A friend of mine recently got married. He’s a super-mega-Catholic, so I’m not terribly sure how knowledgeable he might be on pre-marital sex (my guess is “not very”), but I have heard this view from others before. He said and I paraphrase: “No food kills a woman’s libido more than wedding cake.”
This is something I very much don’t want to believe. I want to get married someday (even though I’m currently so far away from that it’s stopped being funny)*, and I most certainly want to have sex with my wife. A lot. Whenever she’d like, really, which I most certainly hope will be often.
So those of you who have been married, what’s your opinion? Is there a noticeable negative hit on libido of either partner after the knot has been tied?
If the groom is a virgin or inexperienced, and the bride is a virgin or inexperienced, fireworks rarely result immediately after the wedding. Sex is a practice, practice, practice thing.
If the first few experiences were painful, uncomfortable, or just plain boring*, its no suprise the wife is less than ethused. She may not be able to articulate the problem or (depending on the level of ignorance she’s been kept in) even know there IS a problem, other than her husband wanting more.
*yes, it is possible for sex to be boring. This one time with an XBF, during the compulative conjuction itself, my mind completely wandered off to other things, and my train of thought made me snicker, which was awkward, let me tell you.
It’s by no means universal, that’s for sure. But stereotypes and “common knowledge” exist for a reason.
I doubt the reason is the change of state from unmarried to married. It’s probably the case that couples typically have sex less frequently after being together for a while. Once the novelty of the relationship wears off, the oxytocin tops flowing and other things start taking precedence. For a lot of people, this is around the same time that the relationship becomes stable enough to consider marriage. So you end up with a lot of correlation between marriage and lower sex drive, but that’s not necessarily causation.
That’s just my crackpot theory; take it for what it’s worth. Again, it’s not always the case, but it definitely happens to a lot of people.
Not IME. IIRC, studies show that married people generally get laid more often than singles. The thing is, once you have children there’s a slowdown because you’re so exhausted. But after they get a little bigger–assuming you have trained them to sleep in their own beds and through the night–it’s easier again.
Birth control can fool with your hormones and dampen a libido. So can a husband who doesn’t help out and never wants to snuggle; resentment is a big sex-killer. But in an ordinary happy marriage, you work through those things.
The first year of marriage can be a pretty tough set of adjustments and stress can be pretty hard on sex drives. I suspect that has something to do with it. We weathered a couple of years of ups and downs and have settled in quite satisfactorily, still at it after nine years.
Part of it’s probably stress. If the two haven’t lived together in any way, which is likely in families, like mine, that frown on the practice, frustration during the adjustment period can dampen the passion.
On top of that (no pun intended), if the couple have little or no sexual experience, especially with one another, poor communication can hinder the fun.
As for me, since I’m not living with my fiance’, I fully expect our sexual activity to increase.
Nope. It gets better. It isn’t as spontaneous or footloose and carefree as before, especially if you have kids around, and you need to make sure it doesn’t become a before-sleep afterthought when both of you are really too tired, so the dynamics do change a lot, but I’d maintain that the quality improves as the familiarity with one another’s likes and needs increases. Practice is important, of course. Lots of practice. Plus there’s that sheer glee when you can pack the kids off to the olds for a long weekend, hole up in a really nice hotel, and not emerge for three days.
I hate that joke. I know it’s supposed to be “cute”. FWIW, I am not one for whom wedding cake would kill my libido. I love sex as long as it’s within a LTCR. Love and commitment make it MORE fun, and more likely that I’ll be calling the man of the house upstairs to bed, A LOT.
And I very much doubt that I’m alone in this. We girls do like sex too.
Ya know? I hear a lot of “jokes” and complaints about the “old bait and switch” regarding women suddenly stopping the fun train. But when you hear the woman’s side, more times than not, it’s the old “chicken and egg” syndrome.
Did the “fun train” stop first? Or did the “treat her like a lady and say something nice once in a while” stop first? It’s a two way street gents.
If your friend is not experienced, maybe it’s just that his bride found out he wasn’t very good. THAT would stop the sex (and the relationship) for sure in my book.
