A new book aims to help knackered parents have more (or at least some) sex. Mum of one Laura Pullman speaks to its author and gets some surprising tips.
Invest in a lock. That’s the advice of Dr Karen Gurney on how best to avoid your children walking in while you’re having sex. Being hyper-vigilant to the sound of pattering small feet isn’t — quelle surprise! — conducive to getting into the groove. “That level of distraction is not good for your sex life,” says Gurney, who is on a valiant mission to help parents find sexual fulfilment.
At her therapy clinic in east London, the renowned psychosexologist sees countless dissatisfied mums and dads hoping to get back on track between the sheets. There are gulfs in desire, communication black holes, simmering resentments, shattered body confidence and irked confusion. How is me avoiding the school WhatsApp groups linked to you avoiding quickies?
Four years ago, in her first book, Mind the Gap, Gurney focused on desire in long-term relationships and explored the “orgasm gap” between heterosexual couples (a recent study found that 61 per cent of straight men had an orgasm every time they had sex versus 30 per cent of heterosexual women). Now Gurney is so in demand, she has had to close her therapy waiting list at the Havelock Clinic, and of all her online workshops, the most popular is about keeping your sex life healthily intact when you have time-draining, energy-sapping sprogs. Her second book, How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life, comes out next month. “I’ll be queuing at the book launch,” a mum mate jokes when I tell her the title.
Most of my friends are mid-thirties, mid-kids and mid-not-tonight-darling. I’ve got a 13-month-old and a strong track record of falling asleep in front of Slow Horses. Could Gurney’s advice be our holy grail?
“All of us can have a better sex life than we’ve got,” she says. “We always want to see improvements in our diet, health, wellbeing and work life. Why not in our sex life as well?”
Satisfying sex lives correlate with satisfying relationships, less chance of infidelity, deeper couple connection and better psychological wellbeing. “We know that relationship satisfaction influences the emotional climate of the relationship and can also have an impact on parenting. So all these things are connected,” Gurney says. “Sexual satisfaction is a bit like building up a relationship savings account that, when times are tough, could hold the relationship together.” I don’t inquire about overdrafts.
Equally, I want to ask how working parents of multiple small children who are too time-poor to have sex will find the time to read a book on how to have sex and then actually have said sex. But Gurney, who shares two sons, aged seven and eleven, with her wife, is speaking about how “the first challenge is really understanding how desire works” and those insights feel important.
“People think desire is something that they should just feel and it doesn’t need any nurturing, and that it’s instinctive like hunger or thirst, that it operates like a drive, none of which is true,” she says. Forget the bodice-ripping, rampant desire we see on TV — in reality a slow-build “responsive desire” is what we will likely experience in long-term relationships.
“We need to transgress a sense of awkwardness, or allow each other to feel not in the zone yet but maybe with a bit of time we can get in the zone, and then have desire kicking in later on,” Gurney says. “We don’t ever see that represented.” Sighs of relief all round, then, that not feeling “out-of-the-blue horniness” is normal.
That said, everyone else is having more sex than you. At least that’s the common conception and we’re seemingly all getting hopelessly het up about how much is the right amount. Every other day? High days and holidays? “Frequency is a total red herring,” Gurney says firmly. “There is no correlation [between] frequency of sex and sexual satisfaction. None. Everyone in the therapy room quotes three times a week to me, even though we know the average in the UK is about three times a month and a bit less than that for people in the midlife age range.”
More sex isn’t necessarily better, she stresses. Instead — and here’s the catch — we should be striving for sex that “makes us feel alive”. When there is a pile of dirty laundry/unread emails/unwashed children, sex needs to be enticing and fulfilling. “It has to compete when you’re a parent with all those other priorities, like sleep,” Gurney says. “If the sex that we’re having has become predictable, formulaic, awkward, samey, lacking in pleasure, lacking in reward, then it’s not going to win on the priority list.”
Therefore, novelty is key. Gurney quickly clarifies that she doesn’t mean edible underwear or nipple tassels. Thank God. She means shaking up old patterns and not having the exact same initiation, roles and “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” routine. “Our brain hates that kind of sex. Our brain is like, ‘I’m not interested in that. It’s not anything that I’ve not seen a million times before and I’d rather prioritise sleep,’” she says, as I scurry back to the drawing board.
Gurney has more than 20 years of experience and talks with such confidence and empathy that she seems like an all-knowing guru. It’s little wonder that she has more than 97,000 followers on Instagram, where she is better known as the Sex Doctor. So, to schedule or not to schedule? Katherine Ryan, the comedian and mother of three, recently told Style that she and her husband bonk “exactly twice a month”. However, Gurney is against sex scheduling, arguing that pressure kills desire.
“There’s nothing less sexy than feeling like you’ve agreed to something that you don’t know that you’re going to feel like when you get to it,” she says, suggesting instead to schedule time for no pressure “physical intimacy”, which could kick-start desire. Pressure is also why a night or two away in a hotel can be a disastrous idea for some couples.
I raise the idea of a “maintenance shag”, as Caitlin Moran memorably described the type of sex where it has been a while and you hop into bed simply to keep things ticking over. “Sex for the sake of it, that your heart’s not in, will diminish your desire over time,” Gurney says, with the caveat that it is still important to know that you must nurture physical intimacy and that monogamy doesn’t work without effort.
