A few months ago, I had to make an enormous decision whether or not I should follow through with the planes that were long since made, and get married.  I had been engaged for over a year, but all of a sudden the enormity of the situation felt completely disabling.  The man I was about to marry was one of the best men on the planet, but I was so scared I could not breathe. We had been together for nearly four years, and we had a wonderful relationship. What frightened me was the state of our sex life.  It went from great to mostly non-existent.  When we did actually have sex, I sometimes just wished it would end quickly.  I couldn't believe that I, a woman that had believed for most of her life that there was something wrong with her because she wanted sex “all the time”, was feeling frigid. And to make matters worse, I was in my early thirties!  I should have been clawing at the walls!

At first, I could not believe that “I” could possibly be the problem.

Forever, I have carried the reputation of being amazing in bed, and more than a few times told that I was the absolute BEST.  I am a passionate, lusty woman that loves to have sex, and categorizes blow jobs as one of my personal hobbies. The only complaint I could have mustered in the past regarding sex would be “not enough, need more”!

It must be his fault, I had imagined.  He doesn’t know me anymore.  He is more concerned with himself.  When he was not concerned with himself, it is too “mechanical”.  He is obviously just trying to please me, and it's really not working.  Where did the foreplay go? No wait. Forget it. Just get this shit over with.  What kind of cold dispassionate ice-princess had I become?

Then bad got worse.  An old flame tried to re-enter my world.  He moved back from abroad and was looking to sort of pick up where we left off several years ago.  This particular mate and I had the kind of physical/sexual relationship I could write stories about!  Memories and fantasies came flooding in.  I learned that my libido was not in fact, dead.  It was dormant.  I wanted the flame.  I wanted nearly every hot thing that crossed my path, but I could not get myself to want my future husband in that way.  He was my best friend in the world, the ideal partner in every other way, but the attraction vanished.

So here the decision came.  Do I marry my best friend, the man that is truly great for me and great to me?  Or do I act as the proverbial “moth to the flame”, and finally feel ALIVE once again.  I was torn for over a month.  I tried to make strong efforts to bring the fire back to my relationship with my fiancée.  Though my thoughts wandered to the ex, I physically did not.  He and I were never successful in terms of interpersonal relationships, and I did not feel that this relationship would make me happy outside the bedroom.  I decided that it would be wiser to fix the one thing (sex) with my otherwise perfect match, rather than to try to make a perfect match out of great sex.

At first, everything felt forced.  I wanted to talk to him about it, but we all know that most difficult thing to say to a man is that you are not satisfied in bed.  The wording had to be nothing short of masterful.  I tried to start by giving little hints when we had sex like, “ooh I really like it when you linger on my neck”.  But he didn’t apply this precious information at later dates.  He just wasn’t getting it.  It wasn’t smooth.  I felt almost like I was telling a story, and he was to act out the parts.  This was not a turn on.  I realized later, that after a while, he was doing the right things, technically.  It was me who pulled away from kisses, and got cold.  Whatever was wrong was not on the surface.  It was an inside-issue, and the issue was inside of me.  So now what?

I guess this would be a good time to mention that I was, at this point in my life, approaching marriage # 3.  Oh yes, I was feeling incredibly successful on the “relationship” front.  I had a great relationship with my family, and I have nurtured and enjoyed many close friendships for years and years.  Why couldn’t I do this intimacy thing?  I felt like I was getting too damned old to keep “starting over” again and again.  I was thoroughly invested in making this work somehow.  After all, I didn’t want to let this fish go.  I couldn’t imagine life without him.

The first order of operation was “the talk”.  After Pear Harbor, there was a huge horrific bomb.  This bomb was worse.  All I managed to succeed in was making him feel unattractive, like a failure, and scared for our future, even though I tried to be as gentle about the whole thing as I possibly could.  I told him that it wasn’t “his fault”, but that didn’t help at all.  If we could even enable ourselves to begin any sex act, it would halt almost immediately once he thought I wasn’t “into it”.  Things went from really bad to unbearably awful, and the wedding day was close approaching.  Now what the hell was I going to do?

