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It’s 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night. You’re craving sexual activity of some sort, and so you propose it to or even initiate it with your long-term partner, who is exhausted and nursing a stomachache from dinner.
Needless to say, this overture does not go as planned. Your partner rejects your advances and seems upset you dared to venture them. You sulk on your side of the bed, and they sulk to theirs. No one gets laid.
There’s a reason this exact scenario plays for laughs in sitcoms so frequently—it’s relatable to anyone with a long-term lover. And even if the stereotype around it tends to be heteronormative—the disdainful wife rejecting the hopeful husband—New York–based sex-and-relationship therapist Rachel Wright, LMFT, says the experience is not limited to male-female partnerships. “This dynamic happens in all relationships,” she says. “It is not a heterosexual issue.”
So, is this just life in a long-term relationship, or is there another way?
The good news, according to Wright and other experts, is that there is another way. The perhaps less welcome news is that it involves a lot of talking.
When you propose or initiate sex in a way that feels spontaneous to your partner, says Wright, you can catch them off guard. “It often feels like a pop quiz,” agrees sex therapist Vanessa Marin, author of Sex Talks: The Five Conversations That Will Transform Your Love Life. But in all likelihood, says Wright, you’ve been thinking about whatever it is you’re wanting for a while, so there’s pressure for it to go a certain way. “And that’s not fair to anybody,” she says.
Wright says these scenarios can be avoided altogether by engaging in regular talks about sex. “So instead of, ‘Hey let’s do this tonight’ or ‘I want to talk about our sex life right now,’ it’s like, ‘Hey, I want to have a regular time to talk about our sex life. When would be a good time for us to do that?’” says Wright. She calls these set sex talks “containers for conversations.”
As unsexy as appointment sex talks may sound, Wright says they can transform your sex life, and reduce anxiety around sex because you don’t have to ruminate for days, weeks, or months over when you’re going to bring something up—there’s a set time for it.
They are also great forums for discussing how each partner prefers to have sex initiated, which can help you avoid the in-the-moment tension.
Wright says most people aren’t taught to talk about sex, and they’re not taught how to communicate period, so asking your partner to set a time to communicate about sex can be a daunting task. Her advice is to frame the meeting as something you want for the health of your partnership and the happiness of both people in it.
At first, says Cyndi Darnell, sexologist, sex therapist, and author of Sex When You Don't Feel Like It: The Truth About Mismatched Libido & Rediscovering, these talks are going to be uncomfortable for precisely the reason Wright mentioned above. “It is going to feel awkward in the beginning, because everything you've been taught about sex is that it’s natural and you don't have to think about it,” she says. “That’s a trap. You need to learn how to talk about it and build a sustained practice for talking about it. It’s not a script, it’s a way of life—an ongoing conversation that never stops.”
The first thing to keep in mind when initiating one of these conversations is that you don’t want to start out with the negative.
“Most people don’t talk about sex in their relationship until something is wrong, and so their first experience of communicating about it openly is a partner complaining or critiquing it, which tends to go badly,” says Marin.
“Instead, what I recommend is that people get comfortable talking about sex in a positive or even neutral way.”
So, even if the impetus for the conversation is that you need sex to be more frequent, Marin says you shouldn’t bring that up for a while. “Start instead by sharing some of your favorite sexual memories.
Tell them in detail how it made you feel, and really focus on the emotional and personal aspects of it, like, ‘I felt so close to you,’” she says. “You want to create this foundation of communication so you’re feeling more positive and less anxious and on-guard, and then it can feel a lot safer to open up to these bigger conversations.”
The key to making these talks successful is fairly simple: curiosity. “If curiosity is not present, you're screwed—or not screwed, as it were,” Darnell says. Curiosity is an invitation. “I’m curious about what the world is like for you. I’m curious about how your week has been. I’m curious about how you feel about your body. I’m curious about when sex has been good for you and what made it good,” she says.
These are crucial questions, says Darnell, because not only do you probably not know what it takes to get your partner into the right headspace for sex, but they probably don’t know for themselves, and so this type of exploration can be illuminating. “You've got to do your research,” Darnell says.
