Sex Within Marriage
There has been a strange reversal from the pre sexual revolution mantra of “no sex before marriage” to nowadays were the complaint is no sex, or rare sex, after marriage. Whether you are married or simply in a long term relationship, being together a long time tends to engender boredom or routine into your sex life. Common excuses are having children or they are too tired out after a day at work, or simply they are past all that. But I have found that many of my clients have none of those reasons when they find them selves at a sexual lull.
A case study is John and Maria. Right throughout his life, John had always been shy around girls, under confident, reluctant to take the leap. He had been unsure how to read signals and mostly let them take the intitiative. Then he met Maria and she quite simply took his breath away. He told me he fell in love the moment he clapped eyes on her and that she never failed to make him feel comfortable so he never had any problem taking the lead in sex. For the first few months everything was wonderful and the sex was glorious.
It wasn’t just the sex that was great, but the whole relationship, so John had no qualms about asking Maria to marry him, even though they had only been together for a few months. He knew she was the woman for him. John told me he couldn’t pin-point the exact time that he began to lose his sexual interest in Maria. It wasn’t straight after they were married but it was pretty soon after.
He began to realise that the initital comfortable, safe feeling had become a cage of sorts; he was so comfortable and safe he didn’t feel like doing anything more. It had become unwelcome. OK he wanted to cuddle and hug, to talk over the day, but he just didn’t find the passion any more. Maria started to question him about what was going wrong, what had slipped but just kept meeting a brick wall in his responses. The questions gave way to acceptance and sex became a once a month routine. On John’s part, he reckoned that Maria would soon become pregnant and their lives would change to a new stage and sex just wouldn’t be as much of an issue.
They didn’t fight or argue and for all intents and purposes their’s was a life of harmony, Maria shocked John but suddenly announcing she wanted to leave him. OK she still loved him, but just wasn’t “in love” with him any more. John knew why, he knew that it was his inability to make the sexual connection any more that had brought about the change in Maria’s feelings for him. It was at that point that John started to talk to me, desperate to make amends, to get the passion back. He was very afraid about how to do this and very confused.
The fear engendered by the thought of losing Maria destroyed John’s sexual performance. He started to experience premature ejaculation, impotence, infact all kinds of sexual problems started to dominate his attempts to rectify the situation, problems he had never had to face before. The more he tried the more he failed and the more it made his attempts to stop Maria from leaving him harder. Their sexual meetings became filled with tension and frustration and showed just how much their sexual connection had deteriorated. He talked to a psychologist and even started to take medication, but nothing worked and John started to return to the under-confidence of old. Even thinking of taking the sexual lead had become a nightmare to him.
So what went wrong? John’s case was interesting on several levels. To start with we have a habit of thinking of men as being rather straightforward in the sexual department. It either happens or it doesn’t. If it works it’s great, if it doesn’t then it’s down the the doctor or therapist; like taking the engine to a mechanic, a few tweeks and it’s on the road again. Even simply on the level of desire, we always think men are “up for it”.
As we started to delve into the reasons why John and Maria’s sexual connection started to fail, we found some interesting things. To start with it became clear that Maria hadn’t always been interested in sex with John, even in the passion to begin with. This came as quite a shock to John as he had always thought that the intesity and fullfillment in their early days had been mutual, she had always seemed to want sex as much as he did and enjoy it as much. Maria told me that quite often during their encounters she had been off away in another world, thinking about other things and that during these times she found John’s appetite overwhelming. As this admission started to sink in, John started to locate the time this started to happen and how he had reacted. He had thought he needed to make more effort, to make the sex more enjoyable for Maria, it became more of an effort to help her achieve orgasm. This allowed him to realise that all this effort had started to make him tired, it was draining. All this lead him to believe that Maria was so much more highly sexed than him and needed so much more. This became draining and his body had started to rebel, started to resist the demands sex made of him so that no matter how much he still desired Maria, he just didn’t have it in him any more.
Sex of the Heart, Mind and Body. The source of most of our sexual guilt confusingly, is also the source of our sexual liberation. That’s right, the Bible. Now I’m not about to suggest that we should all go back to the days of “no sex before marriage” that wouldn’t work! No what I mean is that the Bible talks about sex in the terms of “knowing”; Adam “knew” Eve. Sex is more than a physical act, it is about knowing yourself, having a sense of awareness. Every sexual encounter offers the opportunity to open your eyes and see yourself and how you connect with another. It is the opportunity to experience your Oneness. Day after day we go about our lives feeling as the individual – separate from those around us. Without meditation we seldom stop to think about our connectedness with humanity. And in this modern hustle and bustle it’s not only the “others” we have become disconnected from but from ourselves, from our bodies and emotions. Just like Maria, who could go about her day to day life with John, including their day to day sex life, and be completely on a different plain, contemplating different thoughts.
This is the reason that unconscous, mechanical sex becomes so dangerous and why any sort of abusive relationship leaves the kind of scars that last a lifetime. If the body and mind are on different paths, one feeling good the other dead, then you yourself are split in two. You can’t even experience you own oneness, your own coming together of body and mind. And if you can’t do that for yourself, how can you do it for another?
So rather than rushing back in to rescue their sexual relationship, John and Maria would have been far better off had they started to become aware of one another again. Stopping to experience each other again. If you really want to touch someone else then you can’t help but be connected to your own body – because how else can you really know who you are touching? Your body informs you. So reaching out to a lover to experience them and their body brings you straight back into experiencing yourself. This state of whole-body-mind awareness is how we should be all the time.
Finding the spark again. The simplest Tantra of all is to open your mind. How many times have you had sex whilst making a grocery list in your head? Or thinking about when you have to pick up the kids? Sex that is not experienced totally in the heart and the mind is not really an experience of sex at all. It is just another disembodied act that takes you further away from the way we are meant to operate. Real tantra is about being present and aware in every moment. In fact, doing the dishes can be an act of tantra if it is done with awareness – a single pointed focus on exactly what you are doing. Within this single pointed focus hides the deepest level of relaxation, focus and creative potential. This is entering into the true Yin state, a state of receptivity and awareness and from this focus, your creative and spontaneous energies will flow naturally. There is no effort required. And we all know that the best sex is when you lose yourself in it and in the other person. Sharing this space with someone else is a sacred experience because you are totally open and totally receptive. This is when you merge with your partner. Your receptivity goes beyond your own body into theirs and you are experiencing your true nature.
Why does sexsex so often deteriorate after marriagemarriage? Why do once passionate partners suddenly find themselves trapped in tired sameness? In this article Origin Psychic’s Cathy CoxCathy Cox examines the problem.