Yahoo Lifestyle “I Realised That Novelty Wears Off, But Great Sex Can Last Forever”
Utterly consumed by one another, the beautiful young couple sitting across from me on the train are oblivious to everyone around them. They’re 20-somethings, with skin like whipped cream; their tangled limbs unencumbered by the heaviness of adult responsibility.
They’re flirting, and it’s obvious that although they’re well acquainted with one another’s bodies, they don’t know each other that well. They think they’re having the best sex of their lives or at least that good sex – the sort that can change your life – didn’t exist until they discovered it. They’re wrong.
Not so very long ago, I was that girl. I thought the hot, urgent taste of novelty – of having sex with men I’d only known a short time before moving on – was the definition of great sex. For sex to be exciting, let alone life-changing, it had to be with someone I didn’t know, someone new who could make me feel, in that moment, that I was a different person. Monogamy, for me, was something older people did when they’d given up on really living life and wanted to “settle down”.
I had tried monogamy. I was married at 24, but divorced by 27, and while the experience gave me two amazing children I’d happily die for, it didn’t leave me with a burning desire to be a one-man-woman again, ever.
Because I had children to love and support, I kept my romantic life entirely separate. Sex was fast and furtive, snatched in moments when I wasn’t being a mother or working my socks off to support those children. It was exciting, and it made me feel powerful and in control at a time when other certainties, like marriage and commitment, had fallen apart. I couldn’t have imagined that power and control were something I’d later trade, happily, for the sexual connection real love gave me.
But five years ago to this month, I went for a drink with an acquaintance from university. He’d messaged me on Facebook because he had moved into my area. I almost refused but fate and timing are funny things. We talked and talked, and across the pub table I felt a crackle of a connection. I didn’t want the evening to end. For three months the only thing we didn’t do was have sex.
This was a departure from past form for me. Sex, usually, came shortly after the talking and before anything else. Perhaps, that’s why, ultimately, sex with all of those different men was unsatisfactory. Sure, it was hot. It was novel, naughty, and rude. But it wasn’t life-changing because it wasn’t love.
I fell in love with him before I slept with him. My life changed, and my conception of what defines “good sex” changed completely too. Now it’s not about novelty. It’s about absolute familiarity and the deepest kind of love. It’s about the strange, thrilling pleasure of giving myself to one man – the same man – again and again.
This sex doesn’t make me want to escape myself, as it did in the past, but rediscover who we are as a couple in an infinite number of different ways. It’s the most exciting journey I can imagine taking, and it’s my luck that it’s one I’ll be on for the rest of my life, because that acquaintance is now my husband. Life-changing? You bet.
RELATED:
"The Sex That Changed My Life" Pt. 1
