Being Best Friends Is Not Saving Your Sex Life

Being Best Friends Is Not Saving Your Sex Life

If you and your partner would call yourselves best friends, this one is for you. I am going to say something that might annoy you, but it will help you.

Being best friends is not saving your sex life right now. It might be the thing hiding what is actually wrong with it.

The better your relationship is, the easier it is for the two of you to quietly agree to never talk about the one part that is not working. Because why would you rock a boat this good?

So let us talk about why couples with genuinely great relationships still end up stuck, sad, and occasionally sniping at each other about sex. And the real reason it happens. Spoiler. It is not your marriage, and it is not your hormones.

Let Me Read Your Mail

Let me describe a couple and you tell me if I am reading your mail.

You genuinely like each other. You laugh at the same dumb stuff. You parent well together. You have systems. Groceries, money, whose turn it is when the kids barf at 2 a.m. Handled. If someone at a barbecue asked how your relationship is, you would say great, and you would not be lying.

But the sex. Struggling. Maybe it is rare. Maybe it is fine.

Fine is probably the most depressing word in the English language.

Maybe it works for one of you and not the other, and you both know it, and neither of you says it. The thing nobody admits out loud is that you have both quietly agreed not to really talk about it. Not because you do not care. Because you care so much about everything you have built that this feels like the one thread you should not pull.

The Greatest Hits

So instead of talking, you have been trying things. Here are the greatest hits.

The date night. You get a sitter, you get dressed up, you have a lovely dinner and a great conversation, because of course you did, you are great friends. And then you go home and one of you gets into bed with a phone, and the whole drive home felt like a silent question mark hanging in the car. Date nights are wonderful. They are also not automatically foreplay. Connection at a restaurant does not become desire in the bedroom on its own. Different things entirely.

The waiting. This is just a phase. The kids are little. It will come back on its own. And the quick question is, how many years has this phase been now. Two? Five? More? Be honest.

The hormone panel. One of you went to the doctor, got blood drawn, and secretly hoped something would come back off, because if it is hormones then it is fixable, and more importantly it is nobody's fault. But then everything comes back normal, and somehow that feels worse. Or you do get results, you do take the pills, and it still is not making you desperate for sex.

And the book. Somebody bought a book. The book lived on your nightstand for eight months. The book judged you quietly every night. The book has now been moved to a different shelf.

Here is what I want you to hear about all of that. None of those were stupid. Every one of those strategies made sense. Every one maybe got you a little closer. But in my eyes, they were not aimed at the actual problem.

Loving Each Other and Being Good at Sex Are Two Different Things

Here is the flip. Loving each other and being good at sex are two different things. One is a feeling. The other is a set of skills. And nowhere, at any point in your entire life, has anyone actually taught you those skills.

Think back to what sex ed was. A diagram of fallopian tubes. A teacher who would not make eye contact. Maybe a condom and a banana. And then movies and pop culture and pornography filled in the rest, where no one ever has to talk, desire strikes both people at the exact same moment like lightning, and everything works perfectly on the first try. That is the training I got. That is the training you got.

And then you had kids, which is basically the expert level of this game unlocked. So we have all been coasting on mediocre sex skills, and now we are at the expert level without ever having learned the expert level skills, and we wonder why we are struggling.

You are two people who were handed zero training, trying to do a genuinely skilled thing, at the hardest difficulty setting of your life. And when it does not work, you each privately conclude the worst. Something is wrong with my body. My partner does not want me anymore. My partner is the broken one and just needs to be fixed.

Nothing is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with your marriage. Sometimes there are just things that need to get learned.

Broken Versus Untrained

You never learned how to have sex. There is a difference between broken and untrained.

There is a difference between broken and untrained. That is the whole difference.

Here is what sex between two parents actually requires. Knowing how your own desire works, and I promise it does not work like the movies told you. Initiating in a way that does not feel like pressure to the other person. Getting your brain out of the grocery list and back into your body. Shifting out of parent mode, which is its own skill and one almost nobody talks about. And saying what you actually like out loud to another human being without dying of awkwardness.

Every single one of those is a skill. Not a personality trait. Not a hormone level. A skill. And skills have a very inconvenient, very beautiful property. Anyone can learn them.

The Fear Is Not Evidence

I know what some part of you just did. The second I said learnable, a little voice went, but what if we try and it still does not work. Then it is confirmed. Then we really are broken. Or maybe we have tried, and it has not worked.

