My wife and I have 7 children and are expecting our 8th next march. My question is in regards to frequency of intercourse. What is considered “normal”? I seem to have a much higher drive than my wife. At what point should I back off?
I would avoid nagging her for sex at all. That’s just annoying. It makes it seem like its all about the sex and not about the two of you coming together as a couple.
St. Thomas seems to indicate 3-4 times a day is the limit (I wish).
He does?
It is more like once, maybe twice a week. I would prefer every day, but that seems to annoy her, which I really don’t understand.
Women’s sexual drives are divided between psychological states and physical states. A woman can be physically aroused while being psychologically turned off. Men do not have this division. If they’re physically aroused, they’re most typically psychologically aroused.
Thus what you need to focus on is not just how you touch her, but how to engage in psychological foreplay. This means recognizing the effects of stress on her sexual urge. You need to see acts of love and romance as a part of her sexual urge. If you start thinking about the amount of work it takes to stir your wive’s psychological urges, you’ll come to recognize that you don’t have an energy to do this on a daily basis. You’ll burn yourself out.
Women, at the same time, do need to come to understand the psychological componant to their urge. Its easy to just wait for the winds of passion to hit you randomly than to work with your sexual urge to not only go through the motions of having sex, but to experience it as a mutually loving and self donative act even when you didn’t start out “in the mood.”
The point is, your sex life should be a priority for both of you. It should not turn into “I need sex so give me sex.” She’ll feel drained and used this way. It should rather be recognized that sexuality penetrates all aspects of your relationship. You are being sexual when you hold hands, when you give an affectionate kiss, when you write little love notes. Sexual doesn’t have to be erotic. If you let your sexuality be a part of your daily expression of love, you can then build up for those special dates where you come together in intercourse.
Personally I think daily is a lot. Maybe a couple days in a row, but if you see it as your priority to psychologically seduce her before you physically seduce her, its a lot of work. You’d burn yourself out if you helped her out that much with reducing her stress to that degree on a daily basis. Pace yourself. Have special days where you build up for the bedroom. It doesn’t mean those days are the only days you’ll have sex. In fact, it can be good to not have some of those days lead all the way to intercourse. Its nice sometimes just to give each other back rubs with an openness to sex without the psychological performance pressure.
In the meantime though, your wife does have an obligation to learn her own psychological cues so that she can practice chastity not just in self denial, but in self mastery. She needs to know how to psychologically build herself up too so that she can go from not in the mood at all to smooth sailing toward an enjoyable loving intimate experience. She’ll need your help to do this, and nagging will work against this, but she should see it as a priority.
She seems to think they ALL must be sleeping, etc. before she wants to do anything. I am more of the mind to lock the older kids outside and tell them get some excercise and put the littles down for naps.
She may not be psychologically comfortable with locking kids out of the house. If her mind is going to be perpetually worrying about the kids or she’s embarrassed about her kids figuring out what being locked outside means, she can’t mentally get there.
Again, avoid nagging. Make it a priority, talk about it, and recognize her psycho-sexual componants.
I wrote about the psychological componant of sexuality here:
embersofincense.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/men-modesty-monkeys/
The modesty doesn’t really pertain, but I do think it offers some insight related