Rachel, 34
He recently bought a food processor and has been making some amazing curries – his cooking is a big turn on for me
Jerome and I missed out on the honeymoon period. When I met him he was going through a divorce – and his wife was actually a friend of mine – so things weren’t exactly straightforward between us. Then I fell pregnant with our first child, and after she was born we didn’t have good sex for two years.
The pregnancy was unplanned: I was 27 and felt too young to be having a baby. I had an abortion, but a month after the procedure I was still experiencing morning sickness. I went to the doctor and he told me the abortion hadn’t worked: I was still pregnant. It’s difficult for me to think about that time now. I was distraught. Jerome and I tried to take the fact that I was still pregnant as a sign that we were meant to have this baby, and, looking back, I suppose we were. But I felt I had no control over my own body.
When you have a newborn, the most pleasurable physical sensation you can imagine is simply not to be touched at all. You’ve had your kid physically hanging off you for 18 hours, so all you want to do is sit completely still and have nobody lay a finger on you.
What kept us going was making the effort to get out of the house together. I felt I’d lost myself, becoming a mother so unexpectedly, and stepping out of our roles as mum and dad for an hour helped with that. Even if we weren’t being physically intimate during that time, we were falling for each other in a new way. Jerome has a laddy exterior but he’s also very sensitive. I got to know that side of him during our difficulties.
In some ways we’re experiencing that heady, lovey stage – now, six years into the relationship – because we’re so much more relaxed. These days, whether or not we’re having sex has more to do with the household rota than any drama between us: if Jerome has done the cleaning he is definitely getting some. He recently bought a food processor and has been making some amazing curries – his cooking is a big turn on for me. And if there’s white wine on the table, sex is absolutely happening.
Jerome, 39
Now we actively do things for one another in bed, rather than just take what we want out of it. It’s not just about lust, it’s about enjoyment
Rachel is a very attractive girl, but, if I’m honest, when we first got together I had an ulterior motive. There was a little voice in my head going: my wife would absolutely hate this! She had cheated on me, so I got a bit of satisfaction out of dating someone she knew. Of course, when Rachel and I fell in love, her connection with my ex stopped being fun. Things moved fast – I can pinpoint the night we conceived our first child. We’d got home a bit drunk, and been living together for less than three months.
I know exactly when it was because we weren’t even having much sex at the time. Moving in together so fast had been tricky. An abortion felt like the right decision, but then we found out the operation hadn’t worked, and we weren’t left with much of a choice. It was getting late in the day to have a second abortion, and, to me, the fact that the baby was still there started to feel like destiny.
I think parenthood was easier for me to come to terms with because I was five years older than Rachel, and, of course, I wasn’t the one carrying the child. Rachel had to go through the anxiety of giving birth for the first time, and it was forced upon her. As beautiful as it is to have your first child, that is not the way you want to do it.
For the next two years, we had sex once every six weeks at the most, and I don’t think it was particularly passionate. But even though we were rarely having sex, in other ways having a child together made the feeling between us so much more intense. Of course I am physically attracted to Rachel, but you can be physically attracted to many people. And we laugh together, but you can do that with your friends. But watching Rachel survive what we went through made it clear to me: I cannot lose this person. There aren’t that many people in the world who have her strength.
Today our sex life is better than at any other point in our relationship. It’s more mature, and we feel free to talk to each other about fantasies and fetishes. When you’re depressed (and I think we both were for a few years) you don’t really have the energy to please anyone else. But now we actively do things for one another in bed, rather than just take what we want out of it. It’s not about lust, it’s about enjoyment. That’s a nice thing. I’ve never had it with anybody else.
Would you and your partner like to share the story, anonymously, of your sex life? Email sexlives@theguardian.com with a few words about what you get up to in the bedroom
