We Want to Renovate Our House to Make It … Sex Friendly. We Foresee It’ll Become an Issue.

How to Do It We miss doing it like this. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Oksana Borodina/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous! Dear How to Do It, My partner and I like to have sex (or at least fool around) in the bath, but we bought a house two years ago that has two bathrooms with two tiny bathtubs. In the future, I’m thinking of remodeling the downstairs bathroom, which is the bigger bathroom, to include a two-person tub. The problem is that the downstairs (technically it’s a finished basement) is where our two kids are going to live (the kids are currently 4 years old and still in utero, and we have roommates downstairs, but in five years or so, the kids will run out of space upstairs and need to move downstairs). They will have their own living room down there as well; it will be like the kids/teens’ space. So then it would be weird to have the bathtub we have sex in down there, right?! (The laundry, storage, and guest room are also downstairs, so we will have other reasons besides just sex to go down there.) But the upstairs bathroom is way too small. Tell me honestly: How weird is it to remodel the bathroom that will mostly be used by the kids to have a tub that’s big enough for sex? —What Do We Tell the Kids? Dear What Do We Tell the Kids, The only scenarios in which something might feel weird for me are ones where the two of you tell the kids this used to be your sex bathtub, or are having sex in the bathtub while they’re trying to do their homework on the other side of the wall and can’t avoid hearing you without leaving their spaces. In my view, you’d get a few years of regular sex bathtub usage, take a multi-year break or confine your bathtub romps to times when both children will definitely be out of the home for a long enough amount of time, and then be free to make liberal use of the space again when they’re both out of the nest. It doesn’t really matter what feels weird to me, though. What matters is what feels weird to you and your partner. Are you going to feel weird about it? The thing is, your kids will be picking up on subtle cues from you, your partner, and the community around them about what is typical, what is weird, and what is shameful. If you’re anxious during bathtime because you feel awkward about what you and your partner have done in that same bathtub, they’ll likely feel that on some level. If you’re as unbothered by the joy you and your partner have experienced, many, many rounds of Scrubbing Bubbles ago, in that space, as you are by having the kids in your bedroom (where you’ve presumably also had sex), I don’t see potential for harm. By the time your children are old enough to infer what a two-person bathtub was probably installed for, they’ll already know about eroticism and sex, possibly be having sex, and are quite likely to have developed the usual teenage tendency to say, “Parents, acting like humans, gross,” and move on to whatever they prefer to do and think about. Or they’ll be a bit more mature than average and consciously decide to respect your privacy. So ask yourself, and your partner, honestly: Are either of you going to feel so weird that you’re going to make this weird for your kids? If so, pass and rent the occasional couples retreat room. If not, go for it and enjoy it. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don’t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear How to Do It, I’m dating a man who is the biggest I’ve ever been with. He’s gentle, kind, and loving, and we have great trust with each other and incredible sex. I didn’t think of myself as a size queen before, but he’s turning me into one! I’ve never been super into blowjobs before, but something about his dick drives me wild, and I want to please him in that way. The problem is, he’s both so girthy and long that he’s too big to fit—I have basically no gag reflex, and he already goes past my back teeth. Are there any techniques or ways to take more of him? —Wanting Even More Dear Wanting Even More, Before we dig into what you requested, where’s the idea that you want to take your partner’s significantly sized shaft into your throat coming from? Is that part of the desires he inspires in you? Are you feeling like you need to do that particular act in order to fulfill the specifications of a blowjob? Is it something he enjoys? I ask because some men actively dislike being deep-throated for various reasons, and because one of the main ways of handling a massive member is to use creativity, tongue, and hands to minimize or avoid having the entire length engulfed by your throat (unless, of course, both parties really want that). So you’ll need to adapt this list of potential tips and tricks to suit your own anatomy, your partner’s anatomy, and each of your preferences. The first question is teeth. Sometimes it is both possible and helpful to wrap your lips slightly around the edges of your top teeth, bottom teeth, or both, to reduce scratching. You’ll want to have saliva lubricating your lips if you’re doing this. Other times, wrapping the lips makes it harder to relax your jaw as much as is needed to prevent the molars from scraping. Play around, see what’s possible, and if you have to choose between protecting him from your front teeth edges or your molars, let your partner tell you which one is the priority. With