Sex Without Stress Page 3

  Yara is still interested in sex. In fact, she is coming alive to sex in a new way. She has had sexual interest in men throughout her life, as well as sexual experiences with men when she was young. She doesn’t label herself as bisexual, since she is only interested in acting on her sexual interest with women at this point. She was confused about her sexual orientation and how she would identify when she was younger. Now, she is feeling more comfortable flirting and engaging her sexual energy with both men and women. This upsets Beth.

  They struggle a lot with their desire discrepancy (in-depth details on desire discrepancy in Chapter 7). Beth will try to avoid sexual situations, and Yara doesn’t want to put Beth on the spot. When they do become sexual at all, Beth will often criticize Yara for being sexual or assertive, trying to back her off so Beth won’t feel exposed in her own sense of inadequacy. She will often deliver a subtle but cutting comment that will crush Yara, and their encounter will fizzle. Given how bad it feels to both, they largely avoid the topic and will go months without even trying to be sexual.

  Jenny and Rich

  Jenny and Rich are a couple in their 30s who have been married for 8 years and enjoy a good relationship in many ways. They are both kind and thoughtful people, and they have two young kids, keeping them busy. Jenny and Rich co-parent well and tend to be on the same page about most of the parenting decisions. That is less true about other areas of their life.

  The two have lingering resentment over household chores and duties. Jenny feels like she’s got the mental load of managing the household and the kids, and she hates having to ask repeatedly for Rich to step up and take the lead on some of it. Rich feels unappreciated for the extra hours he puts in at work to maintain their lifestyle, and he doesn’t understand why Jenny seems so stressed out all the time. They each struggle to deal with conflict, so they largely avoid it until Rich explodes in frustration. Their mutual resentment and their lack of skills in addressing hard topics mean they struggle to work as a team. They also fight about sex. They have the same fight about twice a year, where Rich expresses frustration with their sex life, and Jenny gets defensive.

  In between these biannual arguments, they don’t address their sexual issues directly. Instead, they argue about sexual initiation. Jenny has said in the past that she doesn’t like him just asking for sex and only touching her when he wants sex, so Rich tries to touch her and have some intimacy outside of the bedroom to set the stage for later. For example, he will try to initiate some physical intimacy by touching or kissing Jenny while she is in the kitchen. But then Jenny gets mad at him for interrupting her or not seeing that she is busy loading the dishwasher. She keeps the conversation focused on his initiation tactic, effectively boxing him into a corner where there is no way to do it right. This kind of conflict helps them avoid talking about how bad their sex life has become.

  Rich wants more sex than Jenny. In fact, at this point, she doesn’t want any at all. She has been the person less interested in sex all along, and she has spent quite a long time having sex because she thinks she should. At first, this worked okay. But she’s gotten more frustrated because he seems content to have sex that is more focused on him. She is out of touch with what she wants in sex, and it doesn’t seem to matter to him. He’ll ask about what he can do for her, but he’ll quickly move on when she doesn’t have an answer. As she gets less and less into it, he gets upset.

  Jenny hasn’t felt desire in years, but she’s been having sex out of a sense of obligation for a long time. She has finally hit a wall and is unable to keep doing that without feeling like she is giving herself away or compromising her integrity. They have hit a stalemate since they have not dealt with her lack of sexual desire to begin with. Her libido is affected by the anti-depressants she is on, but it is also affected by her long history of not thinking about what she wants and constantly trying to keep everyone else happy.

  As Jenny has stopped just going along with sex, Rich feels rejected. He’s resented being the sole initiator for sex for quite a while. Now, his confidence, his feeling of being desirable, and his sense of connection with her have plummeted. As they go longer periods of time without having sex, he is feeling hopeless and lost. He is also confused and hurt to realize she hasn’t wanted to have sex. He could tell that sometimes she was more into it than other times, but he hadn’t realized the degree to which she’d been faking an interest. Now that it has all come out, he has stopped initiating sex, and she largely avoids the subject because she doesn’t see how it can improve.

  Tom and Grant

  Tom and Grant are in their 30s and in a young, two-year relationship. They are considering getting married but have concerns about their sex life. Sex quickly became problematic in their relationship, partly because neither of them know how to talk about it. Grant is questioning whether they are compatible because of their struggles. Each time they try to have sex, he is on high alert for signs of whether it’s working or not. Tom is aware of Grant’s vigilance, of course, so sex just feels stressful to him. At this point, when Grant brings up sex, he sees fear in Tom’s eyes instead of desire.

  Tom and Grant both tend toward being passive in the relationship, each wants the other to be assertive and take control. Neither has had much experience with penetrative sex. Tom has had some, but it’s only happened with partners who were experienced and knew what they were doing. Grant hasn’t had any. They both believe that penetrative sex is the “right” kind, so they both feel bad about their sex life since they aren’t sharing that (though they both enjoy oral and manual stimulation and don’t struggle with those activities). They are both interested in exploring penetration, but each thinks it should come naturally and that their partner should be the one to both know what they are doing and to make it happen.

