Home, but never alone

It was a lazy Sunday morning in mid January. My boyfriend and I were lying in bed in our underwear, taking our time to wake up properly and enjoying the winter sun that was shining through the window. I slipped out from under the duvet, walked across the room to the mirror and started to brush my hair. 

In the reflection, I could see him looking at me, and I enjoyed the feeling of his eyes on me. Before long he came up behind me, still warm from the bed, and wrapped his arms around my waist. Stroking my hair over one shoulder, he started to kiss my neck. I turned around and kissed him, and we collapsed, intertwined, back onto the bed.

Just as things were heating up, a call came from downstairs: “Do you two have any laundry? I’m about to put a load on!”.

This considerate offer came from my boyfriend’s mum. We tried to brush it off with a quick retort of ‘no, thank you!’, but it was too late - the moment was gone. We put on our clothes and headed out to Asda instead.

This was far from an unusual occurrence for us during lockdown. Having moved in with my boyfriend and his parents to avoid being trapped apart, our attempts at intimacy were regularly interrupted by the sound of cars on the drive, keys in the door, creaking on the stairs, or well-meaning offers of breakfast. With the pandemic forcing so many couples apart, I was grateful to be so close to him, but physical closeness was becoming more and more challenging, and we were far from a unique case.

The number of young adults living with their parents has increased by over a third in the past decade, and, with COVID-19 disproportionately affecting the job prospects of young people, the pandemic has only exacerbated this trend. With the UK having been through three national and numerous regional lockdowns since March 2020, many young couples have found themselves in the unusual position of not only living with their parents, but rarely, if ever, being home alone.

Artwork: Alicia Morawska

This was the case for Daisy, 24, who lived and shielded with her boyfriend, brothers and parents for all of last summer. She told me: ‘with my dad being vulnerable, we were never home alone - ever! So that meant four months of trying to be silent during sex’. ‘Noise is how you communicate, right?’ she went on, ‘it’s how you explore things without it having to be really formal. Out sex is normally great, but most of the time I wouldn’t orgasm, because if you can’t make noise, you can’t relax, and then it’s just not going to happen’. 

Mia, 21, found the lack of privacy in her family home equally obstructive. While Mia and her boyfriend weren’t locking down together (she moved back with her parents, grandma and sister; he stayed at university) her fear of being overheard somewhat hindered her efforts to maintain a long distance sex life. ‘My parents are Muslims, so they think I’m waiting for marriage, which makes sexting, video and phone sex quite difficult’ she explained, ‘I have to be quiet but then my boyfriend can’t hear me’. As Mia joked, few things are more of a mood killer than having your steamiest dirty talk greeted with ‘wait, what?’. On top of this, she found being sexually active in her childhood bedroom uncomfortable. ‘It’s definitely weird being sexual when there’s old teddy bears around me’ she explained, ‘I have to turn away from all my childhood things’.

While in the midst of a global pandemic, these restraints could easily be dismissed as a mere inconvenience, but they shouldn’t be. Intimacy is among our most basic needs, so it makes sense for any obstruction to trigger an emotional response.

Before I met my current boyfriend back in 2019, I’d had some positive sexual experiences with people I thought highly of, but - as is sadly the case for many women - the majority of my experiences had been negative, ranging from mediocre to traumatic, and I had never had an orgasm. This was something that ate me up inside. I was scared that I was somehow broken, and for years didn’t feel able to confide in anyone about it because of the shame I felt. I was supposed to be an empowered, sex-positive feminist, but I felt my inability to climax somehow invalidated this identity.

Exploring my own pleasure with a regular partner led me to what I like to call my sexual renaissance - in a short time, my confidence, my sex drive, my understanding of my own desire and the love I felt for my body all skyrocketed. For the first time in my life, sex was not a source of anxiety or shame.

