Hi there, first time poster here. I’m a cis woman and I’m writing in because my sex life with my partner (cis man) has fallen into a lull.
We’ve been together for almost two years, living together for the past two months. Since maybe six months ago, I feel like we’ve kind of lost the joy in sex. I got a Paragard IUD about nine months ago and I generally really like it, but it’s made my cervix more sensitive to deep penetration- my partner is on the larger side, so it can cause discomfort. We have the ohnut toy which we occasionally use, but it can still be hard to find a comfortable angle in certain positions. I think that this caused us to start having sex in the same ways a lot of the time. I also had a stressful situation at work for half of this year, which probably didn’t help my libido.
Somewhere along the way, it became difficult for my partner to last as long as usual during sex. In the past, we’d have about 15 minutes of penetration most of the time. For the past few months, my partner has had increasing difficulty lasting even 5 minutes. He spends a lot of sex “in his head” trying not to cum, which isn’t fun for him or for me (I can tell he’s distracting himself). I really like to orgasm in the cowgirl position, but it’s especially hard for my partner to not cum in that position. This leads to him telling me to stop or slow down very frequently, which is frustrating for me because I lose my rhythm. I feel like penetration ends right as I’m getting to peak arousal, and we’re still having very formulaic sex because it just doesn’t last long enough to switch positions more than once or twice. Frankly, sex has stopped being very fun for either of us. There was a night recently where we went on a date and when we came back, we started having a really hot time—porn, lingerie, lots of foreplay, etc. But then when he started to penetrate me, he came within a couple of minutes. I suggested he try to keep fucking me but it was very uncomfortable for him so we stopped. It was very frustrating for both of us.
We’ve talked about this more recently and acknowledged that things haven’t been great for either of us. He feels a lot of performance anxiety, which ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. On my end, I don’t really look forward to sex anymore because it just hasn’t been very hot or fun. I’ve suggested that he try masturbating a couple hours before we have sex, but he seems hesitant. I’ve also suggested that we get out of the habit of orgasm being the end of sex, so we plan on trying that (at least on nights where neither of us is too tired), but he’s told me that when he cums too early, he feels such shame and embarrassment that it’s hard for him to keep feeling into the sex we’re having.
I feel like we’re in a vicious cycle where we both have negative feelings about sex, which leads me to be disinterested in it and him to have anxiety about it. I’d love any advice on ways to break the cycle and start having fun, hot sex again.