Advertisement

How lockdown reinvented my sex life

Clio Wood -  Ocean Taylor
Clio Wood - Ocean Taylor

The time was when I ached for more time together. I dreamt of a no-commute life, no morning rush or skipped breakfasts, instead we could have supper together every evening, with less time sitting in traffic and more time for sex.

I was severely underestimating the actual reality of lockdown. Suddenly all three of us (my husband, me and our six year-old daughter) were trapped at home for more continuous hours than should be legal. And we’re lucky enough to have a house. With a garden. And only one child. It could have been much harder, yet it still took some adjustment.

And my libido? Libidon’t more like.

Stress levels started to rise. Our daughter’s homeschooling timetable was fuller than a festival schedule, and we were squeezing full time jobs in the margins, as well as trying to source lesser-spotted bags of flour, keep up with Joe Wicks, and get through an increasing pile of Zoom invitations.

The days and weeks between sex ticked by.

To be fair, we’ve always been a little sporadic in our intimacy. We can have sex three or four times in a week and then not for a month.  So, to begin with, I didn’t see any issue with sexual distancing.

My husband has suffered from anxiety, I’ve had depression on and off throughout my life. We know first-hand that when your mental health is tested, the likelihood is that your libido also takes a nose-dive. But I forgot, and was quite hard on myself. Now we were blessed with all this time together, why weren’t we using it to have the most passionate sex of our lives; ticking off our adventures like some kind of kinky bucket list?

Eventually we settled into the smallness of lockdown: being at home, baking, gardening, board games. It turns out that diving into retirement activities a few decades early can really relight your fire. With no FOMO, just concentrating on being us, we were able to remember why we like each other. Fancy that.

I’d forgotten how hot my husband is (I knew there was a reason I married him) and vice versa, and adapting to a new way of life forced us to stop taking each other for granted. Being around each other more also meant that we were a lot more hands-on.

Esther Perel says ‘foreplay starts the moment sex ends’, and boy, is she right. Rediscovering the magic of a cheeky passing bum pinch was our lockdown triumph.

Date nights were cancelled so we had some 'early nights' instead. There have been some quickies behind locked bathroom doors. As soon as we were able to, we booked a night away just the two of us and relished every peaceful, blissful second.

It turns out we’re a pretty good team - when you’re nice to each other, you might like to jump each other more too - and thank Covid we remembered that.