Are You Having 'Copy Paste Sex'?

There’s nothing more gratifying than getting into the groove with a new lover. One day you’re sexual strangers cautiously feeling your way around, then click! You can send him crazy with a welltimed lash of your tongue and he’s so in tune with your rhythms, he can count down beats to your orgasm. Huzzah! Life is good.

It’s so good, you copy and paste the whole thing into the next night, and the next, and the next. Before you know it, your groove’s worn into a chasm so deep, you need a rescue helicopter to airlift you out. You wonder how you got from there to here and feel paralysed with fear about what it might mean for your relationship. This is the very definition of a sex rut.

Breaking the Habit

The Internet is awash with advice on how to spice up your sex life, as if all you have to do is put on a sexy costume and everything will be magically restored. In my experience we aren’t short on ideas; it’s confidence, inspiration, and motivation we need more of. Quick-fix solutions just make us feel dumb—if the answer’s that simple, why aren’t we just getting on with it? And there’s the rub. If we could, we would. But we can’t, because we’re stuck in the rut, panicking in case, erotically-speaking, this might be as good as it gets.

This is the kind of heart-sinking thinking that makes us shut our eyes and block our ears, hoping that if we ignore the problem, it’ll just go away. When it doesn’t, we blame external forces: work stress, money worries, tiredness...‘It’s not our fault!’ we wail. Then, when the frustration really sets in, we start blaming each other. Sex ruts are scary. In the early days of a relationship, passion is the glue that binds us together.

It’s understandably unnerving when the glue suddenly doesn’t feel quite so...sticky. It makes us fretful and insecure. ‘Have we gone off each other?’ ‘Is the honeymoon over?’ ‘What if this is all he’s got?’ At ease, ladies—ruts are just alarm bells ringing to remind us it’s time to move things along. Nothing in nature stands still; everything is either flourishing or fading. If we want our sex life to live long and prosper, we only need to pay a bit of attention. And that goes for singletons too.

If you’ve been flying solo for a while, you may have developed dating rituals and habitual ways of thinking about sex and romance that are harming your chances of enjoying either. If every sexual encounter ends up an unsatisfying one-night stand, you’re likely to lump them all together and conclude dating isn’t worth the effort—so you stop caring, and wonder why you’re still single. We even get in masturbation ruts, using the same old fantasies time and again, until we’ve worn away all that was once erotic about it.

We can’t help it—habit forming is instinctive. We develop rituals for everything. From the minute we wake up and stumble to the bathroom we’re on autopilot: shower, coffee, work. Then we head home for dinner, TV, and bed. Routines make us efficient. They’re practical, comforting, and reliable—essential for managing the daily grind, but definitely not sexy.

Taking Risks

In relationships, when the thrill of seeing one another naked has worn off and rut has set in, we know it’s time to up our game, but it feels risky. In the beginning, we wore our Sunday-best bedroom behaviour—hoping to show off our experience, skill, and sense of adventure without giving too much away. Trying to suss out what a new partner might be up for is a delicate operation. Share a tantalising titbit of your favourite kinky fantasy and you risk sending him running for the hills or, worse, judging you as some kind of freak.

This is why we keep our kinks under wraps, for later. ‘Later’ means, ‘When I feel more secure’, but the risk of rejection is directly proportionate to the depth of investment, so the deeper we love, the more we have to lose. The fear of causing a ripple in a boring-but-calm sea makes us re-evaluate: ‘Are my sexual needs really that important?’ The answer, of course, is yes!

Denying yourself the right to fulfilment opens the door to resentment, and nothing kills passion—or love—faster. It’s like Japanese knotweed; left unchecked it runs riot, choking you from the inside out. Scary? Absolutely. Resentment starts out as a reluctant sacrifice (‘I’ll go without for you’), but it will quickly become an angry accusation (‘I’m going without, for you’)—notice the difference. It gets triggered by petty annoyances—suddenly his leaving a wet towel on the bed, the toilet seat up, and not taking the rubbish out seem like reasonable grounds for breaking up. Of course, sex ruts are not to be confused with plain old bad sex— sex-rut sex was once so good that you put it on play-and-repeat.

But bad sex is always just that, and putting up with it will damage your relationship and your self-esteem. And in case your sex life is safe just because you have crazy-porn sex all over the house with an armoury of kinky costumes, you’re not. Sex ruts aren’t about boring sex; they’re about being bored about the sex you’re having— whatever form it takes. And I’ve had dozens of e-mails from readers who are sick of the all-you-can eat buffet and crave the simple hot-buttered toast variety.