regard to the molars, and an eye toward heading into the throat, try (in all seriousness) envisioning yourself opening your mouth, jaw, and throat like a python as though you have chosen to engulf, and everything above your collarbones is widening into an open maw. If mythical-style imagery works better for you, try imagining yourself as Charybdis, Tiamat, or Sihuanaba. As we’re moving into the throat, that openness will continue to help you. The more you can extend that feeling to your sinuses and nasal passages, the better you’ll be able to breathe while your throat is full, and for unknown reasons, extending your tongue out—especially while the back is down, like for a throat exam at the doctor—tends to help. As a bonus, that means your tongue is covering the edges of your front teeth on the bottom. Being able to take in air means you can disengage when you want, rather than when your body requires oxygen (which is very frequently). You also want to think about the alignment of your mouth and throat—the more of a straight line it is, the easier to get his dong where you want it to go. Penises bend a little bit, but not that much when they’re hard, you know? Now, when you said you have basically no gag reflex, you might have meant that you have basically no control of your gag reflex, or maybe you meant exactly what you wrote. Either way, you will almost certainly feel a desire to gag at some point and probably actually gag eventually. Fighting that gagging tends to be painful. Accepting it as a response to what you are currently doing with your body can actually offer you more physical control. People are often able to find stages between the gag reflex being triggered and outright vomiting, and those midpoints can be embraced as an involuntary squeeze (which some report as a pleasant sensation around their penis) that is usually accompanied by a fluid that is very slippery but doesn’t have the acid burn associated with actually throwing up. I have no information on what exactly this substance is, so choose the level of risk you’re comfortable with, and rinse your mouth well with plain water when you’re finished with the blowjob. How recently you’ve eaten, and what you’ve eaten, seem to impact the whole situation, but that also varies wildly by individual. Personally, I am more prone to choking and spluttering if I haven’t eaten something in the past couple of hours, but I would never deep-throat less than six hours after consuming something spicy. I’ve seen people who can eat a whole submarine sandwich and go to town with no problems, and others who can’t have anything in their stomach at all. Try all of that. Try anything else that comes to mind or feels fun. If you’re running into a specific issue, troubleshoot from there. You’re doing this because you want to, and as long as you follow that desire and listen to your body, you’ll be OK. Share Your Story With How to Do It! Readers often have great suggestions for our letter writers, occasionally disagree with a point our How to Do It writers make, or simply want to provide some additional advice. Each month, Jessica and Rich will be replying to some of these comments and suggestions from readers. Write to us! Dear How to Do It, I’m a 36-year-old woman married to a 35-year-old man. We’ve been together for 10 years and have three boys, ages 9, almost 8, and 6. When we first got together, our sex life was amazing. We had sex often. But after our oldest was born, my sex drive dropped dramatically. We were dealing with a new baby, financial problems, stress, and then more pregnancies. Years later, we now go months without sex, and I know the reason is me. My husband used to initiate, but after being rejected so many times, I think he simply stopped trying. I’ve tried figuring out what happened to me. I stopped birth control because I wondered if that was killing my libido. I thought being overweight and uncomfortable with my body might be the problem, but I’ve since lost more than 70 pounds, and nothing changed. I don’t masturbate nearly as much as I used to, either. Our life is exhausting. But I’m starting to wonder whether exhaustion is only part of the problem. Sex with him feels different to me now. I used to love dirty talk and longer sexual sessions. Now when he tries to talk dirty to me, I feel awkward instead of turned on. This sounds horrible, but sometimes I look at him and think he’s kind of lame. He’s a good husband and contributes around the house, and I really do love him. What makes this even more confusing is that I haven’t completely lost my sexual imagination. When I watch porn, I’m drawn to kinky scenarios—group sex, threesomes, women together, power dynamics, and rougher sex. I can find those things incredibly hot in fantasy. My husband and I even tried a boss/secretary role-play once, thinking that might help, and instead I just felt awkward. It’s the same with dirty talk. I used to enjoy it, but now when he lowers his voice and whispers something sexual in my ear, instead of getting turned on, my brain focuses on something completely unsexy, like feeling his hot breath on me. I don’t understand why something I can find incredibly hot in porn or fantasy feels almost cringeworthy when my husband does it. I also sometimes have sexual dreams about other men. If my brain is still capable of creating sexual fantasies about other people, what does that say about what’s happening between my husband