Having Maintenance Sex
Spontaneity is great, but having a regular “sex date” is fantastic
When you read anything about sex, particularly in long-term relationships, one of the common themes you hear about is that couples “lose their spark” and their sex lives become somewhat boring and monotonous.
The predictable answer that everyone responds with is, “You need to be more spontaneous” as if the idea that suddenly the opportunity will arise for you and your partner to just find yourselves able to get at it wherever you are.
Here’s a little secret about successful long-term relationships — they’re stable and predictable.
I know, I know… It’s not a romance novel when you put it like that, but that’s the absolute reality.
By the time you’re 15 or 20 years into a relationship, you and your partner have worked each other out for the most part and you’ve very likely structured your lives together in such a way that things operate as smoothly as possible.
If you toss a couple of kids into the mix, your jobs, maybe a mortgage and some bills, then stability is actually not a “nice to have” but an actual requirement for most people.
But again, if you read anything in the zeitgeist about this type of situation, the argument will be that what I’ve just described is boring and it will lead to a negative impact on your sex life.
Frequency of Sex and Perceived Happiness
What tends to happen to couples in long-term relationships isn’t necessarily that they entirely lose interest in sex or they get bored with each other, what’s more likely going on is, life has gotten in the way, and regular, frequent sex has become a casualty.
Numerous studies over the last ten years have shown that the level of happiness in relationships has some correlation to frequency of sex.
The “magic number” seems to be about once per week — if you’re having sex with your partner every week, then the likelihood that you’ll be happy and satisfied in your relationship overall is higher.
There are a couple of oddities around that number as well.
It’s not linear — so people who have sex 0.8 times per week are 50% happier in their relationship than people who have sex 0.4 times per week.
No, it’s kind of binary — people who have sex on average once per week are appreciable happier than people who have sex less than that.
Similarly, people who have sex on average twice per week don’t seem to be any happier than people who have sex just once per week.
Having sex with your partner at least once per week seems to be some kind of relationship line in the sand.
Now… My usual caveat here because every time I write a piece where I talk about sex within the confines of a relationship, particularly on the topic of “frequency”, some people get their noses out of joint.
The research talks about averages over large population groups.
If you’re having sex with your long-term partner once a year or maybe even less than that and you’re both ridiculously happy and in love, then I’m over the moon for you — nobody is saying you’re broken or “less than”.
This article’s purpose is informational, and the folks it will most profoundly resonate with are people who wish they were having sex with their partner more regularly and they think it might help their relationship.
Introducing Maintenance Sex
So if you’re sitting there thinking to yourself that you and your partner aren’t having sex at least once a week, there’s likely one of two streams of thought going through your mind right now:
- “We’re so busy and tired at the end of the day, we’d both rather just sleep”
- “I’d really like more sex with my partner, we’ve lost our mojo a little bit”
Let me address the first point…
One of the biggest complaints you’ll hear in a long-term relationship where one partner is suddenly surprised when the other person expresses dissatisfaction is, “We’ve become roommates.”
If you’re sitting there reading this piece and thinking that your partner is tired and happy to forgo regular sex to get an extra half an hour of sleep, you’ve very likely de-prioritized that part of your relationship and projected that onto them.
Because they haven’t “really” complained then they obviously feel just like you do is probably how you’re thinking is going.
The truth is, your partner is probably sitting there with the second point running through their mind when it comes to sex — they aren’t “ok” with not having regular sex, they just think that for some reason it’s fallen by the wayside and they’re not sure how to get it back.
So if you’re in the camp where you feel like you’ve lost your way a little bit with respect to your sex life, then there are fun ways to get your mojo back.
But one simple thing you can do is to introduce what’s known as “Maintenance Sex”.
The problem that most couples have over time in a long-term relationship is just “getting the ball rolling” when it comes to sex.
You don’t really feel in the mood, it seems like it’s a lot of work, and while you know you should probably do it, you just can’t be bothered… You’ll do it tomorrow night when you go to bed a bit earlier.
