CAN YOU GET OUT OF A SEX DROUGHT?

Anniki Sommerville’s tips on how to get your mojo back

Igrew up on a diet of romantic teen films like St Elmo’s Fire, Pretty In Pink and The Breakfast Club. My expectations of love were unrealistic. I thought passion would last for ever. Sex would always be exciting. I thought you met ‘the one’ and stayed together until you both croaked. I didn’t realise it required work.

There are plenty of positives about being in a long-term relationship – the closeness, the fact that you end up really knowing your other half (and, like those charming old couples, end up finishing one another’s sentences). My upbringing was more Tenenbaums than Waltons and I yearned for something that made me feel safe.

Twenty years into our relationship, it goes without saying that I love my partner. He’s a great parent. He’s caring and funny. I can’t imagine myself with anyone else. But we’ve been through two significant sex droughts. One lasted three years. I am shocked writing that sentence, but it feels good to get it out. The thing is, we got out of the habit, stopped talking about sex and, well... time passed. It went from a tiny elephant in the room to a large, noisy one that trumpeted in our ears. We still did a good job of ignoring it.

If you’re in the midst of a sex drought, you feel like you’re the only one. We’d had a passionate relationship in the early days – one of those couples that raced home from an evening out so we could get down to it. Booked weekend breaks and never left the room. Then things changed.

Once you start talking, you realise sex droughts are common. A couple of years ago, I went to a women’s networking event. It was the kind of thing that terrifies me – uber-successful women chit-chatting over canapés. The wine flowed, the conversation grew more candid. We discussed our relationships, then the lack of sex in our lives. I was dumbfounded to hear that many of these women weren’t having sex either. We all felt a mix of shame, guilt, low self-esteem, and then relief at the realisation that we weren’t the only ones. It was liberating to talk about it.

To snap out of a sex drought, you need to acknowledge it. It’s why I co-founded The Hotbed Collective (a sex and relationships podcast and site) with Lisa Williams and Cherry Healey. Sex is everywhere in our culture and living in a sexless relationship can make you feel out of sync.

One of the knock-on effects of not having sex was that it made me feel crap about my appearance. I was overweight as a child, and those feelings resurfaced. I couldn’t help thinking we’d stopped because of my awful body. This was amplified by the fact that I’d had a baby, and barely recognised my reflection. My partner told me I looked great and complimented me when we went out, but I didn’t believe him. I was locked in a cycle of feeling bad about myself, not having sex and feeling worse.

In fact, I think we stopped because of a lack of effort. We didn’t prioritise it. Dr Karen Gurney, clinical psychologist at The Havelock Clinic, works with couples going through sexual problems. ‘All too often we take the other person for granted,’ she says. ‘I call this “giving each other the scraps” – we give the funniest, most engaging versions of ourselves to everyone else and have nothing left.’ It felt like we were actors backstage, doing our warm-up exercises but going through the motions, saving ourselves for our star performances (our lives outside the relationship).

If you’re going through a sex drought, what steps can you take to change things? Keep in mind that there’s no miracle cure (and one ‘date night’ every three months won’t cut it), but here are some tips that might help...