  Tom knows Grant is constantly evaluating the state of their sex life. Tom has developed erectile dysfunction due to the sense of pressure he has around each sexual encounter. Every time Tom struggles to get an erection, Grant takes it as a sign that their sex life is doomed and gets emotional and upset. Their sexual encounter comes to a dramatic halt, putting more pressure on the next time. Every time it goes that way, they end up distant and wrapped up in their own emotional wounds instead of connecting with each other.

  At this point, they have fallen into a pattern of only joking about sex. Grant suggests sex but uses a silly, joking way of bringing it up that makes it easy to ignore. First, this type of silliness isn’t sexy to Tom. Second, silliness about sex also signals that Tom can just joke back. Neither of them is forced to address the lack of sex in their relationship in a serious way. Grant protects himself by joking. If he doesn’t make a serious request, Tom’s lack of interest doesn’t feel as much like rejection. Tom feels better because jokes keep the topic of sex lighter and less serious. Both know they aren’t having sex and that they joke about it to avoid talking about the problems.

  CHAPTER 3

  Your Expectations Are the Problem

  Remember how I said the Avoidance Cycle starts with disappointment? Disappointment is all about your expectations. It is the literal definition of disappointment: the feeling of sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfillment of one’s hopes or expectations. Your expectations are the problem. Your expectations of yourself, your partner, and what sex is supposed to be and look like. The ideas in your head often overshadow your experience. They become the measure of your sexual success or failure.

  Every time you feel like a failure, like something is wrong, or like you are inadequate, you will be less inclined to approach sex again. Holding yourself to an arbitrary standard, no matter where it comes from, is a buzz kill. Holding yourself to a standard that is grounded in your integrity and core beliefs is important, but you may withdraw if you aren’t living up to what you expect of yourself. As soon as you feel like you need to perform, to be a certain way, or for certain things to happen, you leave the present moment and sit in judgment of yourself, your partner, and your sexual interactio
n. If you are meeting your expectations, sex is probably working—for now. But since so many expectations are arbitrary and unrealistic, you set yourself up for feelings of failure at some point in the future.

  Expectations are informed by your history and culture.

  You may or may not know where you developed a lot of your expectations. Over time, you have developed ideas about how sex is “supposed” to work. You have ideas about what to expect from your partner and ideas about how conflict should be dealt with or avoided. Your family and your past relationships have taught you a lot about these things, and most of it goes unquestioned until you take the time to examine it. You will get the chance to do that in the next section of the book.

  Your expectations are also framed by culture. Think about how sex has been portrayed around you: in the media, school, sex education classes, and peer groups. You receive a lot of information from all these places, and you weave it together to create a picture of sex and sexuality. Sometimes these messages have been loud and explicit. Sometimes sex has seemed almost invisible, and no one was talking about it. Either way, your brain puts together a picture of how sex works, what it means, and how you are supposed to feel about it. You build an image of what to expect. By the time you started to be aware of sex and were becoming a sexual being, what were you expecting? What specific ideas did you form about what sex should be?

  Pornography shapes your expectations.

  I can’t talk about sexual expectations without talking about pornography. Like other movies that feed us an image of what sex can or should look like, pornography can have a big impact on how we picture sex. Pornography has changed forms over the years, and it’s much more pervasive than ever. Decades ago, you might have found someone’s stash of magazines somewhere and gotten a view of people’s bodies, sexual arousal, and sex itself. Other, racier magazines and video tapes showed you stories about how sex went in the imagination of their creators. Now you can be exposed to a huge variety of video material at your fingertips. There are huge catalogs of porn in every conceivable category. If you have seen any of it, it has shaped your expectations, whether you want it to or not.

  Watching porn is a prevalent way people think they are learning about sex. Except porn isn’t sex; it’s entertainment. (It may be other things than that, too, but I’m not going to get into an evaluation of the value/health/morality of porn.) Not only is porn highly produced, with extensive preparation, enhancements, and selected camera angles, it is also based in fantasy and faking. These aren’t, generally speaking, real people in real relationships and real situations. These scenes, looked at in the most generous way, are exaggerated to appeal to someone’s eroticism, scripted to accentuate certain aspects of sex. They are a caricature of sex.

  If porn is where you or your partner “learned” about sex, you’re going to run into problems when sex meets real life. Certainly, what’s shown in pornography is there for a reason; any slice of it is enjoyable for some segment of the population. But what porn presents is not how sex needs to be. Or how sex should be, unless it’s exactly what you and your partner both want. Porn gives you one view of sex: it’s not the only one. There are almost certainly things that you can learn about your erotic desires from watching pornography, but it is important to separate that insight from the expectations you have for sex with your partner. If you don’t understand the difference between the fantasies being enacted in a photograph (or on screen) and the variety of ways sex can happen between two people in real life, you can end up with a distorted view of what sex is and what other people want. This informs your expectations, and you might view “regular sex” as inadequate or view yourself as inadequate if you can’t perform like the porn stars.

  Sexual myths spawn unrealistic expectations.

