"We Traded Scheduled Sex For More Flirting, & It Changed Everything”
A mom just like us — comparing prices at the grocery store, cheering at the baseball field three times a week, running PTA meetings — shares her sex story, no matter how “boring” or “shocking” it may be.
This story is an “as told to” and anonymous. The mom in this story is a mother of two, in her 30s, living in the PNW.
In every relationship I’ve ever had, I’ve been hyper aware of the amount of sex I was having. I was always worried I wasn’t having enough, and when I married my husband, I decided scheduled sex was going to be the way we kept our spark alive. Sex like clockwork, twice a week.
At the beginning of our marriage, that wasn’t hard to do. We had way more sex than that, actually — but once we had our two kids, our sex life took a serious nosedive. And even though I really wanted us to maintain our twice-a-week schedule, it dipped to just once a week for months before falling to just twice a month.
When our youngest was 2, I told my husband we needed to get our sex life “back on track.” He agreed, and we decided to make sure we had at least one date night a week (we were lucky enough to have grandparents to take the kids for the night) so we could have sex, and then we picked another night where we went to bed right after the kids and did it.
And it... did not work.
It’s not that we couldn’t keep up with the schedule, because we did. But the connection I wanted and the intimacy I wanted to keep in our marriage weren’t there.
So we started flirting.
It wasn’t until I began intentionally flirting with my husband — sending him sexy texts during the day, whispering in his ear, kissing him every time I walked past him in the house — that I realized how much we hadn’t been doing it. And how much I missed it! It’s one thing to make sure you’re having physical sex often enough, but without the build-up and the flirting and the mental foreplay, it really doesn’t matter.
It was like we didn’t need the act of sex as much as we thought; we just needed the flirting. Plus, all the flirting makes me feel confident and good about myself, too, and that’s always a bonus.
Sometimes I send a sexy photo. We both work from home, so other times I’ll just come up to him while he’s working and rub his neck for a little bit and breathe in his ear. We cook dinner together and touch each other a lot more, and we sit on the couch for TV right up next to each other, holding hands. We started making out more, even if it doesn’t lead to anything else, and sending dirty texts about what we want to do to each other... even if we don’t have the time or energy to do it.
We stopped the scheduled sex, which means we’re only having sex once a week or once every 10 days or whatever — but it’s good sex. It’s so much better than it was before.
I feel like I can’t get enough of my husband now, and I feel closer to him. All we needed was more intentional flirting and intimacy. For a tired mom of two, that feels like an extreme win.
