Sex Talk: How good is your communication? 

If you cannot talk to each other at all, how are the other parts of your body supposed to have an ecstatic conversation when it comes to kick-off?

One wife, responding to my column suggesting that before all fails, spouses can take time off and go on holiday – preferably without the children – and just rejuvenate their sex life, strongly disagreed.

Especially when the children are older and more independent, if you plan and save well, you can really see the country – and world – as a couple and these trips do wonders to a flailing sex life. I know a Ugandan couple that enjoys going on those gigantic cruise ships. They occasionally take off to Italy and board one sailing to the Caribbean islands and back.

They swear by the magic of that time away. Another couple with a smaller budget regularly goes to our national parks, local tourist havens, Dubai, Mauritius and Cape Town, among other places, to rediscover themselves.

So, the column was suggesting ways other couples can do the same, seeing as for many struggling couples and marriages, money is not even the issue. And indeed, the wife who wrote back is from a well-cushioned marriage. They have the money, their children are either out of the nest or in boarding school, yet there is absolutely zero joy in their union, she wrote.

She even fears to go away on holiday, because, “what shall we do without the children? What shall we talk about?”

“In the past, my husband actually proposed that we go on holiday just the two of us, and I conveniently forgot about it and just let that discussion suffer a stillbirth because I know how we are,” she wrote.

She is concerned that decades into their marriage, they prefer talking with other people or through the children, but not to each other, and she admits that their lovemaking is also “brief, to the point and perfunctory”. Not that they are in the middle of a cold war or being acrimonious to each other; “We just have nothing to talk about!”

Even when they try, her husband reportedly ends up shutting her up, talking down at her and “generally making me feel so stupid”.

I am sure many people relate to that. A spouse who is not a listener can be quite the nightmare, because they will also not be open to conversations about your sex life, if they cannot talk about basics such as work, the children, music or even politics! Don’t talk over your spouse. Don’t make them sound stupid. Don’t emasculate them.

It may sound like ‘just talk’ to you, but communication is key to your sex life, because lovemaking in itself is a very intimate conversation that feeds off your communication skills elsewhere. Don’t expect magic when your spouse feels unseen, unheard, unwanted. You have left little of yourself to be responded to.

When I go for my evening walks, I regularly bump into a famous, elderly couple walking their dogs, and I just love how much they seem to have to say to each other! They even pause to touch each other to emphasise a point, or nudge each other playfully along the way…it is beautiful to watch.

No wonder they have been married since the early nineties! I don’t have to interview them to know they still have a healthy sex life too. If you are not a listener/talker, chances are high that you are also unteachable and take any criticism really badly.

So, if you are a bad lover, you remain a bad lover and soon you become irredeemable. There is time to unlearn these bad habits and be intentional in the quest to be a better spouse and lover.

caronakazibwe@gmail.com