I’ve talked to too many partners who haven’t had an honest talk about sex and how their dynamics affect them. Please. Stop. Doing This. If you’re dealing with low sexual desire, talk about it. If the way you’re being asked to have sex puts the brakes on your sexual desire, talk about it. If you’re afraid that sex will never look the way you thought it would, talk about it. Too many couples have big fears and instead of bringing it into the relationship, they try to hide those fears or “not bother” their spouse with them.
Sex: Stop Doing It Alone
Relationships are about bringing all the good stuff and the bad stuff into your spouse’s awareness and dealing with them together. When sex isn’t comfortable or it isn’t good, don’t try to figure it out alone. You’re missing out on half of the equation when you try to “figure it out” alone. You’re not speaking the language of sex and constructing your intimate life together. Instead, you’re “doing it alone.”
Sometimes what keeps us from talking to our spouse is a sense that our spouse doesn’t want us anymore. That somehow they don’t want us and that if we open up the conversation, it’s just going to be a big lump of pain.
But if we don’t share the difficult parts of sex - when it doesn’t work like in the movies - we don’t get to be in relationship with our partner. They don’t get to help us. They don’t get to know our deepest insecurities and we never get to be helped by them. The downside to all of this is the tension that maybe it won’t work. That maybe we’ll open up to them about our sexual insecurities and they’ll reject us.
The Leap of Faith
Imagine a ferry is leaving the dock and you’re running towards it, trying to make the last ferry off the island. Imagine running toward the ferry and just as they pull the gang plank and there’s a few feet of separation between the ferry and dock, you jump off the dock hoping and praying that you’ll land on the ferry instead of plummeting into the water.
In that moment where neither of your feet are touching the ground, you’re operating on pure faith that you can land on solid ground. You’ve made the leap and are hoping for the best. That’s what it might feel like to bring up the topic of sex with your spouse. But if you’re stuck on the island, it may be the only way for you to reach them. It may be the only way to get unstuck.
We Don’t Have Sex, Therefore, My Partner Doesn’t Like Me.
To start talking about sex, I help clients talk about accelerator pedals and brakes. This is language that I attribute to Emily Nagoski, whose book “Come As You Are” I highly recommend. Everybody has a brake pedal and accelerator pedal. Most of us have more than one accelerator pedal and more than one brake pedal. As you might guess, accelerator and brake pedals represent the things in the world or inside you that increase and decrease your sexual desire, respectively.
The trick with these pedals is that at any one point in time, multiple brake pedals may be pushed down at the same time as the accelerator pedals. So while your spouse may not seem to want to be intimate with you, they may simply have brake pedals (tiredness, job loss, recent birth of a child) that are being pressed down at the same time.
The damaging assumption is when we think they simply don’t have any desire for us. And it is true that some people are low-sexual desire folks. But that low sexual desire may be because there’s one accelerator and a multitude of brake pedals that are operating at one time. That is to say, you or your spouse may be attracted to each other, but there may be so many things in the way that it’s difficult to get enough desire to act on them.
If you need help talking about your sex life, I recommend talking to an EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) therapist because there are often so many underlying brakes that can get in your or your spouse’s way. EFT as a therapeutic treatment aims to examine the underlying emotions that hijack your relationship, and in this case, your sex life. If you want to know more about how I think of marriage counseling, come visit my marriage counseling page.
If you’re in the Minneapolis area, I can help you walk through this difficult conversation with your spouse or partner. Call me at 612-230-7171, send me an email through my contact form, or click the button below to have a 15 minute consult to see how I might be able to help.
I look forward to seeing how I can help. Take good care.