Fatigue can have a devastating effect on your sex life. We all have times when we don’t feel up to having sex, but when you have an ongoing lack of energy it becomes very easy to use what little energy you have for everything else, and leave sex until the end of the day, when you’re just too tired.
There is no single solution to the problem of lack of sex because of fatigue. But a common barrier that you may not be aware of is creativity.
It’s a problem that most people think that “real sex” must include intercourse. The truth is that sex is more than intercourse and “real sex” can happen in a thousand different ways. After all, what is sex? Ultimately sex is about a connection with yourself and/or someone else. It’s about an exchange of pleasure and intention. It’s about play and pleasure.
If you aren’t having sex because you don’t have the energy for the things you think sex includes, one way to make change is to expand what those things are that you put in the sex box. Here are a few sexual activities that require less physical exertion and, with the right intention and attitude, can bring intense pleasure to you and your partner.
Kissing
You can kiss someone without moving anything other than your lips. The right kind of kiss (right time, right place, right energy) can take a partner to the heights of passion without requiring much physical exertion on your part. If you think kissing is just the thing you do before sex, think again.
In fact, think back to your earliest consensual experiences with sex. Remember the thrill (and maybe fear) of not knowing when you were going to first kiss, of not knowing what that first kiss would feel like. You can’t bring that all back, but you can bring a new attitude to kissing but making it the main event and not just the opening act. So get into a position that’s comfortable and doesn’t require you to strain your neck or other body parts (a comfy chair, or in bed with lots of pillows) and get kissing.
Breathing
Everyone who is alive, breathes. Whether you do it on your own or you have help from a machine, we all have some control over our breath and so we all have access to a way of being sexual without doing anything extra physically. Barbara Carrellas, an author and sex educator, does a lot of work with what she calls “erotic breathing“. This is work that both requires and creates energy, so I wouldn’t call it low energy sex. But it doesn’t require physical exertion. Barbara likes to say that our sexuality runs along the breath, and alone or with a partner, there are ways to create a sexual exchange through breath alone.
Gazing
If you and your partner are both sighted, another sexual activity, which may sound silly at first, is gazing, or eye gazing. There are some specific tantric techniques for gazing, but the basics are to be alone in a place where you have some quiet time, few distractions, and begin to look into each other’s eyes. Try it for a minute without having any goal in mind. If you like it you can experiment with trying to communicate your sexual thoughts and desires without talking, just through your eyes. Combining gazing and breathing can be surprisingly powerful. It can feel like time shifts a little bit (much like it does for some people when they are having more physical sex play).
Hair Brushing
Speaking of sounding silly, this is a tip that often gets a laugh when I suggest it in a workshop, but believe it or not, brushing hair can be a kind of sex. First there’s the intention, if you are doing the brushing you are attending to your partner on many levels. Then there is the stimulation. Having a brush (or comb) run through our hair, the feeling of the tines on our scalp, the slight tug from the brush or your hand, all of these things create stimulation. And while it may not result in an orgasm (although for some people it might) it absolutely can be a sexual act. If it’s a chore, forget it. But if you make time, let your partner get undressed and completely comfortable, and spend 10 minutes touching and brushing their hair and head, you might be surprised by the end result. Brushing repetitively can be tiring, so making sure your partner is positioned lower down can help. For example, you can sit in a chair and they can sit on the floor.
Sexual Touch
One way of thinking about sexual touch is to assume that you are touching someone in order to get them to orgasm or get them to another place. Another way of thinking about touch is that you do it to experience the moment. It’s not to achieve a goal in the future, but just to enjoy the very act of touch for what it is in the moment. Depending on what causes fatigue you can touch different parts of your body (the back of your hand, your legs, your nose or head). Sitting up and over them in a massage position may be tiring, so you can also ask them to position themselves in a way that allows you to touch with the greatest amount of attention and the least physical exertion.
Sex Toys
Sex toys, particularly vibrators, can do things that no human can do. If providing enough stimulation is exhausting, adding a lightweight vibrator can make a huge difference. There are wearable vibrators which don’t require you to hold on to them and there are products like sex position pillows and sex swings that may give you more movement by taking pressure off certain parts of your body.
