I like to think the world has moved on since I started sex blogging nearly fifteen years ago, but there are some terrible ideas that still won’t die. One of these is the false belief that if you’re in a monogamous relationship, you owe your partner a certain amount of sex to prevent them from straying. If you’re busy/tired/overworked? Just make a sex schedule! Set aside a specific time and make yourself do it, even if you aren’t in the mood. While I’m all up for scheduling quality time or date nights, I find the idea of ‘scheduled sex’ pretty grim. Because even if you love the person who wants it, the fact remains that you never have to have sex if you don’t want to.
The article that prompted this post was published on the BBC a couple of weeks ago. Sex schedules and curiosity: how I keep my relationship alive details the life of an author, Nell Frizzell, and explains the challenges she has maintaining an active sex life with her husband. Nell apparently swears by a ‘sex schedule’, and a psychologist agrees that this is a very good thing.
Hmm.
Wait for the punchline…
There’s a game people play with those ‘I bought a house in my twenties’ articles: when the headline screams ‘here’s how I got on the housing ladder!’, you have to see how far you get through the piece before they mention ‘a well-timed inheritance’ or ‘help from Mum and Dad’. I play a similar game on articles featuring straight couples who talk about ‘scheduling sex’, but this time I’m looking for hints about unequal division of household labour.
And oh look here we go! Three sentences in:
…after 10 years with her partner and two young children, [Nell] admits she doesn’t have as much time or energy for her husband as she once did… “I know we’re told to focus on quality time, physical touch and gaze into each other’s eyes lovingly but actually I am shouting at my husband to turn the eggs off.” … Her time, body and attention are being pulled in every direction – she’s raising children, caring for elderly parents, running the home and working all at the same time…
I have a huge amount of sympathy for Nell, this sounds exhausting. I wouldn’t feel sexy in this context either. What absolutely floors me though is that the writer of this piece is happy to skip directly from ‘she’s exhausted’ to ‘here’s how she keeps her husband happy!’ without a single mention of his workload – even in passing. It’s possible he’s contributing, but nowhere in the article is this addressed.
I wish this weren’t so predictable, but it is. As is the inevitable ‘solution’ that’s given to the ‘problem’ of someone not being constantly horny when she’s juggling children, work, elderly parents and running the home: scheduling sex. Broadly this means ‘put a sex date in your calendar and stick to it, even if you don’t feel like shagging at the time’.
I suspect many couples will tell me that ‘scheduled sex’ doesn’t mean you have to do it, and of course it doesn’t. But I maintain that scheduling sex specifically – as opposed to a date night or quality time – adds a level of pressure that does not sit well with enthusiastic consent.
I am grateful to the fabulous Petra Boynton for sharing this article on BlueSky. Dr Petra used to run an agony aunt column in the Telegraph and is thoughtful and knowledgeable about sex and relationships. In response to this piece going online, she pointed out:
“Since nothing’s changed in relationships advice over the past couple of decades let’s just remember that if you’re busy, exhausted and have small children then compulsory date nights and sex become a chore not a pleasure. Childcare + housework + being taken for granted is often the underlying issue”
I couldn’t agree more. And I think the author of the BBC piece could have done readers – and Nell – a valuable service if she’d pursued this issue rather than handing over to the psychotherapist Susanna Abse. Abse not only agrees that scheduling sex is a good idea, she goes one further, explaining that if you don’t maintain regular intimacy and your partner has an affair, it’s basically your fault (!). From the article:
Abse agrees with that practical approach and says if you’re not having sex “you have to recognise the risk in that” if you’re both not happy with the arrangement as “affairs often arise from unsatisfied needs”.
Holy fuck.
Sit down somewhere with plenty of space, please, we’re going to unpack the shit out of this.
You never have to have sex if you don’t want to
Remember the way you felt when you first saw the title of this blog post. You probably thought I was stating the obvious, right? You always have a right to say ‘no’ to sex, no matter who is asking or why. Yes, there are often pressures we’re put under to have sex (by ourselves as well as other people), and it can sometimes be hard to overcome these pressures and give a firm, clear ‘no’. But we all know that saying ‘no’ is allowed and having our ‘no’ respected is important in order to maintain our sense of safety and self.
Obvious. Simple. Basic.
Can I ask why that all goes out the window when we’re talking about sex in a long-term relationship? Usually, let’s be honest, a straight relationship. One in which the woman is caring for children and cooking and cleaning and keeping all of life’s plates spinning at once while her husband’s contribution… is deemed irrelevant.
