Take Back Your Sex Life

Take Back Your Sex Life

Melissa Petro is a 40-year-old writer who lives in New York with her husband of four years and two children. She and her husband switch off between working and kid duty. According to Ms Petro, the always-on nature of parenting a 12-month-old and a 3-year old in a pandemic has been “relentless, exhausting and not sexy.” Recently her husband has been sleeping on the family room couch.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “It’s just that there are so many things to do besides having sex with Jaipur Escort Service, who I do hypothetically find attractive and theoretically want to have sex with. It feels pretty — at times — hopeless, our sex life.”

Ms Petro is not alone. A Kinsey Institute study on the impact of Covid-19 on marital quality found that 24 per cent of married people reported having less frequent sex than they did before the pandemic, and 17 per cent of women reported a decrease in both sexual and emotional satisfaction since the pandemic began. Another study from the spring suggested that a third of couples were experiencing pandemic-related conflict and that many of their sex lives were suffering.

“We are missing out on many parts of our former lives,” Maya Luetke, a researcher at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University who led the study, wrote in an email. “Just as this is the lost year in other ways, it may also be the lost year in terms of sex.”

Likewise, Emily Nagoski was not surprised by the data. A sex educator, researcher and author of “Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life with Escorts Service Jaipur,” Dr Nagoski describes sexual desire and inhibition like the accelerator and brake in a car. And while right now there are more factors in couples’ lives hitting their brakes than their accelerators, all hope is not lost. There is still a lot you can do to take your foot off the brake and hit the sexuality accelerator.

Shift your perspective.

Self-criticism and judgment of your partner are classic ways to dampen sexual desire. More than half of women report that stress, depression and anxiety decrease their interest in sex, as well as their sexual arousal and ability to orgasm. Dr Nagoski said it’s normal to feel less desire during a crisis, like a pandemic. “You feel like the entire world, literally the air you breathe, is a potential threat to yourself and your family. That’s going to hit the brake.”

Make a plan.

Ms Petro said she and her husband still make time for sex, even if it’s just, say, every third Sunday. “I shove thoughts of chores undone out of my mind and just try to relax into my body and be present for my partner,” she said. Afterwards, they take each other less seriously. “We’re lighter.”

“People get very wrapped up in the idea of spontaneously desiring sex Jaipur Escorts,” Dr Nagoski said, but, especially in women, it’s fairly rare. Based on a wide body of research on gender and sexual desire, Dr Nagoski estimates that roughly 15 per cent of women experience spontaneous desire, whereas most experience responsive desire — wanting sex when something erotic is happening.

Pursue novelty.

While experiencing low sexual desire during a pandemic might be normal and understandable, there are things you can do to increase desire in a relationship. One thing that science says increases arousal is a novel experience. Not just the sexual kind, but anything to get your heart rate up.

This might be a good time for people to “open a dialogue with their partner(s) about their relationship overall as well as their desires, fantasies, needs, etc.,” Dr Luetke, who studies the link between conflict and sexual intimacy at Indiana University, wrote in an email. If these conversations are awkward for you, she recommended engaging a therapist specializing in sex.

Complete the stress cycle.

When your brain senses a threat (a lion, say, chasing you), your body activates the sympathetic nervous system, which sends chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol to help you run faster or fight harder. Once the threat is gone (you ran away; you killed the lion), the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, taking you out of fight-or-flight mode and returning your body to a calm state.

That calm state activated by the parasympathetic nervous system is also responsible for sexual arousal. In other words, your brain knows that when the lion is chasing you, you won’t want sex.