Having said we wouldn’t get too involved in the process, the geeky side of me couldn’t help but order an ovulation test kit, male fertility test kit, and special supplements that were supposed to maximise our chances of conception.
My wife had already been using a couple of apps to track her cycle so she already knew roughly when she would be at her peak fertility but because her cycle was short, her fertile period actually overlapped with her period.
We started using the ovulation test kit, which would indicate her low fertility days, high fertility days then the peak two days before ovulation.
The first month (January 2021), we tried to have sex every couple of days when her fertility was high. We hadn’t really had sex that frequently since our mid twenties. My wife doesn’t have a very high sex drive and to be honest, I’ve always preferred both giving and receiving oral sex to intercouse itself but I was really looking forward to trying.
It was the one time in my life where my wife actually wanted sex as much as I did, if not more so it was a novel experience.
In the months before hand, I’d actually completely lost my sex drive. I was really struggling to stimulate myself, my body seemed to be a lot less sensitive and I would go weeks without stimulation and that was very abnormal for me. I was struggling to sleep too without the regular oxytocin floods, even kalms and drowsy antihistamines had little affect. My mind would just be racing all through the night and I wouldn’t fall asleep until my wife was about to get up at 05:30.
If nothing else, I was quite looking forward to being tired out enough to fall asleep afterwards and the first time we made love, being inside my wife, knowing that there was no form of contraception at all and feeling how aroused she was after a long kissing session felt really good. It felt different for me psychologically and I slept really well and felt really close to her.
It wasn’t easy every time however, trying to make love either the next day or day after, I found that I just wasn’t ready for it and I could feel myself losing my erection. It was a really frustrating feeling, like I’d once again failed as a man to do the one thing that’s supposed to be easy for me.
She never made me feel like a failure, she was always very reassuring and we decided to have sex less often than every other day to take a bit of pressure off. She didn’t know it but I was also taking Viagra, I honestly don’t think it made a difference, my problem was never with getting an erection in the first place, it was more psychological but if nothing else it had a placebo effect.
The last cycle, which actually resulted in conception we only had sex twice and the second time, on her first peak day, I faked climax so I know that date of the baby making session that resulted in conception is almost certainly, Wednesday 17 March.
When you talk about faking orgasm, it’s normally from the context of a woman and I wonder whether it’s more common than we think for men to fake it too? Sometimes I just get to the point where it feels the moment has past and I just know it’s not going to happen. Sometimes I’m tired or sometimes I start to feel twinges of cramp or if I feel she’s not enjoying it because I always want her to feel good too so I just use my muscles to make it feel for her like I’ve climaxed and she can’t tell the difference.
It was the only time I faked it whilst we were trying for a baby, the rest of the time I was honest with her about it but when it’s your wife’s most fertile period, sometimes you just don’t want to feel like you’ve let her down.
Part of the excitement of finding out she is pregnant was a sense of relief. From what we had read, most couples take up to a year to get pregnant and we’d managed it in three months even with age being against us on her side and my issues with low sperm motility, according to the home test, and making love sparingly.
Now I’ve got my fingers crossed that we get through the next eight weeks where miscarriage is more common and hope that we have an intrauterine pregnancy with a single healthy child, then we can finally let the cat out of the bag and start telling friends and family!
Rant Over 