Sex Diaries is a fortnightly series on HuffPost UK that asks readers to share their sex lives: to talk about the sex they’re having (or not). Interested in anonymously sharing your story? Email sophie.gallagher@huffpost.com
My wife and I only got married four years ago but we’ve been best friends for 23 years. We first met at Brownies and were friends through high school but didn’t get together officially until 2011. We’d spent years on and off fooling around with each other despite sometimes having boyfriends, but since we’ve been together properly we have been totally inseparable.
All those years of friendship meant that when we first got together our sex life felt a bit weird. I had some issues with body image and confidence – I consider myself a fat girl and she’s thin, so I wouldn’t sleep naked. My weight also meant I’d get sore knees during sex or positions would be awkward. I was on antidepressants so I didn’t have any sex drive, which worried me too.
As time has gone on, the sex has just got better and better. Now it’s amazing. One of the biggest parts of our sex life – that’s helped me grow in confidence with her – is role play. We do a lot of gender reversal stuff, so we might pretend to be a guy and a girl for example. We have loads of different characters and costumes – we’ve developed full back stories for the characters as we were both drama students and love the acting.
“Sometimes we worry we’ve sent a message in character to a friend by accident – how would we ever explain that?”
The role play will last days – we’ll be texting each other from work in character. I’ll pop to the toilet in the office and send a picture or a line that the character would say. Sometimes we worry that we’ve sent a message in character to a friend by accident – how would we ever explain that? In the end we just decided to be open and tell them about our role play. We love playing the game.
When we get home after a day of texting it’s not straight to sex – we’ll build up to it. We’ll cook dinner in character, the tension gets us excited. But sometimes it goes on so long when we get to bed we’re knackered and won’t have sex!
With role play there’s always something new – that’s how we’ve kept the spark alive for so long. We’ve had so many first kisses as different people. It’s still us but we’re different. We probably have sex once or twice a week now. At the weekend if we’re both at home we’ll probably be up to something. We’ve decided we can’t mess around on week nights anymore because we’ll both be too tired the next day. We also watch a lot of porn together and have cuddles.
I’m in a much better place with my confidence these days – I’ve read a lot about fat positivity on Instagram and realised my life doesn’t have to be on hold because of my size. Now, I’m sleeping naked and we are trying new things. Neither of us had ever slept with a guy and I’d never experienced any kind of penetration, but in the last year we’ve been doing that – some of our characters have latex penises so one of us will be packing something down below. It’s quite nice actually.
I’m taking it slow but as we’re getting older I’ve realised I’m a bit of a “pillow princess”.
We’re so close to each other as a couple, we always know exactly where the other one is at. Being women our moods fluctuate a lot throughout the month, but we know each other’s cycles so we’re just always in tune.
In the next couple of months, we’re going to start trying for a baby. We did have a donor lined up but he got cold feet at the last minute. When we’re parents maybe we’ll have less sex but we won’t stop role play – it is what we like to do and I don’t see our sex life going downhill anytime soon.
As told to Sophie Gallagher.