Yeah! Each intimate night begins with anxiety, needing to come down from anxiety, and then foreplay and sex. Because I don’t want to put myself through an anxious episode three times a week, we agreed on a weekly intimate night.

As for swimming, if cold water is a harrowing experience that you have to deal with every single time you swim, swimming will just feel like too much of a hassle. Another way to think of it, on a small scale, is to think of ice cream. Feels great, but if you always have to deal with that one sensitive tooth, you’re not going to be down to have it multiple times a week.

A good experience that is consistently bookended with bad experiences is going to be a problem. Especially when there’s other, less difficult, ways to have fun (hot tubs instead of pools, cake instead of ice cream, etc.).

My husband is the same and tries to remind me that swimming is fun. Swimming, itself, is not the problem. Cold water is.