Love in Lockdown

With a contribution from Mrs. Victoria Plum

I’ve been thinking about Covid recently. The virus is still doing the rounds but is so much less frightening than it was a few years ago. Lockdown was a time of great learning for me. At the time I was in a relatively new relationship. I was an extrovert whose physical and social support network had disappeared, living with an almost adult introvert child who did not enjoy hugs. My partner was living with 8 family members and running an enterprise which was very busy during the pandemic.

This was when I understood for the first time I had an insecure attachment pattern. Like many people I felt very unsafe and adrift without the social and physical connections I normally relied on in my life. It disturbed me so much that I engaged the help of psychosexual coach the Reverend Rowan Bombadil. The work I did with them really helped me understand more about myself and my needs and how to communicate about them in healthy way. I was so grateful for the sessions we did online. Having deep conversations face-to-face online was something I would never have considered before but worked really well. I found the slight distance actually helped me to share more easily. I think those sessions gave me insight and calmed me in a way that saved me from adding extra stress to our relationship in a difficult time.

This time of separation was particularly difficult because it was at point in the relationship when we would have been having a lot of sex. We did have a go at sharing intimacy while connected by phone. This was an enjoyable novelty but ultimately we preferred to wait impatiently until we could be together. An otherwise difficult house move proved to be a gift when it enabled a few stolen days together of illegal sexual abandon that filled my cup enough to last until we could be legitimately re-united.

We weren’t the only ones who had to get creative during that time.

Thank you to Mrs. Victoria Plum for sharing the following story:

Lockdown with my family was mostly good and I enjoyed having my 2 older kids at home and getting more family time together.

With both us working from home and no travel time, my husband and I spent more time in each other’s company than we had for a long time, possibly ever.

Sometimes it was a bit hard to manage, there was limited space and we had to work around that, as well as the fact we annoyed each other sometimes, but actually the reality is we do really like, as well as love each other, and the time in lockdown brought us a bit closer.

We’ve been married for over 25 years now and from what I can tell, we have a pretty good sex life compared to what I hear from some of my friends of the same age.

However for my husband and I’s desire to spend “quality” time together, lockdown caused a few problems. It’s hard to be intimate with two teenagers in the house. They were staying up late at night and often going to bed at the same time as us. On top of that knowing that they were in the next room to us made it difficult to feel in the mood for any loving.

After a while we realised that if we wanted to have a sex life we were going to need to be a bit more strategic about it, so we gave it some thought and had a (quiet) discussion about what could be done.

We decided that the morning was the best time to have sex, as the girls are sleeping in so late.

Our bed doesn’t really make a noise, but it still felt uncomfortable knowing that they might hear us.

So we had figured out the time, but not the place.

Luckily we have a downstairs toilet and shower room so we decided to give it a go in there.

We got up sharpish one morning and went downstairs.

Now although this turned out to be the solution, it wasn’t entirely straight-forward.

You see the shower room is not very big. My husband to let you understand is 6ft 3. This caused a few problems. With him being quite a bit taller than me it’s not easy to stand up and have sex.

Also I’m not so light that he can lift me up and wrap me around his waist.

What came next was us trying out different sexual positions. With that came lots of stretching, grunting and quite a lot of giggling -all while trying to be quiet and not wake the kids.

After a lot of dedicated experimentation, we found the best position was on our hands and knees, half in the shower area and half out. As you can imagine it was a bit uncomfortable on the knees!!

After some practice however, we managed to get better at it and got into the habit of using a towel folded on the floor, to protect our knees. So that’s what we did until the end of lockdown.

I was delighted when the time came when the kids started going out with their friends again, and we could get back to bouncing in our comfy bed.

It was definitely a challenge and we had to make more of an effort to keep the sex going, but it was well worth it. We had some real fun.

Maybe you have a story you’d like to share for the benefit of other women?

If you would like to contribute a piece of writing to the Red Velvet Revelry project please get in touch I’d love to hear from you. You can find writing guidelines here, find more information about the project here and you can email me here.

With love and joy,

Marie Louise

Queen of Revelry