The Camouflage of Sex
They say when you’re married, sex, it’s frequency, declines. Over time relationships shift and change and sex can often take a back seat, or disappear entirely. The Ex and I bucked this trend.
When we first met she was still a virgin, odd as that seemed to me at the time in my late 20’s. That’s not to say she had not engaged with other guys, she had, just never ‘gone all the way’. I am not going to deny that her lack of hesitation in giving me handjobs was not a turn on; in fact, I was more hesitant cumming in front of her at the start than she was getting my pants off. After a few months though, one afternoon we took the extra step and before long we moved in together and a few years after, got married.
Sex, though not lacking in frequency, was difficult at the beginning. While she had no difficulty in making me cum, I could not say the same for the reverse. As I discovered, while not shy about her body, she had no connection with her own sexuality, which of course made it difficult to tell me what she wanted, or how to get there; that she was completely silent made matters only more difficult… was I doing it right or not? I eventually resorted to buying some books for us, so we could explore ‘her’ together, but it was not until she relaxed enough to let me go down on her that we achieved touchdown — while she still did not utter a sound, it was pretty obvious that did the trick. When she started to reciprocate, the flood gates opened and our sex life took on a momentum of it’s own that simply kept going. We enjoyed the relatively uninhibited physicality of one another, pure and simple.
And so it went.
But sex acts like a camouflage, hiding other issues behind a fog of hormones and physical sensations. As is well documented, sex, orgasm, releases chemicals into the brain that create a feel good factor that helps bond a couple. At the same time though, those same chemicals, that bonding, especially when released two to three times a week for years, overshadows other issues.
And there were other issues.
While as a couple we were doing ‘well’, it turned out that she had deeper emotional issues, issues she was good at covering and that were further masked by the camouflage of sex. The signs were always there, surfacing once or twice, but as the fog deepened I lost sight of them. In retrospect I can’t see how I managed that, the issues were as large as a ships! So while ‘we’ continued forward, seemingly happy as clams, what was boiling away under her surface continued to do so.
Then we had our child. And for the first time in four years, sex stopped.
And everything went to pot.
With the stress of everything going on (and there was a lot going on), the sex stopped and the fog it created started to lift. Slowly at first, the cracks started to appear, but as the year went on everything came to the fore and the wall came crashing down. Everything everyone saw, but never mentioned, materialised in front of me as the protective cushion of sex no longer was there. She was (and remains) a complete emotional basket case, and in a scenario where sex had been used as a substitute for talking about deeper things, after so many years we had no other channel of ‘connected’ communication.
And the marriage imploded.
The person I have experienced since is the one literally all our friends saw. That all of them over time told me what they thought of her was small consolation. How I came to be so invested in someone who plainly is not a likeable individual by pretty much everyone’s standards, showed me the power sex can have.
My relationship today is almost the exact opposite of the one I had with her, and I have learnt other things in regards to the role sex plays in a healthy relationship. But what I now know is that sex, frequent, seemingly healthy sex, can be anything but. Unless you can communicate in a clear, unhindered voice, jamming one another’s bits into one another, simply bathes the room in a fog that does a pretty stellar job in hiding everything else going on.
And we all knows what happens on freeways in heavy fog….
I’m a guy, writing about….sex (I know, right?), and the travel’s of life.