and me? I feel incredibly guilty. At the same time, I can’t make myself want intercourse with him just because I feel guilty, and I don’t think forcing myself through sex I don’t want is going to fix our marriage. I don’t want to blow up my marriage. I love my husband and our family. I also don’t want him to spend the rest of his life in a marriage where his wife never wants him. How do I figure out whether this is exhaustion, low libido, resentment, loss of attraction, or something deeper about my marriage? Why can things turn me on in fantasy but feel so awkward when I try them with my husband? —Wanting to Want Him Dear Wanting to Want Him, My instinct is that it’s not a question of which factor you listed is the culprit so much as which of the factors are involved and how they are tangled up with and complicating each other. Which, for a busy woman, is incredibly annoying because that means this is a puzzle to solve and will almost certainly require trial and error and time to sort out. Pregnancies make a significant demand on your body and have major effects on your hormones and brain structure. If you were breastfeeding, that’s another demand on your physical resources, and the sleep deprivation of caring for infants is a marathon that is followed by the chaos of caring for small humans who are mobile at alarming speeds but have yet to develop much in the way of self-preservation skills. All of those life stressors you mentioned can be a factor as well, and while birth control does a lot of good for a lot of people, it can knock some of us out of whack. It can take more than a few months for your body to balance back out. If you have a good relationship with your general practitioner or gynecologist, start by asking one of them to check out your general bloodwork and hormones to see whether there’s something physical they can start resolving. Either of those doctors should also be able to do a basic evaluation for depression, or you can proceed straight to a therapist for that—if you start with a therapist or are referred to one, you’ll want someone who has experience with mothers and is comfortable discussing sexuality. These focuses might not be listed on a provider’s profile or website, so it’s worth asking during an initial phone call or consultation appointment if you’re otherwise getting a good feeling about a potential therapist. Whether you meet criteria for a diagnosis of depression or not, a good therapist can help you talk through your own feelings and consider the details of what might be happening on the emotional end and what could be possible as far as making changes. Because the vast majority of straight couples with children have a home and childcare responsibility ratio that falls heavily on the mother, it’s worth thinking through how much support you had from your first pregnancy and throughout. I know all of that has to be contextualized within whether either partner has work obligations outside the home, and how much time, energy, and brainpower that work takes, but are you expected to do more than your fair share in terms of tasks or the executive function of coordinating everything? That’ll easily unbalance a relationship and contribute to suffocating the sexual spark. Do you ever get time to rest and feel recovered? We need that in life, and we often go into survival mode when we don’t have it for extended periods of time. And does the context of being “touched out” resonate at all? Small children often want a lot of cuddling, and it’s a known phenomenon for primary caregivers to get to a point where any touch from anyone at all (including their husband, whom they love and previously found very attractive) is unwelcome. Since you’ve stayed loyal to your husband, we don’t have any information about how you’d experience being touched in a sexual manner by someone other than him (bravo on that, by the way, and I encourage you to continue honoring your vows). Have you tried fantasizing about him when he isn’t around? If so, is there anything about the level of arousal you experience in that context that might give you a better picture of the situation? Your husband has almost certainly noticed the changes in how the two of you relate to each other. Find time for a talk where you let him know you love him, are committed to the marriage, and want to change the state of your marital relations, but are currently at a loss for how to start. Make sure to include the fact that the ways your body responds to sexual contact and other sensations changed in significant ways at some point, and you want to understand how to rebuild intimacy but currently do not. He might see areas that stand out as likely factors that I can’t see because I’m not there, and you can’t see because you’re at the center of it. He may be able to provide support. At the very least, he’ll have heard, from your lips, that you see this issue between the two of you and are working on figuring out what can be done. —Jessica More Advice From Slate I’ve got a bit of a moral dilemma that I’m hoping you can help with. My husband (M 36) and I (F 33) have been happily married for nearly five years. When we first got together in our 20s, we were completely transparent about our kinks and nonmonogamous leanings. What started as a pretty standard swinging arrangement evolved to us playing separately or my husband occasionally watching or joining in with my playmates (e.g., MFM)… Advice Sex