My wife has decided to schedule sex in our diaries

With work and kids taking over, can scheduling intimacy save your relationship or does it kill the romance? Photo / Getty Images

Advice columnists Annabel Rivkin and Emilie McMeekan help a reader who is worried his wife’s ‘sex spreadsheet’ is unromantic.

Q. I’ve been happily married for 14 years, and we have two children, aged 10 and eight. I knew that we were in a bit of a dry patch, but we realised on holiday that we hadn’t had sex at all this year. My wife is a highly organised person and has decided that she wants to tackle this by scheduling sex in our diaries. I just feel that a sex spreadsheet is rather unromantic (and unsexy). Has it really come to this? I just feel very disappointed. Am I being silly?

Love, Spontaneous

A. One of the disappointing things about being a grown-up is the reality that, if we’re not vaguely organised, things tend to fall by the wayside. What was that word again? Oh yes, spontaneity. Remember that? Spontaneity tends to make itself scarce post-children or, at least, harder to embrace. One minute you are young, fun and having sex because one of you looked cute emptying the dishwasher. The next minute… well… droughts. Not on purpose.

Our sex lives just tend to absorb a lot of the collateral damage – stress, tiredness, irritability – that busy family life serves up along with all the fulfilment and sense of community and other wholesome stuff. There is a place for spontaneity, of course, but it probably isn’t going to get you where you want to go right now, Spontaneous. Not with any regularity, anyway.

First, Spontaneous, this is actually quite a nice predicament. A predicament with in-built desire and opportunity. Our inbox is more often populated by those whose partners no longer want to have sex with them; who have lost their own libidos; who have found that after years of marriage, sexual desires are misaligning; who are helplessly and painfully attracted to other people; who worry that they will never have sex again; who worry that they may never want to have sex again. You both want to have sex. With each other. How do you make this happen? Accept that you need a plan. So, unless you’ve come up with a better idea than your wife’s, it seems possible that you are being a bit silly.

From our perspective, the fact that your wife wants to have sex with you enough to start a spreadsheet (an absolute bore and yet another list she will have to manage), couldn’t that be considered rather romantic? Sexy, even? We are all perma-desperate for solutions in this crazy chaos of life. If someone were to say to us, “Here! Allow me to provide you with a solution,” we might, conceivably, say something like, “Take me, I’m yours.”

A well-planned sex session can often be far more enjoyable than one squeezed between chores and exhaustion. Photo / Getty Images

Not only that but once you are getting a hot slice of solution once a week, as opposed to not once in eight months, you might find that you rather like the spreadsheet. That cursed spreadsheet might suddenly be blessed with your vigorous approval.

To further assuage your fears, we spoke to a few of our married/long-term relationship friends and most admitted to having conducted their sex lives with military precision when the occasion demanded it. There were those who had sex at 8.01pm every Monday, just after the children were in bed, no excuses. Some scheduled hyper-local tennis classes for the children at 6pm on a Friday or 11am on a Saturday so they could dash back for their sex window. Others admitted to blocking out time in their Google Calendar under “tax meeting”. You are not alone, Spontaneous. And so, for the foreseeable, you are going to have to take organisational action if you want to get busy. Hot spreadsheet action.

While your head might still be fixated on the lack of impromptu passion, your libido will soon catch up with the rhythm of it – and you might even find it thrilling. One of our spreadsheet friends told us that she can’t hear the thwack of a tennis ball against a racquet without feeling a little thrum of her own. In a world where life just seems endlessly to throw up problems, once you’ve got the cogs turning again, you might discover there’s room for creativity.

In your current situation, with a baseline of no sex for eight months, spontaneously whispering something like, “Oh look, there’s a bush behind that bus stop and we’ve got five minutes” feel, frankly, dangerous. And not in a good way. Remember that the reason you haven’t had sex recently (according to your longer letter) is because you’re both exhausted and because you haven’t wanted to have sex at the same time. It’s not through lack of desire.

Believe us, Spontaneous, yours is a good problem to have. One more thing that we will pass on (something all our couples advised us): spreadsheet sex is absolutely not the moment to discuss any other family business. Tempting as it might be to seize the opportunity to have that conversation about the boiler or a parent’s upcoming 80th birthday, it is not the time. It’s strictly eyes on the prize. We know, we know, more rules. But, dear Spontaneous, sometimes you’ve just got to schedule the wild times or they don’t happen at all.