As I’ve aged, I’ve experienced several stages of life, from young adult to middle-aged. Along with these stages of life, there have been changes in my sex life. My friends and I started out thinking we knew everything we needed to know about sex, only to find out there is a lot more to sex then, well, sex.
Recently, while running errands with my wife, a topic came up that I’m sure many other couples can relate to. We were discussing how our sex life had evolved together. Don’t worry, I won't be getting into the details of the sex acts themselves.
By the time we met, my wife and I were in the mature adult phase of our lives. We knew who we were as individuals, as well as what we liked in the bedroom. We had experience with adult toys and felt comfortable communicating in the bedroom. Our sexual desires were well in sync with each other. You could say, everything was coming up roses for us, both in life and in the bedroom. After we married, the honeymoon ended quickly, we wanted more kids, and felt pressed for time due to our ages. We were entering into a phase of life neither of us had ever been. Newlyweds wanting to start a family.
I had never had a conversation with somebody about starting a family. Baby making is supposed to be fun and easy, right? Once the safeguards are removed, condoms or whatever form of contraception you might use, babies are made, or so I thought.
There are many issues that can affect whether people can conceive, and my heart goes out to those couples struggling with fertility. The emotional toil that comes from not conceiving month after month, is devastating.
We went from having fun, spontaneous sex, to scheduled baby making, in a matter of months. We were, calculating ovulation cycles, eliminating foods that can affect the sperm count, trying to make sure that we used an ideal position for conceiving. It wasn’t very sexy. We were fortunate to eventually conceive our children, but the stress we put on ourselves trying to conceive was an emotional roller coaster.
So, yay! No more scheduling, sex was great again, right? Oh, wait, then we were parents of a newborn. Again, there was so much that I wasn't prepared for, but we're still here. I'm sure there are plenty of stories from new parents about being up all night with the baby, trying to figure out which cries mean what, and trying to find time to catch some sleep.
During the newborn stage, it became about having the energy at the end of a long day, after an already long night. That felt especially challenging because, like I said, we are at the mature stage in our lives. Even though we loved each other, loved being in each other's presence, and our sexual attraction to each other had not diminished, finding the energy and motivation was difficult at times. Well, it was difficult for us both to have energy and motivation at the same time.
Now, we've moved past the baby making phase and the newborn phase, we are on the raising children phase. With two toddlers and a teen, we are very much in the thick of it. One thing this means, is that we have officially moved out of the scheduled sex for the sake of making babies sex, and on to the sex for the rest of our lives kind of sex. We found we needed to work to make our sex life more interesting and rewarding. Years of trying to conceive, being pregnant, and raising newborns had put us in a sexual rut. We had forgotten how to have fun in the bedroom.
How did we renew our sex lives? The simple answer, we remembered that I was a man before her, and she was a woman before me. Not Dad, not Mom, just people, with desires, and needs. We remembered how happy it makes us to fulfill one another’s desires. We bought some more toys to review for our adult toy store and started taking our time to communicate in the bedroom and try new things together. There might be a something to it, a deeper dive into what brings the two of us together. It might be we’re just fortunate to have found each other in this great big world, at a time in our lives where we didn’t just look past each other. Maybe we were meant for each other, and destiny drove us to one another. Either way, we’re happy to be here, together. We are also fortunate to own a business in the adult toy industry, gives us lots of excuses to purchase and review toys.
-- Mr. ShhhhFun