One of the statements I often hear from wives is they’re too exhausted to have sex. By the time all the day’s to-dos are done, the kids have finished their activities and gone to sleep, and you’ve gotten ready for bed, you’re too pooped to play.
I get it. I really do.
But perhaps we believe a little too much in Ray Charles’s lyrics that “the nighttime is the right time to be with the one you love.” Or rather, we don’t listen well enough to the background singers chanting “night and day” throughout the whole song.
With that in mind, let’s talk about five different times of day that are great for making love!
1. Good Morning!
Now before you night owls jump right to the next point, I want to iterate that I am not a morning person. But whether you are a lark or a nightingale, morning really is a wonderful time to have sex with your husband.
One study showed that couples who have intercourse first thing in the day report better moods, probably because of all the feel-good chemicals released when they make love. But even more interesting is that morning sex seems to boost your immune system.
Also, men’s testosterone levels are highest in the morning, meaning it’s a great time for him to engage. I mean, you know how when he wakes up, he has that “maintenance erection” already going? Might as well that readiness to have a little fun, all while helping yourself avoid catching the next cold your children bring home from school.
2. Time for a Nooner
Recently, a councilman in a small town in Sweden proposed giving the municipality’s employees an hour-long paid break at lunchtime each week to go home and have sex. His reasons? To increase the birthrate and promote physical and emotional health: “Sex is also a great form of exercise and has documented positive effects on well-being.” Now if that proposal somehow passed, it would only affect those 550 Swedish employees, but that shouldn’t stop you from pursuing lunchtime sex on your own.
Of course, the “nooner,” as it’s called, is easier to squeeze in if you work from home or your workplace is close to home. For commuters, this is more difficult to effect. But if you can grab a quickie during lunch, it can boost your mood for the rest of the day and remind you two that even a little bit of time together can result in sexual intimacy.
There’s a playfulness to nooners that you should also lean into. A little “grab your lunch and then come find dessert” message helps to get things going. Then you and your spouse can enjoy all the deliciousness of lunchtime before heading back to the job.
3. Afternoon Delight
I could easily argue that the reason you should have afternoon sex is just so you can sing the Starland Vocal Band song about it. But here’s another good reason: One hormonal expert argues that 3 p.m. is the optimal time for a couple to make love.
Why? Because in the afternoon, women have higher levels of cortisol, which increases alertness and energy. Meanwhile, this is when men have elevated levels of estrogen, meaning they’re “more emotionally present” during sex. In terms of hormones, mid-afternoon could be a sweet spot for your lovemaking.
Not to mention that it feels a bit luxurious to shove aside everything else you could be doing to have sex with your beloved. So rather than ask why, ask why not!
4. Honey, I’m Home!
After we finish work but before supper is a favorite time in my marriage. But frankly, the research I saw goes against me, because late afternoon to early evening is one of the windows couples report as not good for lovemaking. Yet I suspect this is related to our after-work circumstances.
When my children were little, this time of day was “the witching hour.” That’s what plenty of parents call that early evening time when babies are prone to fussiness and colic rears its ugly head. But once our kids got older, and definitely once they were teenagers, this was a great time to make love. Our kids were involved in evening activities or burning off steam after school playing video games with headphones in their ears, meaning we could head to our bedroom, lock the door, and have uninterrupted time.
Plus, it’s a lovely way to reconnect after being apart from one another throughout the day. It can give you a little boost of energy and reasons to smile at each other the rest of the evening.
5. Nighttime is the Right Time
Nighttime can be the right time too. In a recent survey of 2,000 UK participants, nighttime still caught 7 of the top 10 spots for best times to make love.
If you can push off your fatigue and get things going, you might discover that you really enjoy making love right before you nod off to sleep. In fact, sex could well help you fall asleep. That’s because sex increases oxytocin, the bonding chemical that makes you feel close to the man you’re sharing the bed with, and decreases cortisol, a stress hormone that can impede sleep. In addition, when you experience an orgasm, your body releases prolactin which makes you feel relaxed and sleepy.
By staying awake a little longer and having sex, you could help both your marital intimacy and your sleep cycle. And given everything else you’ve got going on, it’s nice for one activity to knock out two benefits at once.
Be willing to try different times of day to make love! You might just find something different from your usual works really great for you and your husband.
Sources: DailyMail.com – How a spot of morning passion can make you glow all day long; The New York Times – A Paid Hour a Week for Sex? Swedish Town Considers It; DailyMail.com – Why 3pm is the best time for making love: Time is when men and women are most in tune with each other’s desires due to hormone levels; Medical Daily – 3 Benefits Of Morning Sex, Plus Science Reveals Best Day And Time To Get Naked In Bed; Sleep.org – Is Sex Helping or Hurting Your Sleep?
So, just about any time. 🙂
Fun article. We enjoy the opportunity of all times, though timing is such that we can’t always be spontaneous.
When the kids were still living at the house, spontaneity was less of an option.
The quickies were exciting, because those intimate moments usually happened as a result of not having opportunity to be intimate for a couple of days causing our arousal to be so elevated that her climaxes were frequent and intense after 15 minutes of hurry up love making. Now my profession doesn’t allow me the opportunity to have a “nooner”.
Now we typically prefer evenings after doing something together, a drive maybe a romantic dinner and a movie, though an afternoon matinee is nice on a Sunday,
Great post, though I’m not sure whether to thank you for putting ‘Afternoon Delight’ back in my mental playlist.
You hit a very important point, in that developing a sense of erotic playfulness is really vital for intimacy to work well. It’s something I never learned; I’m playful (or, now, was) in the sense of riding a horse into a formal ballroom, playing indoor rugby, and getting into pub brawls with my mates, but never learned how to bring that sense of fun (well, not that SPECIFIC sense of fun, perhaps) into relationship.
Perhaps that could be the subject for a future post? How to make intimacy fun?
This post makes me reflect on the adjustments for sex we’ve had to make during our marriage, over the years. Going at it like rabbits early on in our partying 20s without kids. Then as kids came along it’s funny how we held on to old traditions. Night time being the right time was our go to. Not only did the kids change that for a bit but we got old. We were no longer the night owls that stayed up til 2 or 3 am. The years of sleeping away the morning was no longer us. Try as we did to fight for our go to spot we were losing the battle at about 9 pm every night in the form of falling asleep in front of the tv. Now go to time is anywhere from an appetizer before dinner to early evening when the kids do dishes or get showers for the night. We both still miss the late late festivities. We get nostalgic over it sometimes. But, thank God, we adjust & keep at it.
Late night is the only time that works for us. We have been married for almost 4 decades.
My senior citizen husband wakes up with what we call ‘NPT’ (nocturnal p- tumescence) almost as frequently as a teenage boy so we like to take advantage of that. Somehow we are both often awake at 4:30AM – a little ‘quickie’ and back to sleep for a while.
As a mama to five children under the age of six, I can only chuckle at the thought of utilizing any of those daylight times – when the kids are safe in bed is pretty much our only chance, lol! But, we’ll take it 😉
Yes! We have Bigs and littles now, but our baby is cranky and doesn’t sleep for long periods of time. Unfortunately, late at night has been our only option .
The article is fun to read but it’s a fact. We all have these 5 options to choose from. Now go and find the best time that suits you.
I find when we make love at night it helps my husband relax and fall asleep. I will Also give him a blow job to help fall.asleep.