The Problem with Maintenance Sex
Are you doing it for the wrong person?
I write about sex. I work with sex. I enjoy sex. But I have a problem with maintenance sex.
It’s not that I think it’s bad. It’s that the phrase’s implication is backwards.
Some people call it duty sex. It’s the concept of getting intimate out of obligation, not innate desire. It’s a byproduct of (heterosexual) long-term relationships. One partner, with a not-all-bad, natural impulse to peace-keep (consider the contentment of their partner and the stability of their domain), initiates sex. But in their peace-keeping perspective, they see sex as an offering, a gift, or a duty to something external to themselves.
My problem with ‘maintenance sex’ is its implication of that external duty – an outward interest, instead of self-interest – while simultaneously implying the discontent of prioritizing others before yourself.
I get it. I’ve been there (I’ll get to that). But isn’t it ironic that in our desire to care for others, even the language we’ve crafted to complain about that impulse forgets about ourselves?
It’s not an all bad impulse. It’s good to care for others. It’s just also good to care for ourselves.
All humans benefit from regular sex. And with sexual health, as with mental health, and even airline oxygen masks, it is far harder to take care of others if we don’t take care of ourselves first.
I don’t have a problem with seeing sex as a function to maintain. In fact, I do… but for myself.
Sex is a task, like grocery shopping or dish washing, that must happen for every individual human who wants to thrive, not just get by on junk. Grocery shopping, dishwashing, and sex can sure be seen as a slog. A chore. A burden. Something to maintain for others. Or it can be ridiculously goofy, absurdly romantic, mutually, excessively self-serving, or medicinal (in a hot way). However sex is served, it’s an integral ingredient of a joyful, healthy life.
Ignoring the personal potential in the routine, uneconomic endeavors of life isn’t in anyone's self-interest.
Maintenance isn’t a burden. It’s care. It’s opportunity. It’s a gesture of appreciation. For the objects you wash and mend. For the self you tend.
Maintenance sex is an apple a day.
And when that’s forgotten, and one sees maintenance as a burden — something for others — well, that’s when I knew I was not well. Which was, coincidentally, when I needed that maintenance more than ever.
How about you?
Definitely agree with this. And sometimes, ‘maintenance sex’ is taking care of oneself when you know that your partner is unable to partake in the deed — and to do so in ways that don’t make it feel like you are shaming them or blaming them for your need to ‘take care of business’.
There’s something quietly radical in what you’ve written, like you’ve taken a phrase that’s been sitting in the corner wearing a hair shirt and coaxed it into something warmer, more human-shaped.
I think you’re right to tug at the wiring of “maintenance sex.” The term always feels like it’s been filed under obligation, next to boiler servicing and replying to emails you don’t want to send. But what you’re describing reframes maintenance as a kind of tending, not a tax. Less “I owe this,” more “I’m keeping something alive, including myself.”
And that shift matters. Because when sex becomes something done outward, as a gesture of peacekeeping or performance, it can hollow out the very thing it’s meant to sustain. But when it loops back inward, when it includes the self as a recipient rather than just a provider, it regains texture. Appetite returns. Curiosity sneaks back in through the side door.
I also really appreciate how you let contradiction sit in the room without trying to tidy it away. The truth that caring for others can blur into neglecting yourself. That something can be routine and still be intimate. That need doesn’t always arrive dressed as desire, but that doesn’t make it less real or less worthy of attention.
The “apple a day” idea lingers in a good way. Not prescriptive, not clinical, just a reminder that nourishment isn’t always glamorous, but it is essential. And sometimes, especially when we feel least well, the things that look like chores are actually signals. Not of duty, but of depletion.
As for me, I think I’d say this: anything that turns you away from yourself over time starts to cost more than it gives, even if it began as care. So your instinct to reclaim maintenance as something reciprocal, something that includes your own aliveness, feels not just healthy but necessary.
Your last question hangs there in a way I like. Not demanding an answer, just opening a door. And maybe that’s the point. Not to resolve it neatly, but to keep asking: who is this for, really? And am I in the room when it happens?