How I Rebooted My Sex Life

No adult toys or cheesy sexts. Just seven nights of being there, doing that.

- Jancee Dunn

After telling my daughter, Sylvie, one more exciting tale of my youth—in which I play with a large, unsupervised gang of children in a vacant lot—I finally get her to sleep. Then I (quietly) clap my hands together. It is time for my Mom Party.

Your basic Mom Party lasts roughly an hour before the celebrant slumps forward in a dead sleep. It has a few general components. One is food, which should be either sugary or salty (or in the case of salted caramel brownies, both). Add any sort of calming beverage—a glass or three of wine, a mug of decaf tea. Garnish with your choice of mindless entertainment: blogs that obsessively compare moisturizers, a trashy reality-TV marathon.

Humming, I head for the kitchen, extract a bag of chips from the pantry, and take out the magazine I swiped from the gym on the “Worst Celebrity Beach Bodies.”

That is the moment that my husband Tom picks to approach me and give me a back rub. There is no such thing as an agenda-free back rub.

Weary from Sylvie’s bedtime ritual, I ask for a rain check and hurry off to bed, while Tom glumly wanders into the living room to play computer chess.

It is not the first night that this scenario has occurred. We have fallen into a pattern in which he tries to capitalize on a moment when we are finally alone, and I, after a long session of tending to a child, shut him down, viewing sex as just one more thing I have to do for someone.

While it can be tough to summon up the energy, Hilda Hutcherson, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University, says it’s critical to just do it. She lists the reasons why: Sex releases endorphins, the feelgood hormones with a similar structure to morphine, as well as oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” that promotes feelings of devotion and trust.