We had more talks.  This time about the pressures that surrounded the both of us, in our lives in general.  We laughed at some things, cried at other things.  Then we summated that it was neither of our faults.  We made the executive decision to blame life.

Now that we agreed on the cause of the problem, we could redirect our focus on the repair.

First came the practice sex sessions.  There was less pressure, this was only practice.  Anything went, porn, toys, fantasies, different locations, we were less concerned with re-capturing the feeling, we were just “getting each other off”.  Sex became fun.  If things sort of didn’t work out, we did not feel pressure.  We would just try something different next time.  We took nights here and there for ourselves to play, and eventually I felt that I could deal with this for the rest of my life.  Time was running out, I had to make a decision.  We got married.

The wedding night was fun.  We decided to have a “quickie” right after the ceremony, it was pretty hot, but it had to be rather fast as people were waiting for us.  Again, it was fun.  There was some sex on the honeymoon, but not the locked in the room sort that people write about in their diaries.  This did concern me a bit, but what else could I do.

Months passed.  I accepted the fate I chose for myself.  We’d have sex about once per week, or less.  The sex itself was fine, even exciting sometimes.  But somehow it didn’t naturally occur to us to go ahead and do it.  The more I worried about it, the worse things got, so more time passed.

Then from out of no-where, we just started to go on dates with each other again.  We were tired of the everyday crap that took precedence in our conversations, and went out.  We went to the movies, out to eat, spent more time with friends, generally started to enjoy each other.  There was now better things to talk about than, “did you call about…” or “how was work”.  We found ourselves making-out more, and lingering in bed more on weekend mornings.  We also had some earth-shattering love-making sessions that left us trembling.  Once the ball began to roll, pardon the pun, we were screwing each other more than ever!

Penciling time into our busy schedules became a priority.  I started leaving little messages on his work voicemail like, “shave your balls tonight baby, I am going to run my tongue all over them”.  He could think of nothing else for the rest of the day.  All of those little things that the standard relationship how-to books seem to dictate endlessly just seemed to happen without the feeling of just trying too hard.  I had learned to just enjoy.  I needed to stop worrying about what wasn’t happening, and just make things happen for myself.  The more I told him he was good in bed, or that I couldn’t wait to fuck him, the better in bed he was.  If I found myself to be loosing excitement in bed, I would change position, or change rooms.

It can be exhilarating to find new tricks to please our mates.  If you think back to what we do in the beginning of our relationships, you’ll realize a big part of it is trying to impress our potential mates.  We are marketing ourselves.  Until that certain comfort sets in and we feel like we’ve locked in our “other half”.  Then we stop trying so hard.  I now believe, that the marketing we do in the beginning does more than attract the person in our sights.  We are exciting ourselves at the same time.  Following are my Freud-like theories.

We get dressed up.  We clean-up, remove our unwanted hairs, manicure our nails, prepare our coif, and actually apply make-up, along with wearing appealing clothes.  The results of this ritualistic preparation not only turns-on everyone in our paths, it turns us on as well.  How often do we look in the mirror when we are strutting around the house in sweat-clothes? We don’t stop to admire how astonishing we are, do we?  But, on the other hand, when we are all-primped-out, we will gaze at ourselves as we pass any sort of reflective object.  We feel attractive, so we are turned-on.  We get menacing looks from other women and those hungry looks from the men.  That turns us on as well.  If we are not taking the time to make ourselves look hot, how could we possibly feel hot?

Aside from looking the part, we make more effort to play the part of an attentive date during our marketing phase.  We think of witty and interesting things to say on our dates, along with stories to tell about our lives.  Done that recently with your husband of ten years? No.  How can we feel like fascinating people, if we have stopped putting forth the effort to be fascinating?  Again, we are turning ourselves on by acting attractive.

Humans need a tremendous amount of stimulus to stay interested at any one thing at a time.  If someone were to ask you to start bouncing a ball and continue to do so for an hour, how stimulating would that be?  We have got to stop doing the same things over and over again in our relationships, we are only bouncing balls.  We need to break things up a bit, explore, and try new things to keep us interested.