Maintenance sex: Why the most successful long-term couples do it, even when they’re not in the mood

For 28-year-old Millie and her partner Jack*, Sundays are all about sex. Or, at least, part of Sunday. The couple have assigned the whole day for intimacy. It’s a “whole day where we don’t have to think about anything else,” Millie tells Cosmopolitan UK. The couple generally have a pretty healthy sex life, but there was a time in their four-year relationship when their desire for sex started shifting out of kilter. “Both our libidos were all over the place and we were never meeting at the right time, so when mine was high, his was low, and vice versa,” says Millie. “We spoke about it and I said I wanted to be having more sex. And then he was like, ‘Well, so do I, but we’re never in the same place’. So how do we build that anticipation again?” Millie is pretty open about sex. It’s one of the topics she discusses on her 180k-strong TikTok page @milliegshields, alongside other wellness-focused content. So when she encountered this issue in her relationship, she was comfortable suggesting to Jack that they start scheduling sex. “At the beginning, we just talked about how and when it was going to happen. Like, ‘What’s your Friday looking like?’,” she says. “Then we joked about having ‘Sexy Sundays’. It brought a bit of fun to it because we could ask each other what the agenda was for Sunday.” Scheduled sex gets a bad rap — and sure, at first glance it might seem the opposite of sexy to be pencilling intimacy in the same diary you’re organising meetings with your boss, but this kind of ‘maintenance sex’ can be a genuinely great way to keep that elusive spark alive in our relationships. In fact, a 2023 Lovehoney survey shows that two out of five of us are already scheduling sex, while there’s a decent number (38%) who say they aren’t right now, but would consider it. The reality is that it’s normal for sex to dwindle in a long-term relationship for a whole host of reasons. “Sex can be more frequent earlier on in relationships because there’s that novelty factor,” explains sex and relationship therapist Miranda Christophers. “Then it tends to settle down. Life changes and people might be busy with work or children.” Sex educator and author Milly Evans (whose book HONEST: Everything They Don’t Tell You About Sex, Relationships, and Bodies makes an appearance in Netflix’s Sex Education) adds: “It’s familiarity and getting into routines [that can cause couples’ sex lives to diminish]. Often when people start living together, they’re not planning dedicated focus time with their partner the same way that you would when you first start dating. There’s more quantity of time, but less quality.” Should we all be scheduling sex? Scheduling sex can create that excitement again and guarantee time for connection. For Millie and Jack, scheduling sex has encouraged them to be more explorative. “If you know that you’ve planned a day when you’re going to have sex, you can say, ‘I’ve seen this and I'd love to try it’. That can be a difficult conversation to have with your partner, but if you’re already talking [about scheduling sex], then it’s easier to drop things like that in.” Scheduling doesn’t mean that specific acts need to take place. Christophers encourages clients to view this as time set aside for intimacy in general. “It’s not saying, ‘At eight o’clock on a Sunday we’re going to have sex’,” she explains. “It could be that, actually, Sunday evening is going to be your time. If you’ve got other commitments, you’re going to shut them off, not be distracted by phones, and do something nice.” Tatiana Ashborn, host of Under the Sheets podcast, which sees Ashborn interview everyone from her best mates to her granny about their sex lives, agrees: “When life moves so quickly, it’s important to schedule a time but not the outcome. It’s about less pressure and more connection.” In one of Ashborn’s recent episodes, long-term couple Chris and Catherine discuss sex scheduling in their 11-year relationship. Chris tells Cosmopolitan UK that they started taking a more intentional approach to their sex life after moving in together. “It’s not in the diary, it’s more a conscious note,” he explains. “We always laugh that Wednesday is a scheduled day because it’s been a few days since the weekend. We’re quite open about it. We’ll say things like, ‘We’ll go shopping, I need to return some clothes, then you can have sex with me later’. It’s fun communication.” Not everyone sees scheduling sex as exciting and flirty, though. In the comments section on a clip of Chris and Catherine’s Under the Sheets episode, some viewers declared: “So much for romance.” For sex educator Evans, these attitudes are misguided. “People think relationships should be automatic, whereas sometimes you need to have manual methods to keep your relationship going,” she