It’s a known fact that once you are married and comfortable, your relationship as a couple and your sex life tend to take a fall back. Chores and other priorities such as work and children often become inevitable excuses for letting your love life slip. After years of neglecting your sexual intimacy, couples will see a therapist who will often suggest an agreement involving some sort of sexual arrangement. Rather than following this path of destruction, many couples have started to negotiate a sex agreement before tying the knot.
A sexual contract provides a fun way for married couples to agree on important aspects of intimacy including frequency, types of consensual acts and even safe words.
Here are some benefits of signing your own contract:
1. Knowing what you’re in for – if you’re the type of couple that never talks about sex, how do you know what the other person wants/expects in the relationship? One of you may be thinking that being intimate three times per week is reasonable while the other may only want sex once a fortnight. This example isn’t on the extreme side either. The usual stereotype is that the woman wants it less frequently but actually lots of women have higher sex drives than their husbands. By discussing your wants and needs (even if you’ve been married for ten years) you open up essential lines of communication and can start the negotiation process.
2. Get talking – just like every individual has unique tastes and desires, each relationship will have its own distinct requirements. To make things work, you need to firstly communicate your needs to each other. By knowing the other person’s needs or wants, you can start to negotiate and make compromises. It doesn’t need to be all about the sex. For example, my friend Anna loves to go bike riding with her husband, Phil, but he’s not the fitness type at all. He’d rather watch football a game with a bucket of wings under his arm. So they ended up making a quid pro quo sex arrangement (he goes bike riding with her and in exchange she will try a new sexual position with him that weekend). It’s weird but it works for them. It satisfies both their needs and the settlement wasn’t that painful, but it did take them five years before they figured out they need to open their mouths and start talking about things like this.
3. Avoiding sexual blackmail – I saw a comment of Facebook the other day by a disgruntled husband advising every man to stay away from women. He says that once you put the ring on her finger, a wife starts to withhold sex and use it to demand chores. That’s quite a negative view and I’m sure it doesn’t apply to most women but just in case, a sexual contract drawn up beforehand can save you from playing emotional mind games with one another throughout your marriage.
4. Avoiding disappointment – I don’t know how many times my friend Joanna tells me this sad story about her husband Greg. She’s a stay at home mom and Greg works long hours as an electronic technician. He comes home exhausted and most times slumps in front of the telly, then falls asleep. There are days where she spends the whole morning cleaning the house, drops the kids off at their grandma’s and spends the afternoon preparing a candle lit dinner for Greg. After he devours it in five minutes, he watches the news, she cleans the dishes and they end up in bed. When Joanna tries to be intimate, Greg is too tired or has a headache. It’s a huge disappointment to Joanna after she’s tried so hard to make a romantic time for them. I’m sure a lot of men get the same excuses from their wives too. Having a marriage sex contract can avoid these moments in your relationship because both parties will know whether sex is on that night or not.
5. Diversifying your choices – not everyone is satisfied with doing the missionary position all of the time, but sadly that’s what many married couples end up resorting to. It becomes their default sexual position. There are lots of reasons for this: it’s easy and requires no thought or creativity, you might be too afraid to bring up something kinky or you are too afraid of hurting your lover. Unfortunately, relying on this mundane way of making love can quickly make your sex life stale. The marriage sex contract template includes a wide list of sexual activities that you can discuss together, research and even have a good laugh at. Once you’ve agreed on a few, you can always try them and take them off the list if they’re not for you. At least you’ve diversified your experience in the bedroom.
If you need something even naughtier, you may want to consider a power exchange situation and draw up BDSM contract like Ana and Christian negotiated and signed in 50 Shades of Grey. You can buy one of those from our home page. Anything is possible; you just need an imagination and a willing partner.
Never lose sight of your dreams, you’re never too old to endure missionary as your ultimate night in!