Quickies, Date Nights, and Good Connection: How These Parents Keep Their Sex Life Alive

Destin Pfaff and Rachel Federoff are best known for their work on Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker, where they helped Patti Stanger find love for the mega-rich. The couple are also married, the parents of two boys — a 10 and a half year old and a three year old — and now co-own their own matchmaking company, Love and Matchmaking. So yeah, they’re busy. Still, they find time to prioritize their own relationship and sex life, too. What’s their secret to a great marriage? Fatherly spoke to Destin and Rachel about how much their relationship has evolved after they became parents, their sex life, the beauty of quickies, and the pleasure of, well, pleasuring your partner right.

The Couple: Destin (46) and Rachel (43)

Married: 9 YearsTogether: 13 YearsKids: Two boys, one 10.5-year-old , one 3.5-years-oldLocation: CaliforniaJobs: Relationship experts and matchmakers (both of them)

Broad question But how has becoming parents changed your relationship?

Destin: Our kids have absolutely destroyed our relationship and sucked every ounce of life out of us.

Rachel: Oh, no!

D: I’m kidding!

R: You start off in a relationship and it’s all about the romance and the lovey-dovey and just me and you. The minute you have children, there is no ‘just me and you’. It’s now ‘all of us.’ It makes it really challenging to have date nights, because you need a sitter. It makes it really challenging to have sex, because, oh my gosh, one of them is going to walk in on us.

D: What we do love about love is that love evolves. Whether or not you have children, your love is always evolving as you see the different quirks and idiosyncrasies and challenges that both of you have. No one is absolutely perfect for another person, but you evolve together. As you have children, that’s just another one of those challenges that the two of you face. You have to evolve and grow up to not battle, but grow up to be a part of, and embrace, and really allow it to not make it more of a strain but actually pull you together and make that love that you have for each other even stronger.

R: It turns your love into a very different kind of love. It’s just different. It’s not like the young, go out, partying with each other, getting drunk and screwing each other’s brains out kind of love anymore. It’s very sweet, and family-oriented. It’s still hard to explain, but it evolves into a different kind of love.

What about your sex life?

D: It absolutely has changed. And It absolutely should! Again, part of the evolution is that when you’re two individuals, and it’s just the two of you against the world, and you can have sex whenever you want to, you can do anything that you want to. When you start wrapping others in to the fold, and children come into it, not only do you have the weight of each other’s personalities, but you also have the weight of your work, or your business, and your extended family life, and your friends, and now you have children wrapped into it and that all affects your sex life.

You have to make the time, to sometimes even plan it out. It can be that much more impactful and important and that much more connecting, because no matter how exhausted you are, it shows that you’re still willing to make time for the other person.

R: But it also makes it make you more spontaneous, too. Let’s say you wake up in the morning and you’re like, oh, the kids are still sleeping, get ready, quick, go! Lock the door! So, sometimes you have to get it while you can, which is kind of fun. You feel like when you’re young.

D: Right, and you don’t want to get caught.

R: Yeah, you don’t want to get caught by your parents. It’s the same thing. The kid police are going to come in.

D: You have to laugh at it, and look at it like an adventure. It keeps it from becoming a negative thing. That’s the last thing you want: is for that strain or drain to become negative vs. the positive, either planning it out or being spontaneous and just doing it when you can.

What do you do to prioritize your relationship?

D: Well, it’s a high priority to us but a higher priority is the connection. To have some time for ourselves. One of the things we do is a weekly date night, where, if we can’t get a sitter, we ‘go out’ but stay home. We force ourselves to stay up later, we’ll have cheese and wine on the floor, and we talk, eat, drink, and have fun.

We do subscription date night boxes where we have these games come to us once a month and we can have fun. Sometimes they’re sexual games, sometimes they’re communication and intimacy games. But if we don’t make it a priority, and don’t think of the other person’s desires, needs, and wants, too, that’s when you start neglecting the relationship and that’s when things start becoming more volatile and you start fighting more because you didn’t take the time to care. Kids or not, you have to make the time to care about sex, communication, intimacy on multiple levels.

How often are you guys able to have sex?

R: I would say, like, once a week.

That’s pretty solid.

R: Yeah. It’s not that sex isn’t important, as you age, and when you’re married and have children. But you’re on such a different level in your relationship that it’s not as important anymore. It is always important, people in their 70’s are still getting down and busy with each other, but when you’re in your 40’s and you have a family, there are so many more important things. Honestly, it’s more important for us, like Justin said, to have a connection. Date nights have become so much more important. Having love, affection and connection is so much more important than screwing each other every five minutes. We don’t need to do that all the time. It’s not as high up on the list from when you’re just dating, and you’re younger.

D: If you can make an effort to have once weekly standard, and sometimes you go a couple of weeks without it, and then sometimes you have sex at night and then again in the morning or you’re able to go away on a little vacation for a couple days and you’re off to Vegas or New York and you’re able to be naked for days, that can be amazing too. It’s all about appreciating the time when you can have it.

You have to look at sex in different ways. There’s making love, when you have that connection, and then sometimes, like Rachel is saying, in the morning you have time to quickly have sex, that’s a whole type of different feeling that’s also spectacular. And then there are times you just want to be there for the one you love – whether it’s pleasuring, your wife or your husband just because it’s been that kind of day or you’re just in the mood to give to them. One of those things should be happening at least once a week.

Whats’ your favorite part about your sex life?

R: Well, that’s hard.

D: That’s a loaded question!

R: It’s kinda complex.

D: For me, I think that the best part of our intimacy is when I make her orgasm, just to be really blunt. I feel that release of just the happiness and that “ah” moment when we’re with each other and we’re just two human beings and being intimate. At that moment, it’s not about the kids, it’s not about work, it’s not about day to day life. It’s just about passion, heat, and that wonderful human sensation we’re blessed to be able to have. Seeing her have that, I think, is my happiest.

R: Because we have so much craziness in our lives, and stress, and madness, I like when he and I just let loose and are really silly and having fun and being goofy. It brings me back to when we first got together. It takes me back in time. The sex, and the intimacy is more fun.

D: Our sex is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

R: What! No! [laughs]