‘How Are You Supposed to Feel Sexually Liberated with Mum in the Room Next Door?’: Sex While Living at Home as an Adult
By Auburn McDonnagh
While some lose their virginity in a blur of spontaneous passion, I scheduled my first time. I had to wait for my mum to be away, and I was desperate to take advantage of an empty house. My partner and I had very basic sex. The song on shuffle happened to be Sex is on Fire by Kings of Leon – though it’s safe to say that the sex was not on fire.
When I was living at home as a teenager, it was a little bit easier to have sex at home. My sex life was somewhat regular, but it was dull and there was very little need to worry about noisy furniture or exaggerated moans.
When I moved to university, I was filled with a newfound sense of freedom that I hadn’t anticipated and wasn’t even aware I needed. The freedom that I was granted gave me opportunities that, looking back, I didn’t really take advantage of. When I moved back home after university (where I still live, now), I missed that freedom.
Over the past few years, I’ve realised more and more that I may be a little bit repressed when it comes to sex. I wouldn’t say that I was a prude, but I feel as though I am overly worried about the opinions of others. Constantly thinking about how loud my partner and I are or how much noise the bed is making takes me out of the moment. Living at home makes it so much harder because you’re not trying to hide it from friends or strangers but from family, and I for one didn’t have a relationship with my mum that extended to her having to listen to me having sex.
The advice online about How to Have Sex at Home is terrible and very much the same on each and every site. It’s either unrealistic or just plain stupid: 1) Have sex standing up or on the floor. 2) Pad out your bed against the wall. 3) Soundproof your room 4) Play loud music.
I wouldn’t say that I found many sure-fire ways to successfully have quiet and discreet sex at home. My partner and I would wait for my mum to be away or out for the day, and we would book nights away in hotels when we got the chance. It was difficult living at home as an adult. I felt myself regressing back into a teenager.
I didn’t enjoy having to hide my adult life. It felt as though I was smothering a side to myself that I had only just discovered, and yet I was guilty of allowing myself to regress into the role of the teenage daughter, only now I was very sexually active. It was difficult to allow myself to feel like an adult and to have an adult relationship when I was feeling like a teenager. How are you supposed to feel sexually liberated when your mum is in the room next door?
A strategy that I’ve picked up during my experience is to focus more on the relationship than the sex. One of the best things about my relationship – and something that has been a constant saviour – is that we have active, open communication. We are forever having conversations about our relationship and our sex life, some of them more heated and tense than others (the double entendre of those words is intentional).
Although the lack of privacy and the struggles we had just to be able to have sex when he came to stay were not ideal, we were able to navigate our way through these obstacles with healthy communication and some imagination. We learned how important it was to find other ways to experience intimacy together. This started with being able to tell each other what we wanted and share our sexual desires. We became emotionally available with each other, and sharing our feelings helped us grow together as a couple, which allowed us to express our feelings more loudly and fight like couples do. It is almost impossible to not argue as a couple, and it is in fact healthy to argue and disagree sometimes.
We found intimacy in the small acts together, like lying in bed and watching a film or a TV series together; we managed to binge the original Spiderman films, and we watched an awful lot of Friends. Developing routines with a partner can be a form of intimacy. My partner and I have our little rituals and routines; we get iced coffee and go to the gym together and we even try to buddy-read books together. The little things we do together don’t replace sex, and we aren’t using them to try and avoid sexual intimacy. But it can help us feel close.
Living at home was a hurdle for our relationship, one that we didn’t quite know how to tackle. We found times to have sex and we found workarounds when we still wanted to give each other pleasure, but it was difficult. I’m a firm believer in supporting people who have little sexual inhibitions, and I wish I was the type of person who could be that way. But overall, living at home and trying to be an adult is hard and adulting is hard, so it makes sense why it’s so easy to regress into the safe realms of adolescence.