فصل 07

CHAPTER 7

The Lie

I’M BAD AT SEX

I used to be really bad at sex.

Whoa, Nelly!

You didn’t think I was going there—but I totally am. I’m going to talk about sex as a married, Christian woman, and I hope it’ll be okay.

My husband? He’s likely hiding under a rock right now because me writing about this is definitely his worst nightmare.

My worst nightmare is getting chased by Bigfoot, so I guess we all have our crosses to bear, Dave.

But Dave shouldn’t be worried. I’m not writing about him; I’m writing about me . . . and my bad sex. I’m choosing to write about this big, scary, embarrassing thing at the risk of petrifying my in-laws and giving Mema a heart attack because I think it’s important. I don’t think women talk about it enough.

Oh sure, the world talks about it. As much as it can, as loud as it can, as often as it can . . . but not in a realistic way. Not in a way that makes tangible sense to a virginal clarinet player whose experience with men when she met her husband was equal to her experience with hunting large game in the African wilds. Which is to say none. None at all.

My early opportunities for sexual education included ladies at church (who didn’t speak about it within my hearing) or media as a whole, which showed me an ideal that was impossible to achieve. So I walked into my marriage with no realistic idea of what to expect. Which is flipping ridiculous! I wish just one time before I got married someone had said, “Look, here are my experiences. Here’s what you need to know, here’s what you should consider, and also, the first few times you have sex you should pee afterward so you don’t get a UTI!”

Somewhere in Texas an older reader just fainted.

Yes, I wrote about a urinary tract infection. If that freaks you out, move right along to the next chapter, sister, because it’s going to get way more intimate than that.

I knew very little about sex other than what I had gleaned from TV or movies . . . so I was terrible at it. And not terrible as in awkward (though I was most definitely that). It was terrible because I was miserable, and I made my husband miserable too. Five years into our marriage, our sex life was nearly nonexistent. By comparison, we’ll celebrate our fourteenth wedding anniversary this year—and now our sex life is the stuff of legends!

No, seriously. We do it more than any married couple you know—or at least more often than most married couples with four kids and two full-time jobs. We have sex not out of obligation but because it’s really, really good. When it’s really good, why would you not go at it like a couple of howler monkeys whenever you can?

Today, it’s awesome. But it was a long road from there to here, and I’m going to tell you all about it in case you find yourself in the same place . . . and because I don’t want you to get a UTI. Listen up.

I met Dave when I was nineteen years old and he was twenty-seven. I had never even been on a date before, and he didn’t know how much younger I was than him. As I’ve already told you, when the truth came out a couple of months in, it went over like an obese cat falling off the back fence. It was an ungraceful and violent fall, but we still landed on our feet.

Dave has been my best friend since that first year together. He is my favorite human on the planet, and I love him so much it makes my heart want to explode. When we got married, we had the happiest life I could’ve possibly dreamed up for myself. And as for sex? We did it like rabbits. We did it like rabbits because that’s what you’re supposed to do as newlyweds, right?

How many times could we do it in a day?

How many times in an hour?

I would do it in the rain, in the dark, on a train, in a car, in a tree . . .

You get the point, Sam I Am. We were having a lot of sex.

And I loved it.

I loved it because being physically close with him made me feel cherished and adored. I loved it because it made him so happy. It made us so happy. We were newlyweds, we were having sex, and life was good.

But as the first couple of years went on and the newness wore off, the joy of the honeymoon phase wore off too. In the beginning my excitement made me bold. As time went on, though, I felt less comfortable, as if a switch had been flipped. I was raised to be this good Christian girl. Now I was supposed to be a sex kitten, but I had no idea how.

So I drank.

We’d go on a date and I’d have just enough wine to feel sexy. Then I’d try and do sexy things or act in a sexy way, but I rarely enjoyed it as much as he did. Did I pretend to enjoy it? Heck yes! That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Then I started to resent the fact that I wasn’t enjoying it, resented that I thought I should have sex even when I wasn’t that excited about it.

Then I had a baby, and my body morphed and my stomach stretched out and my boobs leaked and I was exhausted. Sex was basically the least enjoyable thing I could imagine. But I kept doing it, kept pretending that I loved every second. I never once talked to Dave about how I was feeling—I was too embarrassed and unsure. I was also nervous about hurting his feelings, so I kept it to myself. More time passed, and our sex life was hanging by a thread. By the time our second son was a toddler, sex barely happened at all—and when I came out of the fog of being a mother of two and thought enough to ask Dave about it, the answer was hard to hear.

“Why don’t we have sex anymore?” I asked him one night.

He looked at me as though the question hurt his feelings.

“I got tired of being shot down.”

I was immediately defensive. “I don’t shoot you down. I always say yes.”

“You might agree, Rachel, but you don’t actually want to, and that’s worse than not having it at all.”

