By Jean-Jasmine Lee and Angela Tan Qiuli
At Last
L was a thirty two-year-old woman, recently married and unable to allow penile penetration during sex. Growing up in China, she did not recall any sex education, and before marriage, her mother had warned her that sex was extremely painful for the woman. Her anxiety with sexual intercourse began the day before her wedding. Every time her husband attempted to penetrate her, L had severe pain and was unable to part her legs.
Treating L involved a multidisciplinary team that included a physiotherapist and a psychologist. Various interventions spanning education, relaxation techniques, exercise and stress management, and visualization techniques were used. It took months, but L and her husband were eventually able to successfully consummate their marriage.
——Dr Jean-Jasmine Lee
COMMENTARY
Promiscuous
Adjective
Having or characterized by many transient sexual relationships
Polyamory
Noun
The practice of engaging in multiple sexual relationships with the consent of all the people involved.
What is responsible sex? Is monogamy the responsible sex model? Yet we have unintended and unwanted pregnancies ensuing from monogamous relationships.
What is consensual sex? Is it the sex within a monogamous relationship? In that case we would not need legislation to allow a wife to sue her husband for rape.
What is a monogamous relationship? Is marriage not the most committed form of monogamous relationship? If that were the case, we should run out of affairs of the heart to gossip about.
Attitudes towards sex fall on a spectrum. Just as we have people who support freedom, there are people whose outlook we may consider to be conservative, or even timid. The accompanying vignette above describes such a person.
We are the products of our culture, traditions, moral frameworks, values, and experiences in life. Long before we become adults, our perspectives on social order and relationships have already formed. For many of us, once formed, they become the lens through which we view the world around us.
—-Dr Angela Tan Qiuli
Dr Jean-Jasmine Lee is a family physician with accreditation is sexual medicine. She has a special interest in paediatric and women’s health.
Dr Angela Tan Qiuli works with geriatric and paliative patients in the community. She is certified in sexual medicine and is also an intimacy coach in private practice. She teaches medical students and has a special interest in human dynamics.
The commentary and vignette were reproduced with permission from the book “Being Human, Stories from Family Medicine” edited by Cheong Pak Yean and Ong Chooi Peng and published in 2021 by the College of Family Physicians Singapore.
Pictures of illness experiences were drawn by NUS medical students in workshops conducted from 2012-2017 by A/Prof Cheong Pak Yean. Senior family physicians subsequently shared vignettes and commentaries based on the pictures.
