Me and my boyfriend haven’t had penetrative sex in around two months now. As well as being ridiculously busy over the festive period with work, the main reason is due to an injury my boyfriend is in the process of healing.

Long story short, his everyday job is quite physical. The air-con broke, and management took forever and a day to fix it, leaving him and others with a few *ahem* heat-related injuries down below with skin rubbing. And if you’re moving around an awful lot, it can take a while to properly heal.

We’ve had sex when he’s been able to, but the unavoidable friction that comes with sex, then puts him back another few weeks of healing. So penetrative sex has been few and far between. I’ve tried to initiate sex when I’ve thought it’s ok to, but he either can’t or he’s just not been in the mood for it, because of said injury. I knew this wasn’t the case, but at first I couldn’t help but think it was me.

As we all know, getting rejected by your significant other sucks. But you accept it. You’re an adult and everyone has the right to say no. Simply being a significant other doesn’t automatically equal consent. But that insecurity still lingered in the back of my mind. Did he not find me attractive anymore? Was I doing something wrong?

He’s told me many times that’s not the case. Believe me, his actions are not of a man that doesn’t want to. Especially when he’s feeling me up and squeezing my ass at any chance he can in the house! Not being able to have sex recently has been on both our minds, and the other night, we talked at length about it after I tried to initiate sex for the first time in a little while, and we found we still couldn’t.

He nuzzled into my neck and in my arms, telling me it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but that he physically cannot right now without it causing pain. He felt awful that he couldn’t, which in turn made me feel awful, because I didn’t want him to feel so.

He said it makes him feel bad, which in turn, affects his drive. I can completely empathise with this. When I feel like utter crap, or am not able to have sex when I really want to (like when I’m on my period because of painful cramps) sex is the last thing on my mind. That or I’m incredibly frustrated, something he’s been experiencing as well. We are still intimate together, minus the penetrative sex or giving him a vigorous hand-job.

So we’ve had to regroup a little from what we usually do in the sack, so we can still enjoy each other in a modified way. Because of circumstances out of our control, we’ve fell into the groove of being intimate in other ways we are generally, but more so.

When I say intimate, this doesn’t just cover sexual activity. It covers emotional, mental and spiritual intimacy too. We appreciate and value each other’s company a lot in general. He says it’s made him appreciate what we have together all the more. I can’t disagree with him. I feel the same as well. As much as I love sex, intimacy is more than just sex.

Sexually speaking however, that night, I pulled up my shirt, so he could play with and kiss my boobs while I masturbated to orgasm. We enjoyed it incredibly and found it released a lot of stress in me, both physically and mentally. During our busy schedule over the festive period, we found a bit of time for some sexy time in the shower after work.

We kissed and felt each other, needing each other like someone thirsty needs a drop of water. He fingered me, I put my mouth around him. We tried anal sex, but it didn’t work out. My lower half just wasn’t relaxed enough. That didn’t dampen the experience though. I sucked him and he came all over my boobs. After the workload we were in the middle of, we certainly needed that.

Like he said, because he’s otherwise indisposed, doesn’t mean I can’t experience pleasure as well. But I want to share that pleasure with him. I told him I didn’t want that to make him feel worse, but he said that it wouldn’t. He wants me to feel good and taken care of. We talked about experimenting more with bondage, paddles, vibrators and the like, with it still being sexual (it’s sexual for the most part for us) just without the penetration until we are ready again.

I see it as an opportunity to spread our intimacy wings to doing things we otherwise just haven’t got round to trying yet. But more importantly, being able to really focus on each other in every capacity of our relationship. I’m finding it strengthening of what we already have.

Like I said, there’s more than one way to be intimate with someone.