It’s almost as if women’s right to say ‘no’ – our bodily autonomy – is seen as something that should be set aside along with everything else when we become wives and mothers. On top of the expectation that we’ll keep a clean home and raise children and earn money of our own and care for elderly parents, our ‘duty’ now also extends to making sure our partners do not cheat. We must take pre-emptive accountability for their moral failings and mistakes because… well… perhaps this guy wouldn’t feel compelled to make mistakes if we’d only suck him off every once in a while!
Our male partners are entitled to happiness, even if that comes at the expense of our own.
I want to distance this from Nell and her husband because it feels unfair to use an identifiable couple as the sole basis for this rant. As I say, it’s possible that he does his fair share of the household labour. Maybe this is just a problem of oblivious framing on the part of the article writer, who thought to mention how much Nell has on her plate but completely ignore what her husband might have going on. If I were him I’d be gutted to see my face on the BBC, in an article about how my wife feels she has to schedule sex, without the author including any mention of how I work to ensure an equal burden of caring, cooking, cleaning and other important jobs. But whatever. Let’s leave them aside. There’s no need to make an example of anyone because I see this particular issue all the time.
Why won’t my exhausted wife fuck me?
A few years ago, in my blog comments, a man came to ask me how he could get his wife to have more kinky sex with him. He explained that he’d bought loads of fun sex toys, yet nothing ever got used more than once and he found himself frustrated. He also mentioned in the comment that they had two young children, and perhaps it was this that was causing his wife to feel unsexy. He asked if I would recommend he start looking elsewhere to get his sexual needs met and honestly, to this day I am still frustrated with myself for how gentle my answer was. These days I think I’d be harsher. I would still give the same advice, though:
“For the next month, do your partner’s work.”
I mean it. If you’re in a relationship with someone who is too tired/busy/stressed to have sex with you, first spend a week helping with every single thing you see them doing: packed lunches for the children, getting up in the middle of the night, changing bedsheets, cooking dinner, shopping, school runs, planning family outings, arranging babysitters, you get the idea. While you’re doing it, write down everything your partner does. Every! Single! Thing! In enough detail that you can replicate it later without having to ask them to coach you through every step. If this means learning how to use the washing machine or making extensive notes about how much milk and bread you need to buy on the weekly shop, do that. If it means memorising the names of your children’s friends’ parents, and their after-school club schedules, do that too. Then, for the next month, you’re going to take over and do everything your partner would otherwise do. Without being reminded that these tasks need to happen or guided in how they need to be done. Set alarms, make notes, get on with it. Don’t just ‘help out’, take responsibility.
While you’re doing all of that, perhaps your partner will have time to take a bath or watch some porn or go to the gym or read a book or have their own horny little daydreams. Maybe they won’t. Either way, you’ll have a far better insight into what it feels like from their perspective – to try and feel sexy when you’ve spent all day with kids hanging off you, work coming out of your ears, one hand stirring a pan of pasta sauce while your phone’s in the other as you call broadband companies to switch contracts so you don’t get overcharged, whatever it might be.
At the end of that month, ask yourself where your sex drive is at, and be honest. How hot do you feel? If someone said to you…
“It’s sex night, darling. You should get naked and pleasure me, otherwise I might have an affair.”
…how would you feel?
[Note: there will be men itching to reply to this to tell me they already do their fair share. Great! In that case you won’t mind doing this little experiment, will you? If you’re really being honest that your share is ‘fair’, and the experiment bears this out, then congratulations, feel free to bow out and leave this discussion to the rest of us. You do not need to leap in to be the sacrificial edge case, taking bullets for your bros who contribute far less than you do.]
I get it, it’s hard. It’s uncomfortable. It’s exhausting. It’s also upsetting to hear. If you’re not pulling your weight in the household right now, being ordered to do your fair share might sound a bit grim and nagging, but consider this… it is nothing compared to how grim it is to be told that you ‘have’ to have sex!
It is equally horrible to suggest that men compel themselves to have sex when they don’t want to, incidentally. The fact that you never have to have sex if you don’t want to is true regardless of gender. But it’s rarely ever men who are expected to submit to ‘scheduled’ sex – have you noticed that? In advice articles like the BBC one, it’s nearly always a woman who is expected to jump-start her own libido to keep her partner happy. Occasionally this trope rings out from reddit AITA posts where a woman asks something like: “I had a baby three months’ ago and I don’t think I can have sex with my husband even though he’s clearly desperate for it – I’m exhausted and up all night, he’s working so needs 8 hours of sleep. He can’t cook or clean because I’m a stay at home mum so that’s my job. For some reason I don’t have the energy to paint on a smile while he humps away at my broken, exhausted vagina. Am I The Asshole?”.
