By Josey Vogels

I’ve been having sex with the same person for a while now. It’s great. Sure, sometimes I miss those lust-filled early days of throwing one another against walls and furniture because we just couldn’t get enough. But let’s face it, for a woman, it’s hard to come when you’re pinned up against the hall table. At least now -- now that he knows my body, now that our sex is all connected and meaningful -- I get to come most times. Unless I’m in a tent and my relatives are so close it sounds like they’re in the tent with me. But that’s another story.

The way things are going, it looks like I’ll be having sex with this same person for some time. As someone who has gone through periods of changing partners more often than I changed my socks, I have to say it freaks me out a little. When I get letters from people worried because they’ve been married for years and their sex life has lost its luster, I think, “Jeez, what’s the big surprise there?” I’d be more surprised if you were having sex with the same person for years on end and not getting bored at least once in a while.

It makes it easy to understand why middle-aged suburbanites get into swinging or having affairs. Me, I’m an old-fashioned girl at heart and still cling to the notion that I can find one person who will put up with me even when I start saggin’. Plus, I grew up in a family of eight and I’m done my sharing time.

So I’m stuck having sex with one person. Don’t get me wrong: There’s no one I’d rather be having sex with (well, okay, a girl’s gotta have a few fantasies), but I admit I worry about how long we can keep it fresh. And I’ve got the added pressure of being a sex columnist. People figure that by the nature of my job, I must have the kind of fabulously exciting sex life that has me doing it 24/7, swinging from the rafters. But even a steady supply of free sex toys doesn’t always keep you inspired.

I suppose we could try pushing the limits, maybe toy with the whole S&M thing or something. But I’m really just a vanilla girl. And latex makes me sweat too much. The other thing is that we both like to be dominated most of the time so we’d end up a couple of slave things lying on our floor waiting for someone to come along and tell us what to do. It’s already pretty funny sometimes. “You initiate.” “No, you initiate.” Usually, we laugh about this and make jokes about wanting sex but being too lazy to do anything about it, and then end up having sex because laughing together connects us and turns us on.

I think the hardest thing to avoid when you have sex with the same person for a long time is falling prey to routine. “It’s Tuesday! Gotta do it doggie style,” kind of thing.

One of the big problems for couples these days is time -- as in the lack of it. After working all day, dealing with kids if there are any, and trying to keep some kind of order in your personal life, a night in front of the TV or in bed sleeping is often more appealing than sex. This is why I have come to love Saturday mornings in bed with the boy. We’re rested and have time to connect and play. But after a while, even long, leisurely sexy Saturday mornings can feel like a rut.

One thing that has worked to keep things fresh lately is time apart. Various solo vacations and work commitments have seen us separated for good chunks of time, which keeps sex together fresh and fun. But you can’t always get away from each other.

Of course, routine isn’t just about doing it in the same place at the same time. It can also be about doing it in the same way. As a female friend put it recently, “It’s the same script we’ve learned since high school -- kissing: five minutes; manipulation of breasts: three min, and on from there.” (Though from the sound of it, some women I’ve talked to would consider themselves lucky to get even five minutes of kissing.)

My friend broke herself free of the script by sleeping with women. Two women together don’t adhere to a road map as much as a heterosexual couple might, she explained at the time.” There’s more of a willingness to improvise. Anything goes because there is no learned pattern.

Personally, I found sleeping with women extremely intimidating for these same reasons. But I think it’s a good point and one that heterosexual couples should learn from. I’m not saying you should go out and have lesbian sex (but hey, it might just be the thing you need to spice things up a little), but it is a New Year, why not use it to freshen things up, throw out some old scripts and start from scratch.

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