My Ex & I Have Better Sex Now That We’re Divorced

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 Penelope,

My ex-husband and I were terrible married partners. We fought constantly, divorced, and became surprisingly good co-parents. Now, years later, we’ve started sleeping together again. The weird thing is, the sex is better than it was when we were married. We’re more relaxed, more playful, and somehow more honest with each other. We can flirt and laugh and enjoy being together without falling into the same arguments that made our marriage miserable. We still have kids together, so we see each other all the time, and we’ve managed to build a pretty peaceful routine.

The only problem: I’m starting to worry that we’re going to ruin it. Neither of us want to get back together, and we’re not exactly dating. I don’t even know if he’s seeing other people. I also don’t know how I’d feel if he did. Part of me thinks this is a great arrangement: we know each other, we have history, and the sex is good. Another part of me wonders if we’re just reopening a door we worked really hard to close. How do I know if this is something we can enjoy without messing up the co-parenting relationship we finally got right?

— Reopening a can of worms

Dear Reopening a can of worms,

There is a particular kind of romantic comedy that begins after the divorce. The marriage was a disaster, the couple finally separates, and then — once they’re no longer sharing a mortgage, a bathroom, and the exhausting daily business of being married —they discover that they actually like each other. Maybe they even have great sex. It’s a charming premise, in part because it seems to promise that the problem was never the two people themselves, but the institution of marriage, with its endless negotiations over money, chores, parenting, and whose turn it is to be disappointed.

Real life, of course, is not always so neatly plotted. But there is something psychologically plausible about the experience you describe. Marriage and co-parenting ask people to do different things. As spouses, you were entangled in the daily expectations of a shared life. You had to negotiate not just who you were to each other, but who would do what, who was letting whom down, whose needs took precedence, and what your family was supposed to look like. You may have been fighting about the dishes, but the argument was rarely only about the dishes. It was about whether you felt seen, whether you could count on each other, whether one of you was carrying too much, whether the other was asking too much. Over time, every small disagreement can become a referendum on the whole relationship.

Now you have a different arrangement. You each have your own home, your own routines, and some degree of control over your own lives. You can be attentive and affectionate during the time you choose to spend together, and then go home. You’re no longer trying to make every part of your lives fit together. It may be easier to be generous with each other when you’re not also negotiating the entire architecture of your family. Also, there’s another possible ingredient: distance can make room for curiosity. When you were married, you knew each other in the exhausting, unvarnished way people know someone they live with. You saw each other sick, irritated, distracted, and overwhelmed. You had to deal with the consequences of each other’s habits and choices every day. Now, even with children in common, you may be encountering each other in smaller, more deliberate doses. Your ex can be a person you’re attracted to again, rather than the person who forgot to sign the permission slip or left you to handle a family crisis alone. You can have a good evening without needing it to prove that your whole life together is working. That doesn’t mean the sex is fake, or that you’re necessarily fooling yourselves. It may be real pleasure, real affection, even a new kind of intimacy. But good sex can mean many things, and it doesn’t automatically mean that the conditions that made your marriage unhappy have changed. You may have become better at being co-parents, or better at being exes, without having become more compatible as spouses. Those are meaningful accomplishments in their own right. You don’t have to turn them into a reunion story.

The question I’d pay attention to isn’t just whether you can keep having sex without fighting. It’s what happens when the situation becomes less convenient or less clear. What if one of you starts dating someone else? What if one of you wants more commitment, or less? What if one of you begins to feel jealous, or hopes the sex means you’re getting back together, while the other sees it as a pleasurable arrangement with no larger implications? And what happens if the old arguments return — not over household chores, perhaps, but over the kids, the schedule, or the meaning of what you’re doing? Because your children are part of this, even if the sex itself is private. You don’t need to share adult details with them, and you certainly don’t need to explain your sex life. But if the renewed relationship starts to look like a reconciliation to them, or if it changes the emotional temperature between their parents, they may notice. Children can be hopeful about their parents getting back together, even when nobody has promised that. They can also feel unsettled if a warm, cooperative co-parenting relationship suddenly becomes tense again. Protecting them doesn’t require you to avoid intimacy with your ex at all costs. It does mean taking care not to let uncertainty between the two of you spill into the family’s routines without talking about it.

All that said I’d suggest having a conversation that may feel less sexy than the sex itself, but is probably more important. I’m not talking about a grand summit about the future of your relationship, nor a demand that either of you define what this means before you’re allowed to enjoy it. What I’m suggesting is more of an honest check-in: Are we both seeing this the same way? Are we free to date other people? What would we want to happen if one of us developed feelings or wanted to stop? What boundaries would help us preserve the co-parenting relationship we’ve worked so hard to build? And if you’re not sure of the answers yet, can you agree to say so honestly rather than letting the ambiguity quietly become a promise? You may discover that you both want the same thing: a sexual connection that feels good and familiar, without trying to rebuild the marriage. You may discover that one of you is hoping for more. Either way, it’s better to know what you’re each consenting to than to assume the arrangement means the same thing to both of you just because the sex is good.

Finally, you don’t have to treat the fact that you divorced as proof that you should never be together again. People change. Relationships change. Sometimes the end of a marriage creates the conditions for a more peaceful connection. But you also don’t have to treat good sex as evidence that you should give the marriage another try. Maybe what you’ve found is a way to enjoy a part of your history without repeating all of it.

— Penelope