they needed to grieve

 They’d been married over 10 years at this point – a beautiful couple with 2 darling kids, an eight-year-old boy who lived to play Minecraft and a girl in kindergarten who couldn’t wait to get outside to the creek when she woke up in the morning. They knew they were very lucky to have such a darling family and they were grateful.

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They were great parents who worked hard – at their respective jobs, doing all the house stuff, grilling the kids on their spelling words and raising money for the PTO.
 
They’d met through friends, which was odd because nobody else met that way anymore. Their friends had all met on Match or Hinge or Tinder, but not these two. These two managed to find their person the old-fashioned way. They ran into each other at the birthday party for a mutual friend, got to chatting, took notice. Eventually, she told him she was into him, but it was a hot minute before he believed her.
 
They loved each other. Back then, when they first met, they were very much in love. They told anyone who would listen that they were soul mates. And usually, they meant it.
 
Almost everything was perfect.
Except sex.
It was zero.
 
Well, not quite zero. They did it maybe once every 6 or 7 weeks. This meant that even though they had what everyone said was The Best Relationship Ever, their relationship was technically sexless.
 
A sexless marriage is defined as a marriage with less than 10 episodes of sex in a 12-month period.
 
It was their little secret. And it scared them. They both recognized the problem. It wasn’t hard to realize that the passion they’d once shared was long gone.
 
There were lots of reasons this had happened – too many really. She’d been kind of insecure about her body back then even though he’d loved it. He was inexperienced when they first started making love and lacked the confident gentleness that she needed to let go. They never had privacy for lovemaking in their tiny apartment with the paper-thin walls.
 
He wanted more sex. She wanted sex but not the kind she’d been getting. It was awkward. It was sometimes painful for her. It was too fast but not fast enough (because if she was honest, she hated every minute and wanted it to be over as quickly as possible).
 
 
When these two hard working, loving people first met and eventually got married, they had no idea that sex would ever be challenging. They expected sex to be what sex therapist Vanessa Marin calls “The Fucking Fairy Tale” - the lie you were sold by the media, Hollywood and even your best friend during that talk you had in the car after a glass of wine at book club.
 
 Real sex (in real life) is a whole lot harder than it looks. When it doesn’t go as planned (which is a whole lot of the time, to be honest), you need to go through a grieving process.
 
When they came to my practice for The Quickie they were disconnected and upset.
During the first few sessions of our work together in The Quickie and even later during Real Intimacy, I helped them begin to grieve what never really happened, and what used to happen but had now died. I helped them identify barriers to connection in their sex life. We made a plan together so that they could start connecting in pleasure and love.
 
It’s very important to get help with this kind of thing. And not just the help most couples’ counselors might give you. You need the help of someone who has specific sexual expertise.
 
Whether you work with me, with someone else, or DIY it – you need a plan. This stuff doesn’t get better on its own.
 
Xoxo
 
Jane
 
PS: As of right now, I have a few spots open in The Quickie. It’s a four-week one-on-one experience with me in person or online. Read about it here. If it’s all booked out when you click through, get on the waitlist by clicking here.