The book is stuffed with practical ideas, reassurances and tips (and, as I discovered, gets you knowing stares if read on the Underground). Don’t think of sex as only penetrative sex. Know that sex taking a backseat in early parenthood is inevitable. Focus on upping the “sexual currency” — ie kisses and compliments, touch and affection — in your relationship. Take a pottery class. Come again?
Gurney explains that undertaking “self-expanding activities” as a couple, such as trying a new hobby like pottery or cooking a new dish together, helps us to see each other in a fresh light. She is a fan of audio erotica to help trigger desire. Perhaps listen on the commute home, she suggests, when you know you’ve got physical intimacy in the shared calendar. “Audio erotica is very popular and such a great intervention because it’s often much more acceptable for a lot of people than porn but works just as well.”
Initiating getting romantic, which Gurney prefers to call an “invitation” because it’s less threatening, often proves a sensitive issue. “Shall we have sex?” isn’t the best line. “It’s all about the end goal and nothing about the journey, and you either have to say yes or no,” she says. “At that point the answer is probably no because it’s unlikely that you’re both going to feel like it at the same time.”
A more casual invitation to cuddle on the sofa/talk under the covers/share a bath is easier to respond positively to, she adds. The end goal isn’t sex, although of course it could happen. “A lot of clients will say to me, ‘What I miss and what I want is passion,’” Gurney recounts. “You can get passion from a ten-second really hot kiss, you can get a feeling of being desired from that.”
Unsurprisingly communication is paramount. When talking about (and having) sex, timing is crucial. Gurney suggests having such sensitive conversations after you’ve had sex or when you feel emotionally connected to each other. Stick to focusing on what you would like more of and already like, rather than any negatives. “Everything is going to change at different points in your relationship — what you want, what your body is doing, circumstances, illness, grief, children, teenagers,” she says. “You have to be able to adapt, and communication is the only way you can do that.” Sharing the domestic load and feeling like a team are also key.
During my time with Gurney, I’ve hung on her every word and am still craving more wisdom. How much has Netflix sabotaged our sex lives? “I think scrolling and phones in the bedroom is a bigger killer of our sex lives,” she says. “We’re too distracted to interact with our partner in a way that might nurture desire.” We bid farewell. Gurney has endless clients to help and I’ve got a pottery class to book.
I came up with the term “sexual currency” as a way to refer to the amount of sexual charge between us and a partner outside actual sexual experiences. If “sex” can be defined as any sexual act involving a body part of yours or your partner’s designed to bring pleasure to one or both of you, then sexual currency can be defined as any way of relating to a partner that has the undertones of sex to it but does not necessarily include a sexual act — such as kissing and flirting. The key is to understand your sexual motivations and the needs they meet. Here’s how to do that:
Be honest: why do you actually want to have sex?
Write a list of some of your reasons — nothing is off limits or a “bad reason”. It’s about understanding yourself and what sex means for you. It’s OK if these are sexual motivations such as “I felt turned on in my body”, or nonsexual motivations such as “I wanted to feel close/alive/connected”, “I wanted to express love”, “I wanted to feel excitement”. Perhaps investing in the relationship is your motivation to be sexual, rather than a desire to have sex for yourself? This is really OK, and a common reason people give for wanting a sex life. You might write this as: “I want sex to nourish our relationship and keep us close.”
Share your sex list
Once you’ve done your lists, set some time to discuss this together, perhaps over dinner, or once the kids are asleep and there are no distractions. Do not judge each other’s motivations. It’s common at this stage in your life/relationship to have something like “Because I felt that I should” or “To make my partner happy” as a reason. This is OK. The concept of “sexually giving” in this way to protect the relationship or acquire something positive for the relationship or your partner has been shown to be a helpful quality in long-term sexual satisfaction.
Ask open-ended questions
Try to understand each other’s motivations for sex. Open-ended questions such as “Tell me a bit more about that” or “Describe that to me”, “What does it feel like?” or “How do you feel about us when you get that?” can really help you understand each other more.
Be open-minded
All motivations are equal. Something I notice in my work is that it can be challenging for a partner to accept nonsexual motivations, such as the need to feel close, if they themselves experience higher levels of spontaneous desire and feel turned on more frequently. The reason for this is that their experience of desire is that it requires little effort or nurturing much of the time. This way of experiencing desire aligns with how desire is portrayed in the media, so it’s easy for this to seem like the “right” way to experience it. Because of this, partners need to learn that this being “normal desire” is not backed up by science. They will need to appreciate that actually never experiencing desire out of the blue, and having motivations driven by other, nonsexual reasons, is how desire works for a lot of people in long-term relationships — particularly, but by no means exclusively, women.
Work on your ‘sexual currency’
For some couples sexual currency is ever present, and though it may have declined since those first heady few months of their relationship, they still feel there is a sexual charge between them. For these couples, no matter how often they have sex together, they feel connected sexually, and find the transition from putting the weekly shop away to kissing passionately against the fridge an easy one to make. Couples with high levels of sexual currency feel the presence of their sexual relationship whether they are having sex once a day or once a year. For others, sexual currency has become increasingly absent, and this absence makes it hard to see their partner (or relationship) as particularly sexual. These couples need to work daily on their sexual currency. This could be a brief but suggestive touch as you pass your partner in the kitchen, a seconds-long but passionate kiss before heading off to work, or just spending time naked in bed together not having sex.
How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life by Dr Karen Gurney is released April 4.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London
