I had a light-bulb moment just recently regarding relationships, or rather  marriages.  I have noticed heard about become aware of an alarming trend that most (ok, I don’t really know if it’s most in the world…but at least most directly around me and my circle of friends) most married couples don’t have sex anymore.  I’ll admit, the last year of my  marriage was completely loveless, in both the emotional sense and the physical sense.  (yes, it was at least a whole year…hmmm, yet another incentive to get the hell out of that relationship!)  But it was strange to me.  It’s not as if I didn’t want to have sex.  Quite the opposite.  Needless to say, it caused a lot of tension in our relationship which wasn’t the sole reason for our split, but probably contributed in its own way to the ultimate end.  My mom used to tell me, “if he’s not getting it at home, he is getting it somewhere.”  To this day, he insists he wasn’t, but who knows…and really, who cares at this point?

As I said before, it was strange to me.  I thought we were a minority among young married couples.  I thought it was a huge issue in our relationship.  I’d always heard the sex life goes downhill as years pass, but after only the first couple years…it’s doesn’t make sense to me.  (Barring some extraneous circumstance of course.) But in conversation with those around me, other young couples (or the not-so-happy half anyway) are just entering their first years of marriage and have lost their sex life along the way.

I don’t get it!  It seems like an understood statement, but I like sex.  All my girlfriends like sex.  Unless he is doing it wrong (in which case you don’t get married and in fact find someone who does it right), I can’t imagine anyone not liking sex.  So why are so many couples living in loveless marriages?  Really, it baffles me, but it seems to be an alarming trend in our world today.  I suppose it’s possible it always has been, but since I’ve only been having sex for about 15 years now…I can’t speak intelligently for the rest of the history of the world.

Are we really so stressed or busy in our lives today that we don’t have the time or energy available to cultivate the one-on-one intimacy between ourselves and the ones we love?  Or is it that we are finding ourselves married too soon to people with whom there never really was an attraction  strong enough to last a lifetime?  Are we just going through the motions?  I’ll say this; it seems to me marriage has taken a turn for the better over the years (for the most part anyway) in that two people can come together as equals and communicate freely without fear.  People are becoming very good at joining lives and creating families and traditions to last a lifetime.  But why is it that when two lives join, then add a couple more lives to the mix, the two who started begin to drift to separate ends of the group rather than all mush together in the middle?  Is a family stronger with a strong relationship at its core, or with the two adults posted on the outside of the group like sentries? 

I’ve figured out for my own life that my family is stronger and happier and more at ease with a strong central core.  As long as Mr. W and I are joined and happy and connected, the children that surround us seems to feed off that security and are (like a  kind of contact high) themselves stronger and happier and more at ease with our family.  I can’t guarantee that this will be the case forever, but I’ve got a good inkling that it will last quite a while. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Family, Mr. W, Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.