'My parents have loud sex in the next-door bedroom. Help!' Alex Carlton's advice for a grown-up stuck living at home

By Alex Carlton|

Is it something you should bring up over a bowl of Weetbix? Probably not, writes Alex Carlton.

Living at home when you're well into adulthood is bad enough. Alex Carlton (@Alex_Carlton) offers words on wisdom to a 29-year-old who's discovered exactly how bad it can be...

"I'm 29 and live at home for financial reasons. I have a good relationship with my parents and for the most part we don't get in each other's way... except for one thing. My bedroom is right next to theirs and they seem to be enjoying a terrifying mid-life sexual second wind. The walls are paper thin and the things I hear some nights make me sob with horror. Oh the horror. How can I bring this up without all of us dying of embarrassment and never speaking again?"

— Please Make It Stop.

Part of me feels for you, PMIS. All of us remember that moment, burned indelibly into our retinas and eardrums, when as kids we walked in on mum and dad "tickling" or "doing aerobics" in their bedroom. At the time you don't understand what's going on but something about it is so primally repulsive that the experience stays with you until you learn the facts of life. Only then does the cold, clammy realisation seep through your senses, like someone forcing a can of cat food down your throat.

Oh god. You witnessed your parents having sex.

So I get it. I understand that the sound of someone's own dad grunting and their mum breathing heavily and that ghastly, damp flapping of god knows which parts of their middle-aged bodies is probably used as a torture method in Guantanamo Bay. But Please Make It Stop? No. No I cannot fulfil your pseudonym's request in any way.

Because, my friend, let me tell you what sex has been for your parents for your entire childhood: three minutes, max, of your mum whipping off her grey marle trackies at 7:08am while you were finishing your Weetbix and your brother was howling for someone to find his cricket bat. It was grunting quickies in the bathroom leant over the sink while Hey, Hey It's Saturday! was on, probably with your mum brushing her teeth to save time before bed. "Parent sex", as blogger Constance Hall describes it, is "where you position the bed to have one foot against the door because for a loud bunch of kids, yours can be pretty quiet when they're sneaking up on people."

That's what your parents' sex life has been since the time their bedroom banging produced you. So if they want to get their spring chicken on in their frisky autumn years while you cringe helplessly at their whinnying from the room next door, I'm afraid my sympathy lies almost exclusively with them.

Don't say anything, PMIS. Leave your poor damned parents alone. You're the one living under their roof and that means playing by their rules. Even if their rules currently involve blindfolds and dreadful polyester French maid outfits.

And you know what else? I don't know what "financial reasons" are keeping you there, but you're about to turn 30. It may just be time to spread your wings and shell out for a cramped, viewless, silent hovel of your own.

Otherwise your chance of having your own children to torment in a similar way are slim to none.


Alexandra Carlton is a Sydney-based journalist, wife and mum of a nine-year-old boy. Fifteen years of interviewing psychologists, scientists, politicians, taste-makers and other highly-qualified people means she's very good at stealing their smart thoughts and passing them off as her own in order to amaze and delight at social gatherings. She's obsessed with documentaries, cool sneakers, ranking her favourite American presidents and starting new, very brief, health regimes. Oh, and she loves solving people's problems. Except her own.

If you're in need of some life advice, email our expert columnists at lifecoach@ninemsn.com.au, like, right now.

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