The 4 Benefits of Making Love–For Her!

By Sheila Wray Gregoire on Friday, April 26, 2013

Resident sex expert, Sheila Wray Gregoire has written today’s guest post. Definitely share your comments below and tell us what you think. Until Monday…make it a great weekend!

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You crawl into bed. Your husband is lying beside you, facing away. Is he asleep? Is he waiting for me to make a move? How long has it been anyway? I guess I really should.

Hardly sexy, is it? In fact, obligation sex is distinctly unsexy. So maybe some women need a new way of looking at it.

Sex isn’t just for him; sex is something that benefits you, too! Here’s why:

1. You Feel More Intimate

Often the reason that we don’t want to make love is because we feel distant.

But do the close feelings come before sex, or does sex bring the close feelings? Most of us feel closer after we make love. And sex is designed to bring us together! We release hormones during sex that help us to “bond”. So if you’re feeling distant, maybe the solution is to make love, rather than to wait to feel closer first.

2. You Sleep Better

If you’ve been avoiding sex because you’re exhausted, maybe you’ve been making the problem worse. Sex often works better than sleeping pills to help you drift off, and it helps you to sleep deeper.

Some nights when I know it’s been a while, and I know we should really make love, I say no because I’m so tired. Those are usually the nights I toss and turn and can’t sleep. Now when I’m really exhausted, I say to my husband, “Put me to sleep, baby.” Works every time!

3. You Feel Like Your Marriage is Stronger

Sex helps you to feel like your relationship is secure. When you make love, you cement it together again. Sex makes you feel protected. It makes you feel loved. It makes you feel like you have a future together.

On the days after you make love, you smile slyly at each other because you have this secret. You can giggle with each other more. You touch each other more. I’ve heard it said, “sex isn’t the icing on the cake; it’s the oil that keeps the engine going.” When we don’t make love, our relationship can get clogged up. Isn’t it better to have it humming along?

4. Your Toes Curl

Let’s not forget the final part: sex feels wonderful! Now, maybe for you it doesn’t yet. That’s okay. As I found in the surveys for The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, it can take a decade or so of marriage for sex to work like clockwork. So if you’re not there yet, don’t despair. Just turn it into the most fun research project you can do with your husband.

If you’re feeling exhausted, and feeling distant from your husband, and feeling tense, then instead of saying, “do I have to?“, why not say instead, “Let’s do it!”

Sheila teaches how to have a marriage that rocks at To Love, Honor and Vacuum.

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Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are snarky, offensive, or off-topic. If in doubt, read My Comment Policy

Meagan

When I was pregnant, my sex drive almost completely diminished. It was really hard for us, since not only was I getting larger and sex was more difficult, but I could not get into it like I used to. I made it a point, though, to continue having sex at LEAST every other day to keep our marriage strong, to feel the closeness, to love my husband, and to feel one with my husband. While I never finished and did not feel like it used to, it still created closeness! Now, our baby is almost 3 months old, and my sex drive has returned, which sure makes sex more fun!
- http://twitter.com/happywivesclub Happy Wives Clubâ„¢
  
  That’s so interesting, Meagan. It must have been confusing for you since so many tell you your sex drive during pregnancy is supposed to shoot through the roof! It’s great you’ve said the opposite here because for many it does the exact reverse.
Kristi

Great topic and great post. As someone who does not yet enjoy sex…and always feels it an obligation…glad to know there is hope still- we’ve only been married 7 years this year. I’d love to see more posts on this, or just references to turn to (i shudder to think of googling this topic, as so much junk is out there!) Thank you!
- KathyB
  
  Kristi, it breaks my heart to hear you don’t enjoy making love with your husband but I understand how you feel. I don’t understand why as we all have different demons that we have to battle. I was abused as a child and gave myself away, when older, many times looking for love. When I met my, now, husband it was like we had to have sex all the time so that he loved me. I thought that was how you made a man happy but I used to roll over and cry every time after we had finished. I hated it, he didn’t know what to do and we didn’t know how to talk about it. From there I decided that if he really loved me he had to love me for who I am not for what I give him so the poor guy went from feast to famine. It took me a while to sort everything out, a lot of healing and talking to each other, but now it is so amazing when we make love. We have been together 24 years and it honestly gets better over time. You get to know each other so intimately, what each other likes and needs. One of the most important things to do is to talk about it. Talk about how you are feeling, talk about what you both like or don’t like. It is not easy to start off with as they can feel pressured that they have been doing it ‘wrong’ but if he loves you he will try to understand and make it better. You can also feel a bit embarrassed talking about it all but jump that hurdle and talk to him. You won’t regret it in the long run. All the best. Kathy
  - http://twitter.com/happywivesclub Happy Wives Clubâ„¢
    