No, my love. You are not the asshole. And you do not have to schedule sex with your husband if you’re frantically busy and tired. You never have to have sex if you don’t want to.
Again, it sounds so silly to say it aloud!
You never have to have sex if you don’t want to.
Yet it’s also, clearly, still necessary.
But what if he cheats??
Here’s the thing: we are so used to seeing this problem framed in one way that it sometimes feels like there’s only one ‘correct’ solution. If your husband doesn’t get his sexual needs met with you, he’ll get them met somewhere else, ergo you should fulfil his sexual needs. If you don’t fulfil his sexual needs, well… you knew what would happen! It’s probably at least a little bit your fault.
But let’s reframe this. This time we’re going to put the core principle front and centre: you never have to have sex if you don’t want to.
“My husband wants sex, but I am too tired and busy to want it.”
How about instead of encouraging/instructing/pressuring you to have sex you don’t want, we instead encourage/instruct/pressure your husband to make it so you are less busy and tired?
Or to put it another way, instead of pressuring you to do it when you don’t want to, we explain that it’s his responsibility to spark that want.
To my mind, no one in this situation is justified in ‘getting their sexual needs met elsewhere’ unless and until they have tried the option above: swapping workloads. There are other options too, of course, like relationship counselling or consensual nonmonogamy if that’s something you’re both interested in (and interested in outside the framework of one of you being busy and tired – lazy partners, please do not use this article as an excuse to try and force your other half to let you do polyamory while they continue to take care of the kids). There is also – sorry to sound so fucking obvious – the option for the unsatisfied partner to leave. It’s so weird to me that ‘cheat!’ is a solution offered long before suggesting ‘walk away’. If you’re not getting your needs met in a relationship, the answer is not to deceive your partner and break the terms you’ve agreed upon… surely ‘ending the relationship’ is the more morally acceptable thing to do?
Maybe I’m weird here. Whatever. There are plenty of options to consider if you’re unsatisfied with the amount of sex you’re having in a monogamous relationship, but if you’re the guy in a straight couple – especially one with kids – the workload discrepancy issue is so common you’d be a fool not to tackle it first.
This is not a rhetorical device, it’s a genuine suggestion
Frustrated husbands, I beg you to give it a go. Take note of every single thing your other half does, then do all those yourself. For at least month. It is not enough to give your partner a ‘night off’ or let them know you’ll be ‘babysitting’ the kids next Tuesday, especially if you expect payment in the form of an instant blow job the second she’s caught her breath. These patterns are deeply ingrained, as is exhaustion, and they take a lot of time to undo.
A month minimum. Enough time for it to bed in. Not just for her, but your family too. If your wife is the primary caregiver, it will take time to teach your children that it’s OK to come running to you instead if they need antiseptic for a scraped knee or want a comforting cuddle before bedtime. It will take time to show the school that they can call or text you instead of her if the kids need picking up at midday because they puked in the changing rooms after P.E. class. Time to show friends that you’ll be the one cooking if they come round for dinner on Friday. It won’t happen overnight, it takes commitment, but it’s worth it: show others in your life that your wife is not the manager of your lives, you’re taking an active role too.
Brace yourself, because the next paragraph is gonna be blunt:
Not only will it take more than one four-hour ‘break’ from caregiving to help your wife reconnect with her sexual side, it will take even longer to rekindle the spark she used to feel for you. If, for the last God-knows-how-long, you haven’t been contributing in a meaningful, adult way then you’ll likely have slipped into being perceived as either an extra child or at least someone child-adjacent. And I doubt your wife finds children sexually attractive.
For at least a month, carry the load.
When the time is up, take note of how your wife looks and feels. Does she seem less tired? Is she perhaps more up for coming on a date night with you? Take note of how you feel as well – are you as horny when you don’t have spare time and energy to spend nurturing your own fantasies? Has the balance shifted now that you have less time and she has more? How do you feel towards her, if you’re the one doing all the work while she’s got her feet up?
Have an open and honest conversation about it. Admit to the areas you might have been falling down. Discuss how to make sure you both have time for yourselves in future, as well as how you can reconnect sexually – as a pair of grown adults who function as a team.