Initially, I was pretty annoyed. Here I was taking one for the team, and he was hurt because I wasn’t more enthusiastic. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood how right he was. I might’ve been agreeing to sex, but I was stiff and uncomfortable, tired and unenthusiastic. Agreeing to it did not mean I was embracing it. My husband could tell I wasn’t enjoying it, so rather than asking me to participate halfway, he had just stopped asking altogether. What a bummer.

They say the first step to fixing something is admitting you have a problem.

Now, I know many of you are super in touch with your own feminine mystique. You’ve got the whole sex thing down pat, and you have a hundred orgasms a week. Good for you, sister. Seriously, you’re my hero! And the following advice probably isn’t for you. For you, what I have to say will sound trite and basic or maybe even naïve. That’s cool, because these are the things that worked for me, and I share them in case they are helpful to someone who is like me (or who I used to be).

Here are the steps I took to go from being bad at sex to being exceptional at sex. There are seven of them . . . one for every day of the week.

THINGS THAT HELPED ME . . .

1. I redefined sex in my own mind. For the longest time, sex symbolized a lot of things—and not all of them were positive. I decided to change what I thought sex was . . . This might not be what sex is for you, your friends, or the Holy Ghost and all the saints; but going forward I decided that sex was supposed to be a fun experience that would always be more compelling than whatever else I could be doing. Up until that point I was continuously weighing sex against other things (reading a book, watching TV, etc.)—and it was playing second fiddle. But if I reminded myself that sex was always an awesome opportunity, then I would presumably want to choose it.

2. I figured out how sex could be an earth-shattering experience. When you’re uncomfortable or don’t feel sexy or are nervous or shy or whatever, you’re not going to enjoy yourself. If you’re not enjoying yourself, you’re not having good sex. So I asked myself How can I enjoy this more? What’s holding me back? The answer? Me. Next I spoke with Dave about all the things I was thinking and feeling. It shocked me that after all our years together I could still be so embarrassed, but I pushed through it. We needed to be on the same page, and the only way to get there was by opening up the book and talking to him about it.

3. I read Hebrews 134. Part of my hang-ups were related to my being a good Christian girl who couldn’t reconcile becoming a freak in the sheets. And then I read Hebrews 134 “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the bed be undefiled” (WEB). Now, straight up, I’m sure I’m not reading this right. I’m sure someone who studied theology will tell me that this actually means something different. But what I read, or what I take away when I read that line, is that the things that happen in my bed with my husband cannot be weird or bad or wrong. Let me back up and say there are definitely things that a committed, monogamous couple can do sexually that can be incredibly hurtful to them both. Pornography, for example, is extremely damaging to both the consumer and the people being used as objects for your lust. But the other stuff? Lingerie, leather, toys, role-play, trying every position possible, going at it on the kitchen table, dirty talk, whatever . . . If it turns you on and doesn’t hurt you, I say go for it!

4. I embraced my body. Having a low opinion of your body is so damaging to your ability to enjoy sex. I used to worry about whether or not my tummy was tight or if my butt looked okay in those panties. You know what Dave was thinking when I took off my clothes? Boobies! Your partner is just thrilled you showed up, and all those things you’re questioning aren’t helping anyone. I practiced positive self-talk about how great my butt looked or how sexy I was. I did it so much that at some point, I started to believe it.

5. I committed to my orgasm. Okay, just writing that line makes me blush. I’m imagining some future book-signing where a reader comes up to my table and says, “So . . . you committed to your orgasm.” But this is important, and even if it embarrasses me I want you to know it. Back in the day, when we first started having sex, an orgasm for me was like icing on the cake. But here’s the thing, ladies Orgasms are not icing on the cake. Orgasms are the cake! A second orgasm is icing on the cake! Remember how I said that I had to figure out how to make sex the greatest thing ever? Remember how I told you that I wanted to desire it over anything else in my life? You know how you do that? With orgasms! I decided years ago that I would never, and I mean never, again have sex that didn’t include an orgasm for me. When I told Dave this plan, he agreed it was the greatest idea I’d ever come up with. Because here’s the thing for most of us, our partners are thrilled to give us pleasure; and if we’re both committed to my orgasm at the outset, it will happen.

6. I had to figure out what turns me on. Oh sure, I’d been turned on many times in my life, but I’d never truly considered the difference between what really did it for me and what was just situational. Knowing what turns me on was key because, remember, my orgasms were our new endgame, and I don’t know how to have one without being turned on. So we experimented until I learned myself and my body better. (Feel free to head back up to the undefiled marriage bed paragraph for a list of ideas.)

7. We committed to having sex every day for a month. Years ago, at the outset of changing up our sex lives, Dave and I initiated something we called Sexy September. We vowed to have sex every day during the month of September—no excuses. It was pretty daunting in the beginning, especially with full-time jobs and two little kids. But the end result was fantastic! It gave me the opportunity to experiment and try things out without any pressure. Also, shockingly, having more sex made us want to . . . have more sex. I highly encourage you to pick your own sexy month and go for it!