    Great advice, Kathy! Thank you for your transparency, as well, and I’m certain it will help tremendously.
- http://twitter.com/happywivesclub Happy Wives Clubâ„¢
  
  Your transparency is refreshing, Kristi! There are two great sites whose topic is sex quite often. The person who wrote this, Sheila Wray Gregoire, writes on sex quite a bit and as a matter of fact has a book titled, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex.” Her URL is: http://tolovehonorandvacuum.com/. A site where this is all she talks about is J with Hot, Holy & Humerous. J goes under a alias because she is SO transparent on this topic (I imagine it might embarrass her kids a bit if they knew ) but I know J and can assure you she is who she says she is: http://www.hotholyhumorous.com/. For me personally, what helped a great deal when I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing in the bedroom ) was a book by Dr. Kevin Leman called Sheet Music. I refer that book to every woman I know who has challenges in this area. Excited to see you dive into this area and to begin to enjoy it more. Once you begin to enjoy it, it only gets better and better (I can speak from experience on that one )!
Lauren Lawson

We have been married for almost 6 years and he makes my types curl every time. The best thing that we do that keeps us having fun is having really good communication about what we want or want to try. At first this was really hard. Practice makes prefect
- http://twitter.com/happywivesclub Happy Wives Clubâ„¢
  
  Yes, yes, yes! Practice most certainly makes perfect (or at least getting there ).
HDWife

I’m not often on the side of not wanting sex. My loverly husband is hypothyroid and even on his meds and at perfect balance his libido is a bit lower than mine. I’m thrilled to research sex; he’s creeped out by it. I find pleasing him exciting; he finds pleasing me difficult, tedious, and even a bit ‘yucky’ (but he tries, and sometimes I manage to remember that kinda makes it more like love). I love the idea of researching it together, but how do I share the enthusiasm?
- SheilaG
  
  Hi there! I just wanted to tell you that you are totally not alone.
  In about 30% of marriages the husband has the lower sex drive, so this
  isn’t unusual. Really.
  
  As for how to get him interested, I’d say think of sex as more than just intercourse. Do fun
  things together–start with giving him a really relaxing massage, or even playing chess naked in bed or something. It doesn’t have to be SEXUAL; it could just be INTIMATE.
  
  And the more you spend time having fun together outside the bedroom, the easier it is to
  have conversations like, “I really want sex to be something that’s fulfilling and exciting for both of us. Can we talk about how to get there?”
  
  But honestly, I’d also really talk to the doctor about this, just because it could be something that meds could help with. Doctors are really used to dealing with this.
  
  Hope that helps!
Laura

Kristi,
I completely understand the feeling of obligation when you’re not enjoying sex. Sex was very painful for me the first few years of marriage, then I has some health problems, and it was really hard to ever want to have sex because I was feeling so crummy and I always had to be the one to initiate it because my husband never knew when I would feel physically up for it. Sex definitely was all about obligation at that point. The thing that really helped was having my first child after 5 years of marriage. Giving birth really changed my body and made sex much more comfortable for me. But then of course, we added in a new little person to our family, as well as massive exhaustion, so sex really fell on the backburner for a while. We are just coming up on 8.5 years of marriage, and I really feel like we are just beginning to “get our groove.” It is such a process of learning of growing and praying… your comment was really affirming to me to know I wasn’t alone in experiencing those feelings during the first few yeas of marriage (because you can feel so alone in this sensitive topic!), and hopfully this comment is affirming for you, as well.
Ruth

I think I can’t agree entirely with the just do it approach. I have found that when I’m stressed, I really don’t want to have sex. I’ve found waiting to clear my thoughts makes for better sex (do yoga or take a walk). You really don’t want to be thinking about your mother-in-law when you’re doing it with her son Just saying.