Sex with your 'ex' good or bad?

Press, 5 April 1989, Page 14

Sex with your 'ex' good or bad?

LEE RODWELL asks counsellors about the consequences of going to bed with your former partner.

Would you have sex with your ex? Sarah did. She and her husband, Guy, had separated after 10 years of marriage and were getting divorced. But after months of indifference, Sarah suddenly began to see Guy with new eyes.

To anyone who has thankfully cut loose from a relationship that has gone sour, the very thought of having sex with a former husband probably seems bizarre. But, as Sarah, aged 31, explains, it can easily happen.

She says: “I hadn’t been interested in sex with Guy for at least two years before we split up, and I suppose that had been part of the problem. But once he was no longer living in the house and I only saw him when he came to take the children out, I began to feel differently towards him. I could see him as an attractive male again, instead of the enemy.”

One week-end when Guy brought the children back in the evening, Sarah suggested he stayed for supper and they sat down and talked as they hadn’t done for years. Not about their marriage or problems, but about work, the children, friends. “At midnight,” says Sarah, “it seemed crazy to insist he went home half way across London, so I asked him if he’d rather stay the night. “I made up the bed in the spare room and just as I was finishing, he came in. He didn’t say anything, he just put his arms round me and I went weak at the knees. Inevitably, we ended up in our bed.”

No-one knows just how many couples make love again, after going through the emotional upheaval of a separation or divorce. But from the evidence that is available it seems clear that it occurs more often than you might think. When Dr Glenn Wilson of the Institute of Psychiatry carried out a survey of divorced men in Britain,, he found that two in every 100 men had re-estab-lished a sexual relation-

ship with their former wives.

So why does it sometimes happen, and does it mean that everything will be all right again?

According to the experts, there are a variety of reasons why people go to bed with former partners. Sometimes the very fact that the relationship is over may remove the conflicts that destroyed it, so that a couple can feel free to be lovers again. American marriage counsellors Jordan and Margaret Paul say this can happen, even when sexual difficulties had been a contributing factor to the break-up. “Almost every couple gets into power struggles. These occur when one person wants something from the partner, doesn’t get it, but continues to try. “It’s like a tug of war and the more one partner pulls at the other demanding love, time, sex, communication or anything else they may need, the more the other resists.”

The Pauls say that sex is one of the most common areas for power struggles within a marriage— either in its own right, or because other issues are surfacing in bed. But power struggles ov£fr sex rarely occur in casual relationships, be-

cause lovers feel less need to control each other. That is why couples, once separated, can feel sexual towards each other in ways they may not have felt since the beginning of the relationship. But, warn the Pauls, rekindled passion alone is never enough for a successful reconciliation. Unless a couple can sort out what was going on in their emotional tug of war, they are likely to fall back into the same old patterns once they start to live together again. Sarah soon discovered the truth of this for herself. At first, she says, sex with Guy was better than it had been for years. So. after several weeks, during which she felt “more like a girlfriend than a soon-to-be ex-wife,” she agreed to give the marriage a second chance. Guy

moved back home, but the truce lasted less than a month.

She says: “All the things that had been bad before, went bad again. After a couple of weeks I felt as if I was walking on eggshells. I was afraid to say or do anything that would spark off a row. Nothing had changed. And I felt a fool for thinking that it would.”

According to the Glenn Wilson survey, divorced and separated couples were twice as likely to resume some kind of sexual relationship if they had children. He says: “This is probably because there is more likely to be some kind of on-going contact regarding access to the children. Maybe, too, there is more likely to be some effort made to reconstitute the marriage if there are children involved.”

Sex with your former can be a positive experience. Lesley, for instance, has no regrets about sleeping with a former lover. She and Philip had been living together for about three years and the relationship had just gone off the boil. Although the couple had got to the stage where they were bringing out the worst in each other, . neither seemed to want confront the situation.

Then Philip went away on business and Lesley contacted the man who had been her first real love. She says: “We’d been made for each other when we were young, but then I’d left home and he hadn’t, and although the relationship survived for a few more years, we gradually grew apart and in the end, he found someone else.

“But we’d stayed friends and we’d kept vaguely in touch, mostly through our families, so I knew for a fact that he didn’t have anyone permanent in his life just then.

“When we met, things seemed strange for the first few minutes, but then when we both relaxed it felt very familiar. It seemed natural to end the evening making love to him and it was just as

good as it had always been. “I needed someone to make me feel desirable — I wanted to enjoy sex with someone who was going to enjoy having sex with me. But I didn’t want to hop into bed with a virtual stranger and go through all the getting-to-know-you moves. And I didn’t want to complicate things by starting a new meaningful relationship.” Lesley says that having sex with her former lover was the catalyst that enabled her to suggest to Phillip that they part. The experience had given her back her confidence in her own sexuality and underlined jut how bad things really were between Philip and herself. “With my former lover,” she says, “I felt like a different woman both in and out of bed. I felt like me again.”

Although they saw each other — and slept together — once or twice a month for the next year, there was no talk of commitment on either side. The liaison died a natural death when Lesley met the man she was eventually to marry. For Lesley and her former lover the emotional scales were nicely balanced. Yet for others, those scales are more heavily weighted on one side than the other. As relationship counsellor Ros Shaw says: “Whenever we make love to someone, we are expressing a range of needs and emotions in a single sexual act, whether we are aware of them or not. We may need to feel wanted, reassured, dominated, dominating, forgiven, forgiving ... the list can go on and on. Rarely is sexual intercourse a matter of lust and nothing more. Often motives for having sex with one’s former partner are complicated. It may be for one of the partners, or even both, that sex outside a committed relationship has al.ways been a far more exciting experience than sex within one. Sleeping with your former re-intro-duces the necessary thrill and aphrodisiacal elements of risk, deception, secrecy.

Or perhaps there are undercurrents of revenge (“I’ll seduce him and get my own back on her”) or a desire to regain control and power (“I’ll show her that she can’t live without me”). It might seem that sex with your former should be avoided at all costs. Yet even marriage guidance counsellors are reluctant to go that far.

As Zelda West-Meads of Relate, Britain’s national marriage guidance organisation, says: “You need to think hard about what you might be getting into. Will it mean more to you than to your partner? Will it hold you back, stop you rebuilding your life? What will it do to any new relationships you — or he — might have? Are you really sure there is no harm in going ahead “just for old times” sake? —Copyright DUO

al wanted to enjoy sex with someone who was going to enjoy having sex with me.”