When people live together, they may start to take each other for granted. No romantic dates, backrubs, flowers, and perhaps no brushing of teeth, listening, wearing clean underwear.
IME, a lot of guys think that they can quit courting a gal just because they’ve married her. That’s one of the chief complaints I hear from my girlfriends. Many women need to feel cherished before they can get into a sexual mood. Being taken for granted WILL kill libido far more surely than wedding cake or any other sort of food.
Libido is a funny thing. I believe for women that it ebbs and flows (no pun intended) moreso than for men. Knowing my history, I don’t know how a partner could keep up with the red-hot-monkey-sex turning into not-tonight-dear without warning.
If the sales of viagra are any indication, there’s more to men’s performance than we ever thought, too. If there’s that many men affected by erectile dysfunction, then it’s no wonder humans never have sex.
We got married last May and have been living together since the privious December, so about a year and a half. My wife went in to see her Ob/GBN with her temperature charts and she also marks days which we have sex. Over the last four months, we’ve averaged sex on 3.5 days per week, which is lower than the number of times per week; which is not recorded but an averages of another 1 to 2 times per week.
It would be higher, but she does have her period, I’ve got business trips and a man’s got to rest sometimes.
From what I’ve read it seems for a number of people that letting things get into a boring routine is one killer. Another is for guys to not include enough intimacy, especially after the act is done.
My wife says* that she wasn’t that interested in sex in her previous relationship, in which she had lived with her previous boyfriend for 7 years, and said that sex just wasn’t interesting. Obviously that’s changed, so people’s libidos can change under different circumstances.
*Of course there is the possibility that she’s just making this up to make me feel good, but if it’s all a lie, I’ll forgive her.
The Grandma From Hell complains because her sex life with The Grandpa From Hell stopped including daily-or-more intercourse about 10 years ago and his stroke of last year (which left him paralized on the right side, he’s 99% recovered now) put a temporary stop to other games.
She’s 93. He’s 92. We celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary last May. Married people don’t have sex, my left eye.
I think that in any decent relationship the cherishing should take place as a matter of course: holding your wife’s hand when you go out shouldn’t just be a bargaining chip for nookie.
I think that sex frequency just drops a bit over time.
For us, being together 2 years before marriage, and 8 years since. . .we’ve slowed down, but the actual marriage had no effect on it.
I was with a girl for 5+ years once that I didn’t marry, and sex slowed down there too.
After you’ve had sex with the same person 500 times. . .well, you still enjoy it, but you’re probably not running around the house like rabbits anymore either.
It’s true that you have more frequent sex at the start of a relationship, when you’re still bonding. But it certainly doesn’t happen that sex decreases because of marriage. Our sex decreased only when our daughter started staying up late. It increased noticeably when she went to camp a couple of weeks ago.
There was this old farmer who had a bull that he rented out 500 times a year to inseminate cows on other farms. One day his wife asked him why their sex life was so dull, when the bull was able to do it 500 times in one year. The farmer replied, “Well, it’s not always the same cow”.
I wish I could print out many of the replys in this thread and show them to my husband. Particularly #16. If you only pay attention to your wife when you want something and ignore her the rest of the time, don’t be surprised when she doesn’t feel like jumping on top of you. ahem Having revealed probably too much, I will share my cookie jar theory of sex and marriage.
When you are a little kid and you can’t reach the cookie jar, you always want a cookie. You beg your parents for a cookie (usually five minutes before dinner). You will never turn down a cookie because you don’t know when you’re going to be offered another one. Your thoughts are all cookie all the time.
When you’re all grown up and you stock the cookie jar, you know you can have a cookie any time you want. You walk past the cookie jar and think, “Hm. . . do I want a cookie? Nah. I’m not that hungry. Maybe later.” You may pass up a cookie in favor of a dish of ice cream (for parents of small children, the ice cream can be seen as sweet, blessed, uninterrupted sleep). Cookies will always be there, so you don’t have to worry about when your next cookie will be.