I Don't Regret Having Sex With My Ex Even Though We Couldn't Stand Each Other

I liked sex with my husband when we were married, but not much else. I liked the way his skin smelled, I liked his level of body hair, which is honestly not a small thing. I liked that he knew what I liked before I did sometimes and that he never needed to ask if something felt good, although now I know I should have wondered about that part a little. He never asked me if I was happy or satisfied or comfortable, in life or in bed or during a quickie in the guest bath. He never asked because he didn’t really care about me all that much. I thought I cared about him a whole lot, but now I know I just liked to have sex with him. And so I kept having sex with him for a long time after he became my ex-husband.

I tried leaving three or four or 10 times before I finally did it, rocking the car of my life back and forth in the ditch that was our marriage before finally pulling free. I was 30 years old, a mom of four little kids. My hair still had that postpartum stringiness to it, my skin not quite mine again yet since my littlest one was just two. My mother told me this marriage was my last kick at the can and I tended to agree whenever I caught a look at myself in the mirror. Or looked at my empty bank account or my tiny rental house full of my own children. I could see my own stats, my imagined dating profile, my life that I was still trying to figure out that read like a red flag Bible.

And so I kept having sex with my ex-husband. The first time we had sex in our After was the night he came over to talk about custody arrangements. Parceling out time with the boys, our lives reduced to hours and weekends. Sad, not sexy. And yet we ended up in our bedroom that was now my bedroom, both of us feverish and quiet and animal.

The next night I called him to come help me take his dresser but also to have some more of that quiet animal sex after the kids were in bed. He called me a few days later to talk about some bill or other but really it was just his turn to want the only thing we’ve ever had in common, sex.

We fought every time we saw each other. Not in that romance novel way where it was all just a big misunderstanding based on old wounds. We were giving each other new wounds all the time, some of which probably won’t ever really heal. The fighting didn’t lead to sex, the fighting was the thing we did on our way to the sex that we both knew would happen. In the car, in the laundry room, on the sofa. I told no one, our weird quiet sex was my thing only.

I had as much sex as I could because I knew this would be it for me for a while. I couldn’t imagine someone new coming into my bed, looking at me or making bad noises or meeting my kids, so I figured this was the next best thing while it lasted. I was a chipmunk squirreling away nuts for a long, dry winter. I was storing up sex memories in all the different corners of my life. This way, when I eventually got bored or lonely, I could find a little nut of a memory and snack on that for a bit. Would a fresh batch of nuts have been better? Probably. But I was moving into a nut-less tundra and knew well enough to take what I could get.

It wasn’t so bad. I was getting lots of physically satisfying sex with a person who hated me but knew my body. This was fine with me. I needed to get that body of mine well fed on enough sex to get me through the next few years. I didn’t know it then, but those few years would turn out to be nearly a decade. Even after I took our kids and moved to a new town, and he was angry and mean and yes, even dating someone new. Even when our conversations got so awful that my mouth was full of cold sores from stress and I developed insomnia, even then I still had sex with him a few times.

I don’t regret storing away all my little sex memory nuts for a rainy day. Even then a part of me knew why I was doing it. A bigger part of me wondered why he was doing it. He would not be going through a long sex drought. Far from it. His nuts were all neatly collected up by other women who were ready to keep him fed and dry and happy through as many winters as he might want.

I know now that he didn’t think much about the why. Just the how and the when and for how long.

Eventually we stopped having sex. Our new lives apart became bigger than our bodies and my kids needed me. This would become the song I sang every morning and every night. The reality of who we were to each other became more obvious, more pressing, more awful than our desire for each other. We didn’t talk about why we stopped having sex because we stopped talking. We stopped being anything to each other. His new (mostly) kid-free life bewitched him, and my new life alone with my kids engulfed me.

They became my only thing. They needed me. This kept me from needing too much for my own body for a long long time.

Instead, I just feasted on all of those sex memory nuts when I felt lonely. And they got me through.

Jen McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She lives in Canada with four boys and teaches life writing workshops where someone cries in every class. When she is not traveling as often as possible, she’s trying to organize pie parties and outdoor karaoke with her neighbors. She will sing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” at least once, but she’s open to requests.