explain: When we first met it was one of those sort of wild passionate uncontrollable things. We were extremely attracted to one another and also neither of us had dated in some time (I had actually been previously married) so we did have sex a very few amount of times. We dated only occasionally in the beginning and would sometimes have sex, but once I moved closer to him (we were about 45 miles apart when we started out), we started to get more serious.

With this seriousness came more discussions about life, morals, goals, etc. Now I knew D came from a Christian upbringing and did his best, in his human-ness, to stick to those values, but he was also a 30-something single man living in the world. My upbringing was different and it took some time for me to come around to his way of thinking, which only made it harder for him to resist, but eventually I relented. All in all, I could count our successful sexual encounters on one hand. Quickly after getting more serious in our relationsship we got engaged and there was no more sex (not in the literal sense of the word anyway) until our wedding night.

Now, people who knew we were "waiting" teased about how we would likely be locked in our apartment for weeks on end making up for lost time, but I have found that just is not true...at least not in my case.

Now don't get me wrong...our wedding night and honeymoon were great, but then when back to our normal lives it was not a case of us falling into bed every time we had a minute. My theory behind this is simple: if you are attracted to one another and in love and DON'T have sex then you find other ways to be intimate. Those other ways don't disappear just because you said "I do." Then there is the case of utility sex....

While it got us our beautiful children, utility sex (my husband's phrase) has all but ruined our sex life. A couple months after our wedding, I found myself pregnant (it should be noted that I was with my former husband 7 years, never used BC and never had kids), but quickly thereafter suffered a miscarriage. My mother-in-law (more on her in another post) jumped into gear, setting me up to see a specialist in some francy-shmansy OB/GYN office via a doctor neighbour of hers. My fertility issues were discovered and I was quickly put on a fertility drug and progesterone therapy. This is where the utility sex comes on.

You have to take fertility drugs on a schedule, which means you also have to have sex on a schedule. I got pregnant with my daughter the first month...then came a long difficult pregnancy...ending in a beautiful big baby girl. When N was 5-months-old, we decided that we should try again because we weren't getting any younger. Unfortunately, this time it took four months to get pregnant. Four months of having sex on a schedule. Then another long very difficult pregnancy...this time ending in a beautiful, even bigger, baby boy and a tubal ligation. We were done. Then came c-sections complications followed by a diseased gall bladder that had to be removed and a hernia that had to be repaired not to mention a flare up of my auto-immune disorder (more on that in another post), so in the 7 months since my son was born, we have had sex maybe four times. Despite how it sounds, my health issues do not completely prevent us from having sex, but they do interrupt the flow of things a bit.

I miss it, but a part of me doesn't really care. I don't feel emotionally connected to my husband anymore, and although we have discussed it, his assurances that we'll work on it have not come to fruition. I love him, I just feel really far from him most of the time. I derive the majority of my emotional joy from my beautiful children (D is a great dad, BTW) and my sexual release from a seriosuly overused vibrator and a great imagination, but I don't get intimacy anywhere. And I can't seem to figure out how to get it back. Sometimes it seems like more trouble than it's worth and it bothers even more that it doesn't seem to bother him that much.

Did I mentioned we have only been married a little over three years? Maybe it wasn't utility sex that ruined it.