Communication is key

When I felt things going south between, I wanted to run.  That's me.  That's what I do.  I avoid getting hurt by running.  It's the ultimate self-defense mechanism. 

He knew.  As much as he, too, was withdrawing, he felt my distance.  And he would call me out.

man: I don't want you to leave.  Stay.  Let's work through this.

Only I didn't know what the answer was.  I didn't know how to bridge the distance between us.  I didn't know how to reach him.  And so we turned to the one thing that had never failed us: our talks.

I had read tons of novels on relationships.  I thought I knew what to say.  Words rarely failed me.

me: What do you need from me to make this relationship work?  I don't want to leave you.

His response was one I never would have predicted.

man: I'm bored. 

He didn't have to explain bored to me.  We were in a rut in every aspect of our lives.  We were in jobs we hated.  We never had money to do anything or go anywhere.  We were struggling.  And that didn't make for a very strong sex drive.

me: I understand.  What would you like to do about it?

I saw this as my in to introduce toys to the relationship.  I saw this as a way for us to try new things.  And apparently so did he.

man: I think we should bring another girl in.  I want threesomes.

I could have gone my whole life without hearing that.  But when the words are spoken, they can't be undone.  And so they hung there in the air between us.  It felt like a knife through my heart. 

Still.  We had to talk about it.  He had the courage to share what he wanted, what he needed.  We had to address the giant neon pink elephant in the room.

Our story begins

We met a few years ago.  I was a reasonably sexy woman who was in my mid-thirties and in the middle of a divorce from my lying, cheating husband of fifteen years.  He was a reasonably muscular man in his late twenties.  He loved how intelligent I was, found that to be a huge turn on.  And I loved his passion for me and his honesty.

The two of us became fast friends and then lovers.  And while I wasn't sure what I saw in our future, I loved our sex life.  It was the passion.  It was being on fire together.

Only, like with most fires, the passion slowly died and we became one of those old married couples (even though we aren't married) who had sex anywhere from occasionally to barely at all.  I would complain.  He would explain that the pressure didn't help.  I would make a move.  He would turn me down.  All the rejection and feeling unloved and unwanted took its toll.

We broke up and got back together several times.  There were some unavoidable truths that he couldn't escape.  There were feelings that he couldn't recover from.  And in the end, we realized we had to make it work or suffer forever.  We love each other.  We want to be together.

And so we hoped that one day our sex life would come back.  We hoped that in the course of building a life together, we'd find that romantic spark, that the passion would once again ignite.  I figured it was a phase.  I expected that, like the tides, there would be ebbs and flows in our feelings and our sex drive. 

It's come back.  It's stronger than ever.  Follow along and see what has made all the difference.