  There are a lot of sexual myths in the world that create unrealistic expectations, too. I’m going to describe the myths that show up the most often in my work with couples. Some of this misinformation might have shown up while you were thinking about your family and cultural influences or considering how porn may have informed your view of sex. But whether they came up earlier or not, I want to correct the most common sexual myths that get in the way of good sex for couples (in no particular order):

  YOU AND YOUR PARTNER SHOULD WANT TO HAVE THE SAME AMOUNT OF SEX.

  The reality is that one of you is always more interested in sex than the other, at least over time (I will cover the topic of desire discrepancy extensively in Chapter 7). Which of you wants more sex and which wants less may switch, too, as life goes on. But a discrepancy in how much sex you want is not a problem. It can become one if you don’t deal with it well, however. You can dispose of the idea that something is wrong just because one of you has a higher libido or interest in sex.

  MEN WANT SEX MORE THAN WOMEN, AND THEY’RE ALWAYS READY TO GO.

  In roughly half of the (heterosexual) couples I see in therapy, it’s the woman who wants more sex than her partner. And in gay and lesbian couples, there is still one partner with a higher desire than the other. The sexual expectations that are based on gender can put a burden on you and your partner. If you’re a man, you might feel a lot of pressure to be the sexual driver in the relationship—which can be very stressful if that’s not how you feel. If you’re a woman who wants sex, you may be judged for that, and at the same time, you might be judging your partner for wanting less. There is nothing about gender that determines what your sexual interest is or should be.

  YOU SHOULD FEEL SPONTANEOUS DESIRE FOR SEX; YOU SHOULD FEEL “HORNY.”

  I describe two basic ways people experience sexual desire—proactive and reactive. Proactive desire is what people normally think of as libido or sex drive. If you have proactive desire, you feel desire for sex on a somewhat regular basis. You get horny, you think about sex, and you try to have it. You seek it out. You may think this is the right way to be, and something is wrong if you or your partner don’t have this experience.

  On the other hand, you may instead have reactive desire, a desire that needs to be evoked. You don’t really think about sex. You may not get spontaneously aroused at all, or at least rarely. If you are asked if you want sex in any given moment, the answer is likely to be no. But your sexual interest is there if you go looking. If you enter a sexual situation, if you get kissed, touched, or stimulated, your body often responds. You start to get aroused. The engine turns over! You get turned on. And then you want sex. That reactive desire for sex (the desire that is sparked by a stimulus) is important. In my experience, about half of the population experiences reactive desire. And no, it’s not all women! Some of you are like this from the beginning. Some of you switch in and out of reactive desire based on life circumstances. We all tend to move toward a more reactive desire as we get older. The bottom line is that your desire (and your partner’s) is normal and valid.

  Reactive desire isn’t a problem. It’s a valid way of experiencing sexual desire. But it requires the opportunity to arise. You must be willing to enter (or create) the encounter and see what happens. No promises, no expectations, but be willing and open to getting turned on and wanting sex. And if you still experience no sexual arousal or desire at all, you and your partner will have to adapt to that, discovering ways to be sexual that still work for you and ways that you can find pleasure in physical touch.

  SEX IS NATURAL; IT SHOULDN’T TAKE WORK.

  Procreation is natural. Enough people have the urge to have sex that humankind hasn’t died out yet. But the ability to have collaborative, creative sex with another person is a learned set of skills (skills I discuss in detail in Chapter 11). It isn’t natural to be intimate or to share a meaningful experience. When you add in the complications of real life—kids, jobs, illness, and other stress—it makes perfect sense that your sex life is going to take work. It doesn’t mean you’re with the wrong person because sex isn’t coming easily. You may need to let go of the fantasy that you can just show up and have good sex automatically. Even if it seemed e
asy early on when there was all that new relationship energy, over time everyone’s sex life will need attention.

  YOU AND YOUR PARTNER SHOULD KNOW WHAT THE OTHER WANTS; YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE TO COMMUNICATE.

  This belief falls into what’s called the “fusion fantasy” category—the idea that you will meet your soul mate, you will be perfectly attuned, and everything will be easy and natural because you found the right person. Unfortunately, this is a fantasy. It’s perpetuated in popular culture, movies, and TV, which can make you feel like something must be wrong when it doesn’t work out that way in real life.

  Here is the truth: if you want something, you need to make that known, often with words. Yes, you can read each other and might have some good ideas about what the other wants, but often you don’t have the required level of specificity. You do not instantly know how to please a partner. And what has worked with other lovers in the past won’t necessarily work with you and your partner now. You are the only person who knows what your sexual activity feels like and how it could be better. It is up to you to give the gift of that information to your partner. They also need to give that to you. You don’t have to talk through an entire sexual encounter, but you will have to communicate sometimes to get what you want.

  WOMEN SHOULD ORGASM THROUGH VAGINAL PENETRATION ALONE.

  Somewhere between 4-30% of women can or will orgasm only through the stimulation that happens during penetration. Most women require additional stimulation of their clitoris to reach an orgasm. You wouldn’t know this by watching love scenes, however, since they rarely show anything but women appearing to climax through intercourse. If you are expecting a vaginal orgasm and you’re not one of the rare women who experience that, you’ve set yourself up to feel like a failure. And if you’re a partner who holds that expectation for your female lover, you may feel like at least one of you is inadequate.