Have We Forgotten How To Be A Couple?!

Welcome to Ask A MWLTF (Yes, that’s Mother Who Likes to F*ck.), a monthly anonymous advice column from Scary Mommy. Here we’ll dissect all your burning questions about motherhood, sex, romance, intimacy, and friendship with the help of our columnist, Penelope, a writer and mental health practitioner in training. She’ll dish out her most sound advice for parents on the delicate dance of raising kids without sacrificing other important relationships. Email her at askpenelope@scarymommy.com.

Dear MWLTF,

My husband and I assumed things would get easier once our kids were older. Everyone warns you about losing your relationship when the kids are little, but no one told us that teenagers would bring a different set of challenges. Our two teens stay up later than we do, they’re constantly in and out of the house with friends, and I feel self-conscious having sex with my husband in our own home. We used to joke that we’d “get our marriage back” once the kids were older, but now I feel like we’re roommates who occasionally discuss college applications. Is this just a normal stage of family life, or should I be worried that we’ve forgotten how to be a couple?

Signed,

Roommates Until Further Notice

Dear Roommates Until Further Notice,

There is one great irony of raising teenagers that no one warns you about: After years of wishing your children would become more independent, they suddenly become independent in ways that make them feel almost impossible to escape.

Toddlers are physically attached to you. Teenagers are psychologically omnipresent. They’re asleep until noon, then somehow awake until 1 in the morning. They’re raiding the refrigerator at midnight, FaceTiming friends from the basement, wandering in after football games, leaving three pairs of shoes in front of your bedroom door. The house belongs to them in a way that can make parents feel like permanent guests.

And unlike toddlers, teenagers know what sex is.

That changes something.

I think many parents experience an odd reversal during these years. Just as your children are beginning to inhabit their own emerging sexuality — crushing on classmates, falling in love, discovering what it means to be looked at — you become acutely aware of your own. Or perhaps more accurately, you become acutely aware of trying not to have one. Suddenly you’re whispering, locking doors, listening for footsteps, wondering whether the bed squeaks. It’s enough to make anyone decide that scrolling Instagram is less emotionally taxing.

We tend to think desire disappears because of exhaustion, and certainly that happens. But self-consciousness is a surprisingly effective contraceptive.

There’s also something deeper going on. By the time your kids are teenagers, you’ve spent well over a decade practicing being co-parents. You’ve become exceptionally good at running a household together. You can coordinate orthodontist appointments, SAT prep, soccer schedules, and who forgot to buy milk without missing a beat. The partnership is impressive. But sometimes, without noticing, the romance gets folded into the same category as all the other things you’ll get to eventually.

The myth is that the empty nest will fix this. Just hang on a few more years, people say. Then you’ll have sex in every room of the house.

Maybe.

But I don’t think desire is something we put into storage until the last kid leaves for college. I think it’s more like a language. If you stop speaking it for long enough, it doesn’t disappear... but it does become awkward. You lose a little fluency. You have to remember how to find each other again.

The good news is that you don’t have to wait for graduation to begin.

I’m not talking about forcing yourselves into elaborate date nights or putting “have sex” on the family calendar between driver’s ed and the orthodontist. Most parents already feel like they’re failing at enough things. This doesn’t need to become another assignment.

Instead, I’d get interested in the smaller ways you’ve stopped being a couple. Do you ever touch each other without it being purely practical? Do you flirt? Do you tell each other stories that have nothing to do with your children? When was the last time you laughed together about something that wasn’t happening in your family group chat?

Those moments aren’t foreplay in the conventional sense. They’re reminders that underneath the machinery of family life are two people who once found each other fascinating.

And as for the practical problem of teenagers who never seem to leave the house? Give yourself permission to reclaim some adult privacy. Lock the bedroom door. Turn on music. Let your kids wonder why you’re unavailable for an hour. Contrary to what many parents seem to believe, children do not benefit from imagining that their parents have ceased to exist as sexual beings. In fact, there’s something quietly reassuring about growing up in a house where the marriage still has boundaries, where the couplehood didn’t disappear into parenthood.

Your teenagers are supposed to be developing lives that don’t revolve around you. You’re allowed to do the same. The goal isn’t simply to survive until the empty nest. It’s to arrive there remembering that before you were parents, you were lovers — and to leave enough breadcrumbs over these next few years that you’ll be able to find your way back to each other.