On Coronation Street, sex therapist Trina is helping Tim and Sally Metcalfe put the oomph back into their relationship.
And in real life, more couples than ever are seeking expert help to make sure they are living their best sex lives.
Relate counsellor and therapist Peter Saddington, who works in the Midlands, says: “Sex therapy has always been a busy service.
“The stigma has become reduced, so some couples sign up not with a dysfunction, but because they recognise, like the couple on Coronation Street, that sex could be better.
“People say, ‘Every time I look at the television everyone’s having great sex and it looks dead easy for them – and I want a bit of that’.
“More people are realising sex isn’t a taboo subject and they can go and talk about it.”
Well, perhaps you are not ready to make an appointment quite yet.
So here Peter shares his expert tips for improving sex in mid and later life...
Experiment
Treat working on your sex life as something fun and an experiment. If you’re anxious and believe it’s very serious and it’s got to be perfect, you’re going to fail. It has to be fun.
Shower together
If you’ve not been sexual for a long time and feel a bit more body conscious, maybe one of the first steps is having a bath or shower together. There’s an agreement there will be no sex so it takes the pressure off. Just washing each other means we get used to the idea of the other person being naked and close to us. We get used to the fact our bodies are just as they are. If you’re really to happy with your body you’ve either got to do something about it or just accept it.
Go naked
Many couples ask how to keep a relationship fresh when you’ve lived together for all this time? Two things I might think about: get used to having one or two nights a week when you go to bed naked. Get used to lying next to, or having a cuddle, with our naked partner. Get used to the feel, the sense of the other person’s skin against skin.
Special night
Plan a special night when you both get dressed up in what makes you feel special. Arrange a time to meet in your house, have a drink, sit down and each take ten minutes to talk about all the things you can remember on the first night you met. Then, if you’re comfortable, throw a dice and whoever gets the highest score stands up, invites their partner to stand up, and they’re going to undress them slowly and carefully and talk about what they enjoy about their partner’s body. Then the other does the same for their partner.
Remember
Start off by going back to the beginning. What can you remember? What were the things you enjoyed? What did you notice about that person - and why did you pick that person out of anybody else? What was special about them?
Communicate
Learn to communicate. Find out for yourself first about what you like when it comes to sex, then share it with your partner. As you start getting older and haven’t got the same pressures in life, many people feel more confident about being able to do things or say things. If you feel sex isn’t working as well as you want it to, introduce the idea to your partner. You could say, ‘I saw this couple on television who are doing something about it and it made me think, why don’t we do something about it - because I think our sex life could be even better than it is?’
Research
Once you’ve made the decision that sex could be better, start doing a bit of research. There are some fantastic YouTube talks by experts like Emily Nagoski or Esther Perel and they talk perfectly normally about the subject of sex. They show no images whatsoever - they just talk about it. Hearing someone else talk about sex and realising the world didn’t suddenly end helps you start building up a bit of confidence to talk about it.
Try this game..
I encourage couples to perhaps have a drink, plan a Friday night and try a game. Take a large piece of paper and both write down as many words you can think of that mean ‘sex’ or body parts. The older you are the more inhibited you might be, so treating it as a laugh and having a drink before you do it means it might becomes fun, silly and make you giggle. It takes away all the anxiety, all the pressure about talking about sex.
Maybe you have never tried different positions or had sex anywhere apart from in their bed. So start talking about things you’ve seen, read or heard about sex.
The second game you can play is writing the sex things you’ve heard that might be fun, strange, or you don’t know what it means.
For the third game, look at the lists and each pick the top ten things that you’d like to try. Cut the list up to individual slips, then crumple each one in to a little ball. Find a nice jar to hold all these little bits of paper. Then say: “Next Friday we’re going to have a drink and at 7pm we’re each of us going to put our hands in the jar, pull out a piece of paper and whatever’s on it we’re going to have a go.”
It has to be on the understanding that it’s an experiment so might go dreadfully wrong - but what’s the worst that’ll happen? You’ll have a laugh about it.
The following Friday, put your hand in the jar and pick out whatever piece of paper comes out. Either have a dice ready and whoever rolls the highest score goes first. Or one person says they want to go first.
Set things up to give you a chance to succeed. Make sure you’re not expecting any calls, put your phones away, lock the door, make sure the children are occupied or not coming home and have a shower. Then you each decide where you’re going to do it and how.
If you have the bit of paper you’re the one in charge, you set the rules. The other person has to go along with whatever you suggest but if one of you feels uncomfortable it’s their right to say stop. The other person has to respect that and not interpret it as rejection.
The rule of experiment is that, because it’s something new, you might not like it so each of you have the right to say ‘I don’t feel comfortable’ or ‘can we just stop?’. But agree either then, an hour later or the next day to talk about what happened to get you to a point where you said no. You have to talk it through so you both understand what’s going on rather than thinking, ‘is it something I did?’
Let’s say you chose to have sex downstairs rather than in the bedroom. You march downstairs and you say, ‘Do you want to take your clothes off or do you want me to undress you?’. Talk through how you want to do it and try doing it. Afterwards, however it goes - good, bad or indifferent - spend half an hour lying down, cuddling each other and after 15 minutes say what you really enjoyed. Don’t say what you didn’t enjoy or didn’t like, just what you enjoyed. Say whether you would like to do it again - and that’s it. You can put your hand in the jar every week.
Some couples might like to take the jar away with them to a hotel because it feels safer for them to do it totally away from their normal environment. That’s an enhancement on the game.
After writing your top ten things you might like, try writing your top ten fantasies. Maybe you’d like your partner to wear different underwear or play a role. When you pick out the paper, share with your partner what that fantasy’s about. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to do it, just describe it. Out of that comes ideas of things that you do want to incorporate as you start to develop your sexual relationship.
