The Best thing to Help Improve Your Sex Life Is...
The Courage to have Vulnerable Conversations.
Now, hear me out. I hate click-baity headlines like this... But this is one of the most underrated, least discussed things for improving your sex life with your partner.
It's not about lubrication (although that can always help). It's not about overcoming shame or sharing hidden desires. It's not about sex toys or new positions (although I do believe every lady in the world needs one of THESE VIBRATORS).
It's about vulnerability.
People talk about "Communication" being at the center of a lot of relationship obstacles - and Sure. But I truly believe that the real crux lies in the willingness to be courageous to have vulnerable conversations - with love, care, respect and a willingness to allow ourselves to be truly seen.
As you can well imagine, I have had a thousand conversations with a thousand men who have expressed a wide spectrum of similar frustrations and obstacles with regards to their blocked sexual relationship with their partner. If you can imagine it, I have heard it. I've listened to so many different stories of why their female partner has shut down sexually and has put up a wall of distance, avoidance and justifications.
But when I have asked clients the question - "So are you guys able to talk about this? Have you had any conversations about this?" It seems to me that at least half of my clients aren't having conversations about their sex life with their partner - and even if they ARE having a regular sex life with their partner - it still never gets talked about...
And so the conversations never happen, the topic goes on ice and gets ignored under the weight of jobs and stress and kids. It gets put on a shelf and forgotten about, which can lead to it coming out sideways through repressed sexuality that is about to explode like a volcano. And that often leads to people hurting each other in unfortunate ways.
Or... worse yet, is people being imprisoned in a relationship with no physical intimacy. It's like sex prison. And just dying under the weight of all of that un-met need for love, physical affection, closeness, touch and pleasure.
If you know me, you know that I believe that having a fulfilling sexual connection is an essential, necessary, deeply nourishing component of a committed romantic relationship. Really, the only thing that makes a committed romantic relationship different from a close friendship or a family member is... Sex.
If you are in a close friendship relationship with your roommate, but you're not having sex with each other - you're not actually in a romantic relationship. In that type of dynamic - you're friends, with no benefits. Maybe you're business partners or co-parenting allies, or maybe you're family members. But having a sex life with your partner is what differentiates your primary partnership relationship from any other friendship or family member. Maybe you're even BEST FRIENDS, but if you're not having sex with your best friend, then you're not in a romantic relationship.
(And as an added caveat, I know that this is written within a largely monogamy oriented framework, so I understand that this has varying degrees of nuance for those of my non-monogamy / open relationship friends out there...)
Back to the point of this post... I've stated this before to so many clients in so many different ways, but what IS the point of sex exactly anyway? Is it just pleasure for the sake of pleasure? Is the point of sex just getting off? Is the point of sex just about conquest and getting the other person? I really don't think so. And maybe as a woman, I am biased - but I truly believe that sex boils down to one thing... This is what I think.
I believe that in sex what we are looking for is... We want to be loved. We want to be seen. We want to feel accepted in all of our vulnerability. We want to be cherished in the wholeness that we are.
We want to feel as close as is humanly possible to the person that we love. In my humble estimation, THAT is what makes sex magical. We want to feel merged together in transcendental ecstasy with our closest person... That is the ultimate fulfillment of a peak sexual experience, I believe.
AND! We want to overcome all of these obstacles created by our subconscious minds, created by our belief systems and religions, created by our childhood trauma imprints that create all of these distortions and disconnections between ourself and love and union and ecstasy. We want to overcome those walls and experience true ecstatic union and feel our hearts interwoven in the fullness of love and shared ecstasy.
But here's the catch. We can't experience that fullness, that interwoven rapture if we cannot talk to the other person we're having sex with, about what's going on inside ourselves.
If we are trying to be in a close physical experience with someone else, but simultaneously subconsciously pushing them away or distancing ourselves from them with a wall of revulsion, or hiding all of our secrets from them... I believe it short circuits the connection.
You really can't have a deeply ecstatic interwoven connection with your partner, if you can't be vulnerable. Vulnerability is the price of admission. Vulnerability is the price of closeness. And if your partner is shutting down, or putting up walls, or distancing or not being vulnerable - then there is a real problem.
You can't attack another person into closeness and vulnerability. You can't force or push them open to be vulnerable and close. You can't have power over someone and expect them to be vulnerable. You can't criticize your way into extracting vulnerability from your partner. Blame doesn't work either.
But having difficult conversations that are an opportunity for both people to feel truly seen and vulnerable, and for both people to feel heard... And most importantly, to share vulnerabilities about our shared sexual experiences is super crucial.
I had a really fascinating experience with someone who had a challenging obstacle with rapid ejaculation, and in retrospect I think the big takeaway is that sometimes when people are in long term relationships - people start to build insecurity and shame about their bodies. So the self-talk is about, "There's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough as a lover, because I have this physical issue. This issue means that I can't ever have what I want... which is a fulfilling sex life that includes passionate intercourse with my partner. And I end up having this thing, which is not exactly what I want, and I don't feel fulfilled." It's a negative self-talk spiral in which we project our internalized anxiety and insecurities onto our partner.
So my big insight is that we have to be willing to have these vulnerable conversations with our partner, and share about what's going on for ourselves in such a way that we both get more of what we want. We're working on a shared goal, in which we both get what we want, which is to feel loved, to feel cherished and treasured, to feel as close as possible and connected to each other, and to have the fulfilling pleasure & shared ecstasy that is our birthright.
So I suggested to my client experimenting with this alternative way of doing things, and communicating about it with his partner from the perspective of... I want us both to have a more fulfilling sex life, which means I need to try experimenting with different techniques in order to figure out what works best for my body.
It's like bio-hacking. We're trying to bio-hack your sex life, so that you can figure out ways to work with the uniqueness of your physical body, so that you can get the fulfillment that you deserve AND so that it can bring you and your partner closer together.
And I understand, it can be scary to have these kinds of conversations, because it brings your insecurity and vulnerabilities up to the surface. But it's these moments where we develop the courage to share from a place of vulnerability, that we allow our partner to truly see us and love us and maybe even work together in healing our unconscious patterns that we are struggling with.