2 Years of the Podcast and This Is What I hear The Most
What If Your Partner Isn't Asking You to Want Sex More?
This week marks two years of the Sex After Kids Podcast. Two years of filling your earbuds with my opinions, my knowledge and my questions about your sex life and your marriage. To celebrate, I want to share what I hear most often from both sides of the desire gap, and what sexuality actually is, because most of us were only ever taught one small piece of it.
What higher libido partners tell me
When I ask higher libido partners in my DMs (most often husbands) what would feel like a win, most women would guess sex five times a week. It's not. The most common answers are:
A genuine hug this week
Some loving touch
Feeling important, loved and wanted
And the biggest challenge isn't "she's not fucking me enough." It's "she won't even talk about this with me. She won't tell me what I'm doing wrong." Yes, these partners can be defensive, and they may be asking for connection in ways that push you away. But the heart of what they want is to feel loved, to feel wanted, and to be able to talk meaningfully about this really important topic.
What lower libido partners tell me
From lower libido partners (and I'm still the lower libido partner in my relationship), I hear:
"I want to have sex with my partner and I don't know how to want to want it."
"I want my partner to know I love them, and talking about this is really hard for me."
"When they ask me what I need, I don't have answers. So where is the conversation supposed to go?"
So often, I have two people who love each other very much and just haven't figured out this whole freaking sex thing. That makes sense, because nobody ever properly taught you.
The reframe
When your partner asks to put your sex life on the table, what most women hear is "I need to find a way to force myself to want sex more often." If that's where you're stuck, of course you don't want to. Your body has never really been your own (more on that in last week's episode), so giving it up on demand feels like a hard no, thank you.
But what if your partner isn't asking you to force yourself to want sex? What if they're asking you to open the box called sexuality that's sitting next to you, and look inside with curiosity instead of fear?
It's still a scary ask. I've been there. But it's a different ask, and the natural by-product of looking inside is an ease in talking about it, and access to something different, without forcing yourself.
One open box, one boarded-up box
Think of sex as a sandbox. Many of the men I speak with have an ease with their sexuality. Their box is open, they're comfortable playing, and they're confused about why you don't want to come play too. That ease is a privilege, because society hasn't beaten it out of them.
For most women, the sandbox has not been friendly. Sex has put barbed wire around the box and said if you like this, if you're curious about it, you're a slut, you're a whore, you're all the things. We have made it dangerous for women to enter the box, because that is where their power lies. (Naomi Wolf explores this idea in Vagina: A New Biography.)
So we end up with one box wide open and one taped up, boarded up, danger, danger, danger. It's not the only reason for desire differences, but I believe it's a big contributor.
Five compartments inside the box
Depending on the model, there are more or fewer, but here are five dimensions of human sexuality we all should have learned in sex ed:
Biology of sex. Where most sex ed began and ended: anatomy, contraception, STI prevention. How to not make babies and how to not get diseases. But there's a whole anatomy of arousal to explore, plus your nervous system's capacity to hold a charge. When I struggled with orgasm, my body would get to the top of the hill and go, too much, shut her down. I had to teach it to hold more goodness. A great starting point is Sheri Winston's Women's Anatomy of Arousal.
Intimacy. Into me, you see. Trust, vulnerability, feeling seen, heard, held and safe. Most of us never learned these skills, and my fellow type A, hyper-independent, overdoing partners are experts at skirting vulnerability. If we struggle with vulnerability, we are going to struggle with sex.
Identity. Gender identity, gender expression, orientation, and all the gender scripts running in the background: men pursue and push, women hold the line. Most of us are also far more queer and far kinkier than we'd like to admit, and cutting those parts off is part of why sex doesn't feel like the full buffet.
Sensuality. Your relationship to pleasure in all its forms, not just sex. Touch, body image, skin-to-skin contact. Humans are made for touch, and going without physical and emotional closeness is as bad for you as smoking. Most of us solo pleasure one exact way all the way to the finish line. No play, no curiosity. The menu is so limited.
Sexualization. Sex as power. How we use sex to gain connection, love, touch, and affection in healthy and hurtful ways.
The best sex of your life is yet to come
I'll say it flat out: most of you are having boring as fuck sex. We go from novelty to maintenance sex every Thursday in the exact same way, then we have babies, and it's no wonder we don't want to go back. There's an entire buffet, and most of us eat the same thing every single time.
My big bold argument is that the best sex of your life is yet to come, whether you're 40, 60 or 80, if you're willing to explore what's inside the box. Start by inviting yourself to try one new item.
If now is the time to make the next decade of your sex life the best yet, book a free Spark session. 45 min of your time to understand what's in your sex box and the roadmap to shifting it so you can get to sex that feels easy light and pressure free. The one thing I hear most often after these calls it "it feels so good to get that off mychest". Talk to you soon. Book now.
