Sex, lies and videophones

What’s the big deal about sex anyway? Now it doesn’t have to get you pregnant, and you can sniff each other out for disease, or just wear condoms, why does having sex with someone mean anything more than, say, having a coffee or going for lunch?

Isn’t it time sex lost its historical anachronism and religious connaations of ownership, morality, virtue and sin? Sex is an activity, same as any other, although that doesn’t take into account emotions such as jealousy and love, whatever that may be.

I like sex. It helps me get to know people better, and since I’ve always got on well with men, it was sometimes  part of friendship as well as love. Giving up sex as a recreational activity when I got married felt like an enormous sacrifice, but I had just had a baby and would have another in a year, so it wasn’t exactly top of my priority list.

But as time went on, it crept back in: the desire to be found attractive, in more ways than just as someone else’s wife, or a dutiful mother.

And by then, sex didn’t seem to be the linchpin that was holding us together –   Tom and I had loyalty, friendship, children, we’d survived good times and tough; and sex, while we still had it, was as often something that we did for free when we were bored and broke as anything of greater resonance.

Once in awhile, we experimented here and there, and the world didn’t end, although I never liked the dynamic of sex for its own sake. But over time, jealousy receded, but then so too had the mutual passion that  brought us together in the first place.

Did that mean my marriage was over? Or out of loyalty, compassion and concern for my family – and to a greater or lesser extent, societal disapproval, as a wife,  mother, a friend,  someone who bakes cakes for the school (although more and more and more under duress. I’ve got better things to do these days)  – would it feel like I had to spend the rest of my life dutifully pleasing my husband once a week to the exclusion of my own needs and wants ?

It got to the point when I was getting really depressed. I only have a couple of real, long term female friends. I’d got well and truly bored shitless on the mummy circuit and  I missed the company of witty, erudite, flirtatious men. They make me feel clever, and fun,  interesting and sexy – and more than a just mum, a wife, and all the schlep that goes along with that.

The problem is while Tom was happy enough to have a drunken night that turned into something else, I never was.  If I like someone enough to sleep with them, it generally means I like them, and that’s the end of it. We wrangled over the new dynamic as first one, then another man turned lover turned friend entered our lives and confounded expectations of ourselves and others.

Sometimes it got messy. Sometimes there was high drama as boundaries were exceeded and feelings ignored. But Tom and I never wanted to leave each other, not really, although there were a couple of times when a row would turn into one or other of us storming off in a god almighty huff.

But we never, ever lied. For one thing, my tip of the toes lying is appalling, and the experience of a dalliance’s textbomb going astray is really terrifyingly uncomfortable, when you fear your entire life may be at stake. I never really understood the point of hiding anything. Tom knows every text, touch and tantrum of every intrigue. Hell he’s even helped me sext before, but only because I’m such a technophobe.

And our mutual goals and respect haven’t really budged, despite both of us having a much more active social life these days. It freeing, although it can be daunting, because you can’t account for feelings sometimes, and if they tip over into love, whatever that is, it can complicate things, and they have.  Particularly if I’m on Facechat in my knickers and Tom wants to go to bed.

With my children’s stability my overriding concern, yet not willing to fade away into half of myself, it’s a balancing act we’ve not yet perfected, and probably never will. But don’t judge, however long you may been faithful, graciously or otherwise, because this is not about deception; it’s about sex, pure and simple. And having it away doesn’t make me worse or better than you. Just different. And there’s nothing wrong with that.