This is where maintenance sex comes in.
Rather than making excuses, you just commit yourself to getting stuck in and doing it.
You’re probably sitting there thinking, “That sounds rather clinical and not very sexy — it’s more akin to taking out the trash than making love to my partner.”
This is where you’re missing the magic of maintenance sex.
What it does is it makes you and your partner communicate about sex beyond just “no” — you have to talk about it and agree that you need to do it.
Most of the time, when your sex life diminishes over time with your partner, you’ve chalked it up to “being busy” or “fatigue”, but the reality is, you’re very likely suffering from a lack of intimacy — both psychological and physical.
Talking about making time to have sex and doing it forces you to have an intimate conversation and share some of your desires.
Scheduling Maintenance Sex
This is kind of the next level up — where you and your partner make an agreement to prioritize sex to the point where you make a pact that at a certain point in time, everything else will become less important than the two of you spending time together intimately.
See how cool that sounds?
It’s important to contextualize it that way as well — you’re not turning sex into a chore like taking out the trash or doing your taxes, you’re making a commitment to your partner that you’re both going to prioritize each other above all else for a period of time.
In my relationship, we’ve always had “sex date night” — Saturday evenings, we go to bed at a reasonable hour and we have sex for 30–60 minutes.
Our “sex date night” is actually a thing that OTHER stuff gets planned around — if someone wants us to go out for dinner or we have some kind of function on, we actively plan to be home by 10:30pm so that we have time to have sex before going to sleep.
And like anything, it becomes a habit — part of our routine, so we don’t even have to think about it anymore, it just happens.
Sometimes the sex is off the charts great, and other times, it’s just kind of perfunctory — we do some foreplay, make sure there’s no orgasm gap, then we assume a position that one of us feels strongly about it that evening, and we do the doings.
When I first heard the term “maintenance sex” a few years back, I laughed and forwarded the idea onto my wife and that’s how we casually refer to it amongst each other now.
For some people, this might seem uninspired and unromantic, but there’s nothing to stop you from having all of that kind of passionate sex during any of the other six days of the week as well.
We’re still having sex two or three times a week outside of “Saturday sex date night” as well.
The key is, we’re making time for each other and it’s locked in — part of it is that we enjoy having sex with each other, but there’s also a lot to be said for the fact that we both make that commitment to each other.
Stop Making Excuses
As I said before, if you and your partner are having sex at a frequency that you’re happy with and you’ve had an open conversation and transparent conversation about it, then that’s awesome… Good job, you!
But for most people, I’d suggest that they probably haven’t had that open and transparent conversation — they’ve very likely justified what’s happening in their own mind and because it maybe hasn’t come up, they’re rationalizing it as, “Well, my partner hasn’t complained, so he probably feels like I do”.
Or worse, there’s the particularly toxic situation that when it does come up it turns into an argument that involves blaming and shaming each other, so both parties decide it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.
The truth is, a significant portion of couples in long-term relationships feel as though they’d like to be having more sex than they are, but aren’t REALLY sure what to do about it.
Step one, stop making excuses for yourself and your situation.
You’re talking about a desire to be intimate with the person you probably love the most in the whole world — that’s a good thing.
The best thing you can do is to address the situation head-on and talk about it.
Make sure that you’re not doing it from a place of “blame” or accusation, but one where you’re both exploring how you can make more of an effort to re-establish and strengthen the intimate bond in your relationship by having more sex.
And that’s where maintenance sex can really come into play — it gives you a “tool” and a way of thinking about sex differently.
You stop falling into the Hollywood notion of lust-filled spontaneous lovemaking where you’re ripping each other’s clothes off, and refocus your energy on an achievable thing you can do by making a commitment to each other to have more sex on a regular basis.
And if you have to schedule regular “sex date nights” to make that happen, then so be it, your relationship is worth it.
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