Deployment Email-Sex

Steps to building an explosive bedroom reunion

by Heidi Russell Rafferty 

“Dirty Thursday” wasn’t about doing laundry.

But it was a laundry list of sorts–that is, a list of what Susan* and Kyle* would do to each other in the bedroom after Kyle returned from Iraq.

Married for 19 years and with five children, the couple had been through normal ups and downs in their sexual relationship. But when they experienced their first and lengthy wartime deployment, intimacy became top priority.

So they came up with “Dirty Thursday,” their code phrase for email-sex.

 “I would grab a fantasy,” Susan says. “One was to say, ‘I’ve been exercising and thinking about you at the gym and what it would be like if I was on the weight machine.’ I described for him what it would be like if he saw me sweaty and what I’d be doing, but I didn’t go into detail about what would happen next. I gave him the detail to put the image in his mind.”

A VACATION FROM SEX?

Separated by oceans and deserts, igniting a “fire for one” in the bedroom is the last thing many women want to do, including Susan. “After he said goodbye, in the back of my mind I was relieved that I didn’t have to think about sex for a few months. Something inside me said, ‘I’m on vacation from that,’” she says.

But that changed when she realized that sex wasn’t just about her own needs. By putting Dirty Thursday into practice, she ultimately rediscovered her own sexual appetite.

  Susan’s dampened desire is common, say sex therapists. But it’s important to “look at the sexual part of yourself as a place to retain and keep special” while your spouse is away, says Dr. Peter S. Kanaris, public education coordinator of the New York State Psychological Association.

MAKING SWEET, SEXY LEMONADE

Use the separation as an opportunity to “make lemonade of lemons,” says Dr. Joy Davidson, a therapist who writes for Playgirl magazine. “The lemonade is that you are exaggerating aspects of your romantic and erotic relationship, which is normally treated with much less fanfare. In doing so, you can not only have fun, but set patterns in motion that you will continue to do later,” she says.

Remember, says Kanaris, “the most important sex organ is the brain.” It actually is possible to connect on an intimate level despite the geographic distance, he says.