Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

a blog by liz

I’ve just past the three-year mark of trying and failing to conceive, not an anniversary I hoped to celebrate. One of the problems with trying for so long is it tends to make sex feel like a chore, a necessity, an endeavour that requires more precision than a well-timed soufflé.

Gone are the days of ad-hoc sex for – gasp – fun. Instead there are various tried and tested techniques that my infertile sisters and I attempt:

“I’m feeling romantic”
I try and make it sound like a random, genuine, coy, playful suggestion. But be warned, if half-way through the proceedings, he twigs, backs up, looks you in the eye and says, “Wait a minute, are you just doing this because you’re ovulating?” it does rather kill the moment.

So the next option is to be rather more direct:

Schedule Sex
Now, this is fraught with difficulties. You might discover that you ovulated in the morning so you warn your partner that tonight is the night. But not through sexually explicit text messages designed to stoke the fire of passions, instead it is more likely to be a demanding: “We’re on tonight, don’t be late.”

So you wait until bedtime. But he’s had a hard day at work. (Incidentally you’ve had a tough day, too, but you are willing to stay awake for a few more minutes, and let’s face it at this stage of the game, you aren’t even looking for much in the way of foreplay). “Can it wait until tomorrow?” he begs, as he nods off.

The next day you have a couple of choices:

Morning Glory
Let nature help. Your guy has been waking up ready for action since he was 14. Time to put that natural phenomenon to good use! But the problem here is that if you are having to head to work you might not have the luxury of a 20-minute lie down with your hips up afterwards.

So you aim for after work and try the:

Get It Over And Done With Method.
As soon you get in from work, before you’ve had something to eat or settled down in front of the TV for the evening, you launch yourself at him with a romantic, “Come on, if we do it now then it’s done and we can get on with the rest of the evening.”

And if that doesn’t work, by this time you’ve had a couple of days of abortive attempts at sexual encounters, the ovulatory window has passed for another month. But woe is the partner who didn’t live up to his side of the bargain on Ovulation Day, but three days later trys to get romantic . . .