"If you don't like it we don't have to see them again," my husband insisted for the umpteenth time.
We were lying in bed after a pleasant but somewhat unsatisfying Sunday evening lovemaking session.
"We're doing well but we can't take it for granted," he continued. "You said yourself that you were ready to try something a bit edgier, didn't you? You agreed we could do with a breath of fresh air in our sex life, didn't you?"
"I suppose so," I replied uncertainly.
"Right! So let's just try it once and see how it goes," Paul cajoled.
It was the weekend before the events of this story took place and I was lying in the semi darkness of our marital bedroom frowning. At forty, I was a year younger than Paul, my good-looking husband and the father of our two young children who had just rolled off my leaking body and was lying alongside me on the rumpled sheet.
"We mustn't lose the momentum, must we?" he continued, kissing me on the cheek and beginning to stroke my tummy. "Having come so far, we don't want to slip back to the boring, stale days, do we?"
I sighed resignedly.
"I've said I'll try it and I meant it. Just don't expect me to be as enthusiastic as you; it's your fantasy after all, not mine. And I'm not promising to do anything with them, okay?"
"Great," my husband smirked as he lay back and turned off the bedside light. "You'll love it, Pam. I know it!"
***
Paul and I had been together for nearly twenty years and had been married for fifteen of them. In our early years together when I had been much more daring, our sex life had been wild, imaginative and very frequent. For several years we had experimented with positons, locations and even a few pleasurable perversions but as the kids had arrived and began to dominate my life; as I had become more tired and my figure had lost its youthful, gym-toned shape, my adventurous spirit had gradually reduced too.
Eventually, like so many married couples, we had settled into a boring, unadventurous routine that satisfied neither of us and had consequently lost most of its appeal.
As the frequency and intensity of our lovemaking slowed, Paul seemend to take up every form of manly passtime imaginable; DIY, car maintenance, team sports, going to football matches and lots of late night working, all of which were activities he did without me.
As a result, I began to feel that he had lost interest in me, that he no longer found me interesting or attractive. This slowed brought our unreliable sex life to a complete halt. I felt unloved and unwanted by my husband; he felt sexually abandoned by me.
It was a recipe for disaster and soon started to interfere with our relationship. Now of course I know that most couples go through something like this at some time but at the time it felt as if my world was ending. There were long silences, occasional rows and jealousies on both sides until, after a particularly bitter and spiteful row - fortunately not in front of the children - during which he called me a frigid bitch and I accused him of having an affair with a colleague from work, we decided to take the advice contained in so many of my women's magazines and had visited a relationship counsellor for help.
I have to say, the woman was a genius; by the end of the very first session she had expressed the problem in two sentences.
'Men need to have sex to feel loved. Women need to feel loved to have sex'.
According to the counsellor, by rejecting Paul sexually I was making him feel less than a man. Many men in the same circumstancesmight look to other women to help him recover some of thier confidence. Paul assured me he had not yet done this and I believed him; instead he had subconsciously been driven to assert his masculinity in other ways, hence all the stereotypical male activities he had taken uo.
In my case the counsellor believed my loss of libido had probably started with a strong dissatisfaction with my own body post-childbirth. Because I felt unattractive, I couldn't believe anyone else found me desirable or interesting.
Reinforcing this, I had perceived Paul's increased interest in 'manly' things as a lack of interest in me. I had even suspected his late night working might be a cover story for an affair which had reduced my interest in sex still further.
In addition, she believed I had coped with the new responsibility children bring by letting the control freak side of my nature take over. As a result, I couldn't do anything that involed letting myself go or losing control in any way; something our sex life had once involved in spadefuls.
The more Paul wanted me to let go, the less likely I was to do it. The less I did it, the more he wanted me to. A vicious circle; painfully predictable!
The bad news was that, although we both still loved each other, we had reached a point where our dysfunctional sex life represented a serious threat to our marriage.
The good news was that we had previously been highly compatible in bed and highly sexually active. What was more, so far neither of us had actually been unfaithful and we had sought help in time to do something about it.
If we re-kindled our sex life, Paul would feel more loved and would want to spend more time with me; I would feel more attractive and want to spend more time with him. We could turn our vicious circle into a virtuous one - if we did it right.
The counsellor had gone on to suggest a number of intimate activities that might help and, with some reluctance on my part we had started to give them a try.
With two nearly-teenage kids in the house it had been hard making space in our busy lives for each other but with a little time-management help from the Counsellor and a lot of childcare from my parents we managed to set aside at least two sessions each week to try and rescue our sex lives and our relationship.
It had been very awkward at first but it had started to work!
Over a few months and after a slow start, we tried everything the Counsellor suggested; every type of sexy underwear imaginable (made me feel really sexy too); doggy-style sex (okay but a bit undignified and animal-like for me); cunniligus (a very nice feeling indeed but felt 'dirty' and made me very conscious of what childbirth had done to me 'down there') and sex toys (a bit cold and calculating but worked exceptionally well on my body if not on my mind).
Some ideas had failed miserably. Even half-drunk I could not bring myself to suck my husband's cock until he came no matter how much he tried to persuade me. In the past I used to suck him off every time I had a period but now the mere thought of having semen in my mouth again made me feel sick.
However good it made my husband feel and whowever well my body responded when I did it, fellatio made me feel like a whore.
But these setbacks were minor; as the adventurous spirit of our love life returned, both of us could feel the passion coming back into our marriage and our love for each other remained as strong as ever. So with the Counsellor's continued encouragement we persevered until eventually we found a hard-core of sexual activities that had a really positive effect both on my libido and on Paul's.
There was no doubt at all what turned my husband of fifteen years on most. However much he tried to laugh it off, it was a plain as the nose on my face that, of all the many things we had tried, the thing that had aroused him most by far was the acting out of fantasies.