says. “That’s really healthy behaviour. Just expecting your relationship to stay alive just through sheer will alone isn’t how it works, especially in long-term partnerships.” Tapping into our approach to desire We also all experience desire pretty differently. For some of us — and to take the words of literally every Love Islander’s mouth — the urge to ‘rip the clothes off’ our partner may hit us out of the blue, while others may find themselves in the mood only after, say, their partner comes onto them. These styles of desire are called ‘spontaneous’ and ‘responsive’. Christophers breaks down what they actually mean: “Spontaneous desire is the kind of desire that people intrinsically feel. They would notice the desire before the arousal. With responsive desire, as the word suggests, it’s in response to something. That might be sexual stimuli like reading a sex scene in a novel or something they start to do with their partner, then the desire kicks in.” Millie says her sexual desire became less spontaneous after experiencing a sexual assault. “Having gone through that, I lean more towards responsive desire because it helps for me to have emotional closeness and feel safe, and then [sexual] intimacy comes afterwards.” Evans says that developing an understanding of how you experience desire can have a huge impact on both your sex life and your relationship with yourself. “People think there’s something wrong with them if they don’t experience spontaneous desire,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “It’s not true at all. It’s so common to need some stimulus to start feeling like you want to have sex. Then for partners who experience spontaneous desire, it can be confusing if your partner isn’t able to reciprocate, it might make you feel like you’re not desirable. A lot of what people might consider to be sexual dysfunction could probably be explained by learning what desire looks and feels like for them.” She adds that scheduling sex might be particularly helpful to neurodivergent people, who may experience other factors that mean they struggle to get into the right headspace for sex. “With autistic people, sex scheduling can be helpful because of sensory issues,” she says. “They might want to have a shower or need their partner to shower before they have sex, or maybe they are sensitive to touch. So, if they have time to prepare for it, it might make them feel calmer and less reactive. People with ADHD can struggle with task-switching, so knowing when that’s going to happen can be beneficial to ease into it.” For those whose desire style is more responsive, it may take more than just the suggestion of sex to get you into a sexy headspace. Particularly in long-term relationships, there may be times when your partner comes on to you and you initially think, CBA, but sometimes it takes getting into it to fully awaken your desire. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should feel pressured to have sex. “Consent is an ongoing response, and desire still does include choice and agency,” asserts Ashborn. “It’s important that you know if you’re still not feeling up to it, then you can say no.” There are questions to ask yourself when you have responsive desire, says Evans: “[This might look like], ‘Do I feel open to having sex? Maybe I don’t really feel like I’m in the mood for sex, but would it be nice to make out with my partner? Yeah, actually, I’d really like that’. You might find that after that, you do actually feel turned on, and would love to have sex.” She also recommends solo play. “Learning about your body through masturbation is a great way to understand what turns you on and what it takes for you to get into the right headspace.” Millie finds it helps to set the scene to put herself into a spicier mindset. “If I’m not feeling particularly sexy or I’m due on my period, then I might light a candle and make sure I feel comfortable, whether it’s lingerie or pyjamas,” she says. This is when your partner can come in handy, too. “Things like flirty texts are little drops of intimacy or care into your day. Even if it's dropping off someone’s Vinted parcel that they haven’t got around to yet. They might sound like tedious things, but they’re so beneficial.” And whether you’ve organised intimacy with your partner via a Google diary invite or a steamy sext, Millie affirms that once you get to your scheduled slot it most definitely feels sexy. “One of the best things about scheduling sex is that it reignites that giddy feeling,” she concludes. “It’s so easy to lose that in day-to-day life. It brings all of that fire back.” *Name has been changed

Maintenance sex: Why the most successful long-term couples do it, even when they’re not in the mood

Desire isn’t always spontaneous. Sometimes it takes getting into it to really get into it.

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