Not long after the BBC article went live, I spotted this gem from Fesshole – where people share anonymous ‘confessions’. Someone wrote in to say:
“My wife prefers us to not plan sex so now I meticulously plan every detail so that we end up in situations where we “spontaneously” do it”
This person clearly thought they were being sneaky for arranging things so that their wife would want to have sex with them at particular moments. They don’t mention what they did but I imagine it involved at least a bit of schedule-wrangling, life-admin, maybe clearing some chores off her plate so she had time to get excited. Perhaps planning a nice meal out or an activity the pair of them could do together that would remind them why they’re in love.
That isn’t sneaky! That’s exactly how this should work! Scheduling sex and then compelling your partner to tick it off like a ‘chore’ is self-serving and coercive. But making plans that help your partner get into a relaxed, happy and horny mood, so they want to spontaneously bang you?
That sounds like seduction to me!
So you’re saying if I give my wife a month off, she’ll fuck me?
NO. I am NOT saying that. Because remember the golden rule: you never have to have sex if you don’t want to! Even if you do everything your wife does for a month, and you do it well and with care, she still doesn’t have to fuck you! You don’t have to fuck her either!
This month will probably give your wife more time and energy. It’s possible she’ll use some of that to nurture her own fantasies and desires, and remember that she can be a sexual being, not just an unpaid servant or ‘Mum’. She might want to spend some of her bonus energy riding you like you owe her money. But ‘possible’ is not a guarantee, because:
- ‘one month’ is actually not that long if she’s spent years and years doing this, and
- because – sing it with me – there is no way to ‘guarantee’ that someone will provide you with sex.
There is nothing you can do to ensure you’ll get sex – even from your wife. While I genuinely love the idea of scheduling in date nights and fun couples activities if you want to reconnect, and I think that making time for each other is a powerfully good thing, there’s something grim going on when an actual psychologist suggests that couples create a sex schedule in case one of them cheats. The implication, for some readers, will be this:
Once sex is on the schedule, your partner can’t (or shouldn’t) say no.
I don’t want to fuck anyone who doesn’t want to fuck me!
I’m broadly monogamous. I’m also a very sexual person with a probably-higher-than-average libido. I can count on the fingers of one hand (OK, one finger) the number of men I’ve been with who matched me in terms of sexual energy. All the rest of my relationships have included many many nights when I wanted to fuck and the other person didn’t. If I had been given the opportunity to ‘schedule’ sex on a particular night and know my partner would feel compelled to give it a go, fucking would be the last thing I’d actually want to do.
Because… call me crazy… but I don’t want to fuck someone who doesn’t want to fuck me!
It is a gigantic turn-off! It is not appealing! I cannot get horny for someone who is not horny for me! It squicks me out that so many people apparently can! I realise that the point is not to ‘force’ your partner to have sex on the night you have scheduled, but holy shit the way it is discussed sometimes involves a level of pressure that would instantly dry up my vagina, no matter which side of the libido divide I was on.
Remember how in her quote for the original piece, psychologist Susanna Abse says that if you don’t make time for sex “you have to recognise the risk” that your partner might cheat on you? On what planet is it OK to put this kind of pressure on somebody in order to get them naked?!
If you want to fuck your partner, the solution is not to scare them into believing that bad things will happen if they don’t do it. We call this coercion, and it’s grim. If you want to fuck your partner, you need to tempt them into doing it by … you know … treating them well! By making sure their needs are met, putting on some nice tight underpants that show off your bulge…whacking on some Barry White… whatever floats their boat.
Your partner never has to have sex if they don’t want to. Don’t try to make them have sex, work out how you can spark their want.
Again, to stress, no shade on Nell or her husband here. In the original BBC piece, Nell explains that “It might feel administrative to say ‘this is when we’ll have sex’ but with small children, it’s absolutely key and it’s something to look forward to.” which is definitely at the healthier end of attitudes towards sex schedules. What’s more, if a sex schedule is initiated by the person who usually doesn’t want to have sex, because they feel like they might be able to get in the mood if they can ‘look forward’ to it, I’m certainly not going to tell them how to live their life.
But while Nell is there making sure she wraps her answers in clear consent, the psychologist goes a fair bit further by telling the reader that once sex has been scheduled you should “allow yourself to be persuadable”.
Nope.
I don’t want a partner who’s ‘persuadable’! I want one who is genuinely excited about shagging me!
If your partner doesn’t want to have sex with you right now, your solution shouldn’t be to guilt-trip, nag, cajole, schedule, compel or browbeat them into doing it anyway. Your goal should be to figure out why they don’t want it and then do your best to rekindle that want.
We don’t owe anyone sex. Not even our long-term partners.
Not even if we’re monogamous.
And certainly not just because it’s a fucking Wednesday.