I see you. And even though I am a sex coach, and even though I have spent the better part of my twenties and thirties and now my forties talking publicly about sex, I have been there too. I have been in periods where I thought it would be unchangeable. I have been in the place where I did not think I would ever find the words for what I needed. I have been in the place where I thought I was broken.

What it is really all about is fear. Fear deserves real time. But for now I just want you to notice one thing.

The fear is not evidence. It is just fear.

It shows up right on schedule anytime something matters. We get afraid when the uncomfortable status quo is finally ready to change, because the uncomfortable status quo is still better for our nervous system than the terrifying unknown of something better.

Steve and Nicole

Let me tell you about a client. Steve reached out to me about a year ago. He and Nicole were stuck in a frustrating cycle. Sex would happen infrequently. He would get upset about it, vocal about it, frustrated about it. She would feel all kinds of pressure, which meant she would either find a way to make it happen just to relieve the pressure, or double down and pull back because she was upset by how he was behaving. It was leading to less sex than either of them wanted, and it was creating real tension around the bedroom, which just created more avoidance and distance.

Nicole was game. She came on a call with me, and they joined the Naked Fun Comeback together, because they were ready to get out of the dance. She did not want to feel pressured anymore. He did not want to be having tantrums anymore. They just wanted sex to feel easier and more fluid.

The biggest thing that shifted for them is that whole dance around avoidance and emotions and meltdowns. It neutralized. The highs are not so high and the lows are not so low. Steve does not ruminate the way he used to. He does not get in his head about what it means that they are not having sex. Nicole feels less pressure in general, which means they are able to connect on a regular basis, whether it leads to sex or not. It fills both their cups. It lets them feel loved and connected. The whole relationship feels more fluid, more easy, more simple.

My Own Deep, Dark Hole

For me, the scary hole looked different. I have been doing this work since my 20s, and I am going to be 42 this year. Early on, my struggle was orgasm. I just did not feel like I could reach it. I had this big is this really all there is feeling about sex. Early in a relationship there would be novelty and interest, and that could sustain my excitement for a while, but it always waned, because I just did not get that much out of sex.

I remember calling my first sex therapist, after my partner at the time really insisted I do something about it. She told me something I can never unhear. I could sit on her couch and talk to her all about my views on sex and dig for the root cause of everything, but the real root cause was likely that I just did not know how to have an orgasm. I had not developed the skill.

That sent me down a path through several books and through my tantra certification. And I can now proudly say I know how to have an orgasm. I know how to have multiple orgasms. I know how to have different kinds of orgasms. And I am excited to keep learning and expanding that skill.

It Is All Part of the Naked Fun Cycle

Two very different stories, but the point is the same. There are the tangible skills, anatomy and pleasure and what button does what. And there are the relational skills, how we find value in our relationship, how we ask for what we want without creating pressure, how we hear each other's limits. All of those are the skills that make a sex life better.

So much of what I see online is toys, lingerie, lube, topical estrogen. I am not dissing any of it. It is all part of a delicious sex life for somebody. But if we do not know how to make an ask without creating pressure for our partner, we never even get to the point where the toy matters. And if we are not having sex worth craving, you can bet I am not going to be excited to get into that bedroom with you.

It is all part of what I call the Naked Fun Cycle, and I will go deeper on it in the coming weeks.

You Do Not Suck at This

Here is what I want you to take away. You do not suck at this. You have never learned it.

You cannot expect yourself to be a Michelin chef if you have never been to chef school.

Say it in your head if you need to. Or better yet, say it to your partner tonight, not as an accusation, but as relief. Because that is what it is. It means the last however many years were not a verdict on your marriage or how much you love each other or how attracted you are. They were just a revealing of two untrained people doing their best without a map. And it means the next years get to be different. Not because you will try harder, but because you will finally learn the things nobody taught you.

Want In

If this is resonating, consider joining the Naked Fun Comeback, my program for couples. It starts October 17th. Doors are not opening for a little while, but I want you to get on the waitlist now. There are going to be all kinds of juicy bonuses and a very special early bird discount and pricing for the waitlist only.

So even if you are just at huh, maybe, get on the waitlist and get all the good stuff. The link is below.

Next week on the podcast we get into the conversation itself. Why talking about sex with the person you love is so brutally hard, and how to get over yourself and do it anyway. That one is going to be spicy.