My lover and I can’t stop having sex – and it’s disrupting our working lives

My partner and I, both of us women, have a lot of sex. It’s got to the point where we miss appointments and are late to meetings. We are in a long-distance relationship, but even when we’re apart from one another we masturbate on the phone a lot.

She thinks we’re not normal and need help, though I think we are just extremely attracted to one another. We have tried to reduce the amount of sex we have but it just doesn’t work long term. When we do see each other, we will spend the whole trip having sex. Even at my parents’ house we somehow found a way to have sex with each other.

How do we focus on other areas of our relationship, like communication? We want to get to know each other’s quirks a little more and understand each other better, but we can’t seem to focus. All we do is have sex. I love this person and want to understand her in and out so I can be the best possible partner for her.

A very large proportion of the people who write to me for help express concerns because they have the opposite “problem”, ie they have little or no libido, or their partner has no libido, or for one reason or another they are not having much sex – if any.

I hesitate to minimise your partner’s concerns, but it is important to put your situation into perspective. You are lucky enough to have strong attraction between you, strong mutual desire, heightened physical arousal, and the sexual creativity to be able to share these gifts whether you are together in the same place or not.

This seems to be a blessed erotic union. I can’t speak to the interruption of your daily activities, as I’m not sure how important the missed meetings might have been, but, generally, it would make sense to curtail some of your sexual activities if they are really causing significant problems in your daily life. If not, I recommend you simply allow yourselves to carry on regardless.

• Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

• If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.