So my latest sexual peril has been my rolls. And, despite what my last blog may have suggested about weird food fetishes, I ain’t talking about bread rolls. For reasons completely unbeknownst to me, I’ve put on a fair amount of weight over the summer period. Could it be the family share bags of Minstrels I’ve been eating every night? The whole packets of chocolate digestives that I’ve been devouring as a mid-morning snack? We shall never know for sure. In any case, it’s safe to say I no longer jump at the chance to take my clothes off in front of the mirror, much less another human being.
My biggest concern here is my blood sugar levels. Lol jk. It’s my SEX LIFE. For a while my boyfriend and I fell into that dreaded ‘old married couple’ paradigm: sex just wasn’t a nightly thing like it used to be, and at first I couldn’t work out why. Usually we’d be screwin’ six ways till Sunday, but now I was beginning to feel like it less and less. Where the feck was my mojo? Well, turns out it was hidden somewhere under all my flab. My sex-drive was repressed because I was convinced that my wobbly bits would repulse him.
Every now and then he’d bring up my lack of libido in a deceptively nonchalant manner, and I’d dismiss it.
“That’s silly,” I’d say, lying through my teeth. “We have plenty of sex.”
I was too embarrassed to talk to him about my weight gain, as though he might have failed to notice it yet and if I brought it up then the penny would drop and he would leave me at once. In order to solve the problem, I thought about laying off the digestives and actually dragging myself to the fresh hell they call the gym – but I needed a realistic solution.
I will tell you now what I should have known then; what I think is the solution to having a generally better sex life for the rest of eternity… Talk about it.
Again, I’m not asking you to shout from the rooftops about your vegetable fetish (see last blog); I’m asking you to communicate with your sexual partner about what’s bothering you, what’s exciting you, what you want, what you don’t want. I promise you the sex will be 1000x better.
Sex is just as much about emotional connection as it is physical connection, and that’s something you can’t achieve if you’re not putting all your cards, along with your genitals, on the table. Dismissing my boyfriend’s legitimate concerns about our sex life because I was too embarrassed to talk about it was the worst thing I could have done for my relationship.
So how did I come to my senses? One day, the poor sod knocked his two front teeth out in a drunken bid to do the worm on his granite kitchen floor (all very standard business). He wasn’t having his replacement teeth fitted for another couple of days, and we lay in bed that night scouring through channels.
“Don’t you want to have sex with your hillbilly boyfriend?” he asked me, his attempted redneck accent verging more towards Australian. As per, his teeth – or lack thereof – had nothing to do with why I hadn’t tried to jump his bones that night.
“You haven’t tried to have sex with me,” I said.
“Well, that’s because my sexual confidence has officially hit rock bottom now that I’m tubby and toothless.”
Eh? Tubby? He thought he was tubby? That’s ludicrous, I thought. I hadn’t noticed a single change in his weight, and even if I had, it wouldn’t make me want to have sex with him any less. Even the toothlessness couldn’t put me off.
And that’s when I finally saw sense. We hadn’t been having sex because we were both self conscious about physical insecurities that the other neither knew nor cared about. He was oblivious to the rolls I had accumulated, as was I to his, because – obviously – we see past that in each other. It’s just a shame we couldn’t see past it in ourselves. And we could have realised all of this a long time ago, except we didn’t because we failed to communicate properly. Just imagine all the lost shags.
So there we were, post-epiphany, two little tubs of lard and one of us toothless – and we had never found each other hotter. The sex was the best it had been in a while.