Let me get straight to the point: at ShesDoll, we receive messages from prospective customers who tell us that, as they come to us to consider a purchase, their marriage is on the brink. They’re avoiding each other. Their sex life is dead. They can’t breathe life back into it. They’re craving intimacy, but they can’t get it anywhere without cheating and hurting each other. Desperate to try something – anything – new to remedy what they see as an irreparable problem, they buy a doll. It’s often a last resort. They’re scared and confused, and sometimes convinced that this will not only fail but exacerbate their existing problems.
Down the track, they regularly come back to us and tell us it saved their marriage.
We genuinely receive these messages. And we receive them more often than you’d think.
How is this possible?
Are dolls are a magic panacea to all problems in broken relationships? Do they contain a secret love potion?
The answer is a lot more mundane than magic. In truth, it’s healthy for many couples to introduce a doll into their love life. Whether for one or both of the couple, a doll being around can help to remedy the mounting problems that slowly drag long-term relationships down.
Many marriages or long-term relationships are weighed down by a whole host of responsibilities: families, work, mortgages, other financial burdens and more. In addition to the general cumulative difficulty of keeping a long-term sex life alive, these burdens can make anything happening in the bedroom a literal impossibility. Sometimes people just don’t even get the time!
For some unhappy people, the survival response to a relationship that can feel like a trap is in escapism. They start looking elsewhere, imagining a fling or an affair. But cheating is an ultimate taboo in our society. It’s popularly seen as a death knell for relationships. In monogamous relationships, it often is.
For couples stuck in this rut, the purchase of a doll can offer the perfect, practical happy medium. Frustrated partners looking for intimacy or an escape can indulge their sexual desires with a doll, which many find does not damage a relationship with the same degree of stigma around cheating. Satisfied, they can return to the burdens and obligations – and love – of a happy long-term relationship, their sexual appetites whetted.
It’s a genuinely healthy response for couples hoping to resolve their intimacy and monogamy issues. It works. We know it does. And it’s not only in our opinion that this is a good idea. As the years go by, we’re getting more and more reports from couples who’ve come to consider our dolls that they were actually recommended to us by a relationship counsellor. It might seem like an unorthodox solution for many, but clearly some professionals are also coming to see the resolution a sex doll can offer for deeply ingrained long-term relationship issues.
Research backs up this approach. One 2016 study suggests that couples who incorporate toys or implements somewhere into their sex life report feeling more passionate and satisfied in the long-term. So, the successful incorporation of a doll into the intimate life of a couple can actually help with the passion in that relationship.
We’re not saying that all couples have the easiest ride when introducing a doll for the first time. Whether it be for their, their partner’s or their relationship’s sake, it can sometimes take a while for couples to get used to. We’ve discussed the pop cultural stigma attached to dolls by popular culture in this blog space at length in the past. That kind of stigma can take a bit of patience and conversation to dispel.
But for the couples that make this leap, the benefits can be enormous. Life-changing. We’ve been told by customers that introducing a doll into their life has actually been a lynchpin moment that led to a series of changes that kept them together.
One customer tells me they have been talking and engaging more freely, flirtatiously and openly with their partner since taking the plunge.
Another customer says that their partner likes to have sex with the doll as well as them, in a threesome scenario. Theirs was a relationship that had slowly shut off to intimacy over time, and so the doll has reportedly been a surprise revolution for them in the bedroom. They never even anticipated this kind of change when they bought the doll. They thought it would help only one of them!
Another tells me they’ve even been getting back to having sex with their partner again – without the doll present. The issues preventing them from having sex with each other didn’t simply disappear, but with some barriers to intimacy removed by having a doll in the house, eventually their sex life uncovered a new surprise chapter. (But yes, so they tell me, they definitely still use the doll too.)
We’re taught to feel guilty about having desires outside of our relationship. But the truth is that feeling desire and eroticism is a deeply human, deeply normal, and deeply safe thing. Sometimes, introducing a safe new element into a relationship can allow us to celebrate that desire. Dolls can open up a whole new chapter in intimacy and sex – enough, as we’ve learned, to save marriages. We’re proud at ShesDoll to help make those changes happen for some of our happy, loving customers.
Is your relationship suffering from intimacy issues? Consider ShesDoll range – it might be the thing you both need to turn over a new leaf in love.
