I’ve never understood the general female sentiment (and I am female) that it’s a negative thing to “roll over” and fall asleep after sex. In my opinion, your level of exhaustion/sleepiness is directly proportional to how good the sex was. After a really fantastic session, if I lie perfectly still I can have the most wonderful floating sensation, like not having a body at all (or a modified version, where I just can’t feel my legs). That obliteration of sensation, directly following the most intense physical sensations, and the deep tiredness that immediately follows constitute the cherry on top of my sundae. I don’t want to cuddle, and I certainly don’t need to talk.
I have only my own experience to go on, but I always suspect if a woman is interested in cuddling and having an important personal conversation right after sex, she probably didn’t actually have an orgasm, or enough orgasms, or the one she had wasn’t strong enough.
Honestly, if everyone just lies there quietly and nobody makes any sudden movements, we could all just drift off into the most wonderful, deep post-sex sleep, which is one of the best things life has to offer. I urge you to give it some serious consideration.
— Dana, commenting on “10 Good Reasons Why Women Have Sex“
I will disagree with Evan, if slightly. For me, I just feel more comfortable facing the outside of the bed, largely because that is how I’ve slept since I was a child. However, whenever we sleep facing away from one another, we always say that, “I’ve got your back,” and that back-to-back contact is in some ways more gratifying than spooning or any other form of cuddling. We’re touching, we’re both comfortable, and we wake up feeling like we slept comfortably. It really carries a deeper meaning than just sleeping back to back. We remind one another that no matter what, we’re caring for one another, even in the middle of the night. For us, cuddling back to back reminds us of the trust we have for in one another, and what’s better than a night of sexual and philosophical satisfaction? 🙂
count me in on the people are not the same. not even from time to time-sometimes great sex is energizing, sometimes sleep. it just depends.
Oh, James, darling, don’t be such a luddite. Change is good. Could your concern about being able to find the Comment of the Week be a little intensified because two recent selections were your OWN comments? If you give it a chance, you’ll actually find that it’s easier to find the stuff you like with this new format. We produce so much content every week and before it was just disappearing so fast! This way, everything’s categorized — if you like Wise Guys, there are the last three on the homepagee; if you like our advice, same deal; if you like confessions and polls and comments of the week, there they are in the Confessions section. It’s still in the transition phase and we’re still tweaking things — for instance, we hadn’t yet added “Comment of the Week” to the Confessions pull down menu in the top nav bar (it’s there now) and we still need to add the search box to the top nav bar. But once you take a second to familiarize yourself with it, we think you’ll come to find it a vast improvement.
Everyone’s different…I’ve known both men and women who get energized by great sex, and people of both sexes who want to fall asleep immediately afterwards. My husband falls asleep, I wake up- fortunately neither of us is annoyed by it.
Never mind, I just found what I was looking for. This new format is very confusing, not easy to follow threads as it was before.
James.__________________________
What happened to the previous comment of the week?? I think it was an interesting thread, and a good time to confront an issue that is relevant to todays times.
Thanks.
I don’t think you can really say everyone is going to react the same way, some people just aren’t hardwired to experience nice floaty after sex.
I would certainly agree with this, but with some caveats…
I think the issue is less with the “go to sleep” than with the “roll over”. The idea is that ‘men’ (or some men) treat sex as a way to blow their loads, and nothing else; rolling over (i.e. away from your partner) signifies a lack of the connection that one ‘ought’ to feel after sex. The idea that sex (at least within a long-term partnership) should start well before and last well after orgasm is, I think, a legitimate one. But part of that lasting after could be the floaty-dreamy-exhausted feeling – so long as you’re sharing it with your partner, and have done what they need you to do to let them be there too.
Personally, I hate how these things get gendered; whether or not men are more likely to just be looking to toss one off than women (a question that is, to my mind, still open), there is certainly more overlap than difference between the genders, and ultimately what matters is what the two (or so) people in the bed (or wherever) want.