Understandably, the claustrophobia and interruptions that accompanied lockdown meant that my sex drive was slightly lower and I found it harder to climax. While it should have been easy for me to attribute these changes to my external circumstances rather than an inherent personal failing, old anxieties once again began to surface. I became scared that the sexual identity I now cherished could disappear again; that something which was now such a source of joy for me could be ripped away at any moment.

Thankfully, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this didn’t happen. We soon learned to work around the obstacles we faced, and we were lucky that the restrictions placed on our sex life didn’t put a strain on our relationship. Many in our situation were not so fortunate. 

Jade, 22, who is currently living with both her family and her partner, explained that the lack of privacy had made her boyfriend much less keen to have sex, and this in turn had created friction in their relationship. ‘It makes me feel like he doesn’t find me attractive. I’m not sexy,’ she explained, ‘I have a higher sex drive than him anyway, so any external factor playing into that just fucks things up. I get grumpy, he gets grumpy, we both get a bit tetchy with each other’. ‘I think sex is really important - as a stress reliever, as a reconnector, for so many things’ she went on, ‘so when we’re not having sex I find it adds a level of friction between us. It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me, but it’s never actually our relationship that’s causing it - it’s an external factor’.

Anna, 26, who spent part of lockdown sharing a flat with both her mum and her fiance, also felt that this lack of privacy had put a strain on her relationship. ‘I think that it has definitely left us feeling disconnected at times’, she told me, ‘despite having time to be alone we don't often feel super close, sometimes it’s like we are living alongside each other rather than with each other’.

For relationships like Jade’s and Anna’s, moving out may seem like the obvious solution. Yet, for those who have spent months or even more than a year living within these confines, their new found freedom may not be quite the quick-fix some would guess.

When I spoke to Daisy, she and her boyfriend had moved into their own flat just a few weeks prior. She described experiencing a sense of pressure in the early days of having their own space: ‘we’re out of the family home now, we can have fantastic sex again, so when you have sex that isn’t as amazing as you’re expecting that can throw you - it definitely threw me’ she said. ‘Now it’s carefree for sure, I’m almost in a honeymoon period again, but before that there were definitely some teething issues, just getting back into the swing of things’.

Mia, who hadn’t seen her boyfriend for nearly 6 months when I spoke to her, also had apprehensions about this pressure. ‘It’s the longest time I’ve gone without sex so sometimes I worry when we’re together again I’ll forget how to do anything’ she laughed, ‘I’m excited to have our own place to have sex because we can both be comfortable with some riskier stuff, but there’s a little worry that because we have our own place the sex should always be amazing and wild’.

Perhaps a more positive takeaway from these new sexual restrictions is that couples have been pushed to better communicate their needs, and have become more willing to experiment with different forms of sex. Within many sexual relationships, PIV sex is treated as ‘the main event’, with oral and other non-penetrative sex being limited to just the ‘warm-up’. This script about how sexual activity should progress is so culturally ingrained that non-penetrative sex acts are frequently reffered to as foreplay - a word literally meaning erotic stimulation that precedes sexual intercourse. Not only does this overemphasis on PIV sex restrict the sexual freedoms of all parties, it is often far less condusive to achieving pleasure, particularly for people with vulvas.

As Ellen*, 24, recalled: ‘it’s had benefits, we both have experimented way more with silent positions, I find that it makes intimacy more special, and there’s defintely been more non PIV sex’. Daisy agreed: ‘the up side is it’s made our communication better because there’s been this change [...] we tried more things, so we wouldn’t have ‘traditional’ sex quite as often. That was a pro. So, more foreplay based stuff where there’s less noisy bed springs’.

As my own boyfriend so wonderfully put it, while our sex was great already, locking down in his family home meant parts of our sexual repetoire gained more ‘finesse’ - ‘we had to restrain ourselves physically while trying not to compromise quality and trying to achieve the same results’, and so we upskilled. He even suggested recently that we should start some kind of sex class. I told him that this suggestion was the erotic equivalent of two people having an interesting conversation and deciding they should start a podcast, but his point still stands: we’re damn good.