We need to talk about sex

I have been with my husband for more than 20 years. We met when I was 20, which means there are very few people on this planet who know me better. He knows what mood I’m in from the way I close a cupboard. He knows when I say “it’s fine” whether it is actually fine, definitely not fine, or fine but I would quite like him to ask me about it again in approximately seven minutes.

He knows an extraordinary amount about me. Yet, until very recently, there were things about sex that I had never told him.

Nothing particularly revelatory. In fact, most of it seems ridiculously mundane.

Like the fact that sometimes, when we are having sex, I stop experiencing what is happening and start watching myself instead. What does my body look like from there? Can he see that? Do I smell? Is he enjoying this? Am I taking too long?

Suddenly I am not really in bed with my husband at all. I am in my own head conducting a fairly brutal performance review.

I had been doing this for years. He had absolutely no idea.

We are expecting people to be mind readers

A few weeks ago, we sat down together and watched something by sex coach Ruth Ramsay before I interviewed her for Why Aren’t We Talking About This?

Ruth started talking about the thoughts that can run through women’s heads during sex. Bodies. Vulvas. Smell. Appearance. I remember thinking, Oh. That’s me.

So I told him. Twenty-one years into our relationship.

His response was essentially: why have you never told me this?

Fair question.

I don’t think I’m particularly prudish. In fact, I don’t think I am at all. We have a great relationship. I talk about things for a living. I’ve made an entire podcast about conversations people find difficult to have.

Yet somehow I’d expected the person lying next to me to understand an internal monologue I’d never actually let him hear.

The more I spoke to Ruth, the less unusual that seemed. She told me about couples who’ve been together for decades who, when she speaks to them separately, tell completely different versions of the same sexual relationship.

Sometimes it goes back to something tiny. One person interpreted a moment as “they don’t like that”. The other thought exactly the same thing. Neither mentioned it.

Years later they discover they’d both wanted the thing they’d quietly stopped doing.

Sorry, what?

We don’t know. We interpret. Leave an interpretation alone for long enough and it starts to feel remarkably like a fact.

Somewhere along the way, we learnt that good sex shouldn’t need explaining

At school, we learnt how sex makes a baby. We learnt remarkably little about how two actual human beings have sex.

Nobody taught us how to say ‘I like that’, ‘I don’t like that’, or ‘I used to like that but I don’t anymore’. More importantly, nobody taught us how to hear those things without interpreting them as criticism.

Culture filled in the gaps.

Films taught us that desire appears out of nowhere and everybody instinctively knows exactly what to do. Porn gave us performance.

Neither spends an enormous amount of time on someone saying, “Could you move your hand slightly to the left?”

Somewhere in all of this we’ve ended up with a peculiar idea that if sex is really good, we shouldn’t need to talk about it.

They should know. I should know. Our bodies should know. Desire should happen spontaneously.

Having to explain it, schedule it or work at it can start to feel like evidence that something isn’t quite right.

We don’t apply that logic to much else we care about. We don’t assume a great relationship means never discussing money or that good parents instinctively know what to do at every stage.

Why on earth would sex be the one part of a 20-year relationship we’re supposed to get right without talking about it?

I wonder if we’ve confused effortless with good.

That came up again when Ruth started talking about desire.

I have always thought scheduling sex sounded like one of the least sexy things you could possibly do. If we’re getting our diaries out on a Monday morning and deciding Thursday is sex night, surely something has gone terribly wrong.

Except that isn’t really what she meant.

Ruth talked about responsive desire, which was one of those slightly annoying moments where I thought: why am I 41 years old and only just learning this?

We tend to think desire should just appear. Suddenly I fancy you, you fancy me and, conveniently, this happens at exactly the same moment when neither of us is tired, thinking about work or remembering the 47 things we still need to do.

Desire doesn’t always come first. Sometimes you create the conditions for it and desire catches up.

Ruth and her husband actually put a heart in their diary. It isn’t an appointment to have sex. It’s protected time to connect. Phones away, work finished, a shower, music, whatever helps them move out of everyday life and towards each other.

My immediate reaction was still that this sounded slightly contrived, until I realised how differently I treat almost everything else I care about. I don’t expect friendships, exercise or time with my family to magically happen in whatever gaps are left after everything else has taken what it needs. I make space for them precisely because they matter.

With sex, making an effort can somehow feel like proof that there is a problem.

Ruth also talks about desire as having brakes and accelerators. Stress, tiredness, feeling uncomfortable in your body, thinking about everything you need to do: all brakes. Then there are the things that make desire easier.

You can pile on the accelerators, but if your foot is still firmly on the brake, you’re not going very far.

Again: why did I not know this?

It also made me realise how quickly ‘why don’t I want sex?’ can turn into something much bigger in your head. Am I still attracted to them? Are they still attracted to me? Is this what happens after you’ve been together for years? Is something wrong?

Asking ‘what is making it difficult for me to want sex right now?’ feels much more useful. Maybe you’re knackered. Maybe you’ve spent all day being touched by children. Maybe you’ve had a shit day at work. Maybe you don’t feel particularly good in your body. Maybe you need twenty minutes where nobody wants anything from you.

For me, my body has always been a big one.

My husband obviously knew I had body hang-ups. What he didn’t know, until we watched Ruth together, was how much they followed me into bed.

When I finally explained what was going on in my head, he was genuinely surprised.

Then he told me he loved my vulva and thought it was beautiful, which is not a sentence I expected to be writing on the internet this morning, but here we are.

What got me wasn’t really the compliment. It was realising that we’d been together for more than two decades and there was this entire conversation happening in our sex life that only one of us knew we were having.

He didn’t know I needed reassuring because I hadn’t told him.

This is where ‘we need to communicate more’ starts to feel a bit obvious

Of course we do. I don’t think many people are walking around passionately advocating for less communication in their relationships.

I’m much more interested in why we don’t.

How can two people who love each other, know each other incredibly well and are perfectly capable of talking about difficult things still leave so much unsaid when it comes to sex?

I wonder if part of it is that after a long time together, you start to think you know.

I’ve been with my husband since I was 20. The 41-year-old version of me isn’t the same person he met then. My body has changed. What I like has changed. What I worry about has changed. He has changed too.

Of course our sex life has changed.

Ruth recommends couples ask each other a ridiculously simple question: ‘What do you need tonight?’

Not what worked last time. Not what we’ve always done. Not what I assume you like because you seemed to like it in 2009.

What do you need tonight? It sounds so bloody obvious. Apparently some of us need 21 years and a podcast to work it out.