Maybe I am a lucky anomaly but I’ve never understood the droves of women on on the many fertility forums and blogs who complain about sex being no longer fun while trying for a baby, and, conversely, also when not trying for a baby any more. “Sex became perfunctory,” writes one. “All the monitoring and charting and having to do it “on schedule” took all the passion out of it.” This “no fun sex while TTC” has become somewhat of a meme among the trying-to-conceive crowd. “Baby-making sex can take a toll on a relationship. Stress of being intimate for the sole purpose to create a life plays on both partners and the joy of it all can go out the window fast. My husband and I have had our fair share of what we coin ‘chore sex’ in order to have the children we do. I remember one week while trying to conceive our youngest — it was hot as heck out and we were in fertile zone and had to ‘get it done’. Sexy, right?” writes Devan McGuinness, an author of many articles for those on the baby-making road.
I don’t know how about you, ladies, but even in the midst of the toughest conception efforts, our sex was almost always fun. And yes, I did my share of obsessive-compulsive calendar molesting, checking cervical mucus, and inserting a thermometer in my nether parts every morning at 7am for half a year before we got our infertility diagnosis – heck, I even knew how high or low my cervix was (lucky to have long fingers), something not too many women know an awful lot about. Maybe our sex wasn’t New Year’s London-eye fireworks every single time, but fun it was. It was loving, sensual, and exciting, too, all the more so because we had yet another great reason to do it. Why wouldn’t it be? First of all, the window to get pregnant is relatively small. If you know anything at all about the process of ovulation and fertilization, you are aware that once released, the egg lives for less than 48 hours. Even if you add the recommended five days before ovulation and two days after, to cover all your bases, it’s still only a week. And that doesn’t even mean you have to have sex every single day. Every other day will do perfectly fine. So that’s sex three times in that week? Four times? Are you worn out yet? Relax… you can have your three week break soon. And if you get lucky and fall pregnant, imagine the bliss of not having to do this “dirty deed” for the whole of nine months and a further six weeks postpartum!
Second of all, isn’t ovulation the time it feels best to have sex? The time when our noses are super-sensitive to our partner’s skin, our mouths to his kiss, our breasts to his touch – when our whole body shuffles itself around to make us more attractive and sexy, inside and out, so neither party misses the signs that “it’s time to party?” If anything, I want to schedule my sex for when I’m ovulating, because I know my body craves it during that time and I will have many happy orgasms. Am I alone in that, too? Oh, what a chore! I conclude I must love chores.
Us women are complicated, though. When conception doesn’t take place and the reality of infertility sets in, for many women sex suddenly becomes “meaningless”, because there is no baby to create. It has failed as a mechanism of procreation and is, therefore, just a pointless relic in a couple’s relationship, on par with, say, a drunk wank. So, first we complain that baby-making sex is too “perfunctory” and goal-oriented, and later, when its biological function is compromised, that it’s pointless. I’ve read enough stories by the infertile, and as much as I empathise and sympathise, because we belong in this club, too, this particular meme – no sex post-infertility because it’s useless – makes me want to shake them by the shoulders and say: woman, how many times in your life did you have sex just for fun, compared with the times you tried to procreate? Was the first kind always “meaningless”? Bonding with your love, sharing the most intimate parts of yourself, or even just getting your rocks off in the most spectacular way on a flimsy beach towel during your gap year in Costa Rica, meaningless?
Sexuality is different from fertility, even if these two are related. For us who face fertility problems, the more we are able to separate these two in our heads, the better for our marriage or relationship. Unless you are very close to the grave, please have sex with your husband. Regularly. Otherwise you risk not only losing the dream of your baby, but your real, already-here and missing you, man. If you need counselling, then have counselling. Do your grieving, by all means – you may not feel up for anything at all for a while, and that’s fine… just don’t make the while last too long. Studies show, though (and I confirm), that a few good unprotected shags can make you feel significantly better, never mind your other half who is already probably pretty strung-out from the whole fertility struggle. I don’t think we should allow this experience, however harrowing, to push the physical connection out of our lives. Nobody makes a better point of the consequences than Michelle Weiner-Davis in her TED talk called The Sex-starved Marriage. This should, in my humble opinion, be compulsory watching for all couples, by the way, even the super-fertile ones.
So, a final thought for today: We might not be able to make a baby, but we can make a whole lot of wonderful, fun, and meaningful love, for the rest of our lives. And that is something to celebrate.
LIFE FOR THE THREE OF US 