Dave: Sleazing the Moment

It’s that When Harry Met Sally moment (no, the other one), your attractive female friend has recently been dumped and looks to you for comforting words and a shoulder to cry on. As the alcohol flows, she opens up to you. Tales of regret. How to ease her pain she’s slept with a couple of his friends and couple of their friends too yet, aside from a moment’s satisfaction she feels even colder and more lonely for having done so. Emotion runs high; honesty pours out. It was just sex, and never any good because it was for the wrong reasons (you need reasons?). And between hiccups and teary smiles she holds you tightly, showering you with compliments (for the first time since you’ve known her).

Even without having listened to her confessions, you know the flirting is born from misery and the fact she can no longer see straight. And if you’re truly honest with yourself, the vulnerability may even act as a stimulus, however ashamed you are to admit it. On the one hand it’s your responsibility to restrain yourself for the sake of not only your friendship but for the altruistic feeling of really caring for this person. On the other you get to shag a really hot woman, without the burden of having to impress.

But a tidal wave of questions crashes around your head. Would she regret the encounter? Possibly. Despite initiating the proceedings would she consider that you took advantage of her? Probably. Or ironically, should you do the gentlemanly thing and get her home safely with what’s left of her virtue intact, might the feeling of rejection be too much for her to bear coming from somebody she knows and trusts? Typically.

Do you seize the moment, accepting her advances at face value, pleading ignorance of valour and foresight? Would it not be incredibly patronising to presume you know what’s best for her? And are you desperately trying to convince yourself that there’ll only be a positive outcome from boning your dejected comatose companion?

The greatest quandary is dealing with perceiving yourself as the sleazy shyster you’ve warned all your female friends, your sister, and ten year old niece about. What’s worse? That your melancholy friend may view you thusly or to see yourself in such a light? Though in terms of rationalising the situation, would it be even worse to pass up what could be a one off opportunity? I suppose the answer depends upon the length of the dry patch you’re having. A nice clinical conclusion to a moral dilemma.

Sam: Work vs Sex

One of the things that struck me while working on ‘How to have Sex after Marriage’ was that lots of the couples seemed to have a real problem with their work life balance. Or more accurately, they had a real problem with their work-sex balance.

Put simply they were working too hard and sex got squeezed out of their lives. They were working, looking after the kids, doing the washing, watching the telly and just generally too busy to have sex.

Now this seems really crazy to me. Really, in your life shouldn’t you be prioritising the best stuff first? I don’t know about you, but sex certainly ranks up their pretty much at the top of my fun list. And it’s the same for everyone else. Professor Richard Layard, in his groundbreaking book Happiness, found that sex was the thing that made people most happy.

So why aren’t we doing it more? I reckon that sex ends up getting shoved to the bottom of the pile for two main reasons.

First is the myth that sex is always supposed to be spontaneous. A wave of lust overcomes us, we rip off each other’s clothes, have a lusty shag and lie in the afterglow. One of the biggest complaints of couples on the show was that sex wasn’t ‘spontaneous’ any more.

For something to be spontaneous, you have to actually have the time to do it. If your life is filled with other priorities, like work, like watching telly, like doing the washing, then there is no time for you to be spontaneous! Put another way, ‘spontaneous sex’ means sex that gets stuck last on the priority list and shoved in as an afterthought in between everything else.

Which neatly fits into the second main reason – we are all working harder, longer and more. We suffer time sickness, we seem to have less and less time.

So it’s a vicious cycle – you’ve got no time, but you need time to have ‘spontaneous sex’, so in the end, unsurprisingly everyone gets less sex. I think the myth of ‘spontaneity’ is killing people’s sex lives.

The solution? Prioritise sex. Treat it how it should be treated. Make it a top priority. Regularly put time in your diaries for sex, block out Sunday afternoon in red. Make Tuesday nights sacrosanct. Give yourselves space to actually have sex. Otherwise sex will end up where it is now, last in line and at the bottom of the pile.

How’s your work v sex balance? Where is sex as a priority in your life?