She notes, for example, that foreplay isn’t always sexual. “It might be making sure the apartment is clean and the dog bowl is washed and the trash has been taken out, even if it’s not necessarily your ‘job’,” Darnell says. “It’s creating a context for eroticism to thrive.
Doing these things without being asked because you’re thoughtful is a leg-opener.” It doesn’t have to include chores, either. “You might arrange a massage or a babysitter or get flowers—stuff that’s kind of banal and innocent, but has thoughtfulness behind it,” she says.
These types of conversations can also help illuminate just how much of a co-creation great sex is. “It’s the responsibility of both partners,” says Darnell.
Marin agrees and notes that a good way of approaching this is to ask how you can support one another in making space in your busy lives for intimacy.
“It turns it into a teamwork approach, and your partner is less likely to get defensive when it’s framed this way,” she says. “They’re not going to feel like you’re blaming your sex life on them.”
When you do get to the point at which you’re ready to discuss specific desires and needs, e.g., I would like more blowjobs, Marin's advice is to use “I” statements as much as possible. “If you're saying things to your partner like ‘You never want to have sex with me,’ that's a one-way ticket to getting defensive,” she says. “Instead, talk about your own experience and your own feelings.”
You need to be clear on not only what it is you want, but why you want it. “We have this tendency to see sex as a purely physical act, and when you’re the partner with lower desire, this can feel annoying or frustrating, like your partner is just looking to get off,’” says Marin. “What gets missed is that sex isn’t purely physical: It’s emotional, vulnerable, and intimate.”
When one partner is asking for sex, says Marin, it’s true that they want to feel good. But what they’re really asking for at that moment is closeness. “It’s important to make clear to your partner that you miss them, you love them, and you want to connect with them,” says Marin. “That feels so different from ‘Can you give me a blowjob?’”
And you want to make the request feel as specific to them and to your relationship as possible. “It’s not just I need this thing, I want this act,” Marin says. “It’s that I want you to do this thing. I want to have this experience with you, and for these reasons.”
This, again, is where curiosity comes in, so that you’re not just centering your desire, which can come off as entitlement. Darnell encourages talking not only about what you’re into and why, but asking your partner what they’re into and why.
This can help to build a bridge between your desires and, again, co-create a more satisfying sex life. “If you invite someone to your house and they’re a vegan, but you feed them roast beef, what kind of an asshole would you be?” says Darnell. “You have to research what your partner’s turn-ons are, and not just come at them with roast beef.”
If your request is something that has come up before, and your partner has agreed to try to accommodate it but this still hasn’t happened, Wright says it’s important to begin by acknowledging their efforts. From there, she says, it’s helpful to once again take a team-based approach, e.g., ‘What can we do to make this happen?’ “Acknowledge that you conceptually understand that they want you to have everything you want, and ask if you can figure it out together,” she says.
If, on the other hand, you are asking for something novel that your partner has never done before, Wright says it’s important to find out what it would take for them to feel safe with it.
It’s also important, says Wright, that you understand whether or not the request is non-negotiable for you before you bring it up because that should inform how you approach the conversation.
“Some of us are making a request because it sounds like something fun that we kind of want to try, but it's not a dealbreaker. Other times we bring in a request that is very clear that if we don't get it, this is not going to last. Those two things are very different,” she says.
If the request is one you are certain needs to be met, you should be radically honest and frame it that way, emphasizing that you want to meet that need with your partner. If that’s not a possibility, explain that you hope that you can figure out a different way to get it met together as a team.
At this point, you should have the tools to handle a situation in which your partner is not open to whatever it is you’re proposing. You can get curious and try to find out the why behind their no. You can open up to them about the why behind your ask, and if the specific ask is still their “roast beef,” you can work together to come up with a different ask that fulfills the same why.
If your request has upset them, Marin says it’s important to explain that it wasn’t your intention to upset them, and Darnell reiterates this as an opportunity to ask them questions as to why the request upset them.
After all, it’s unlikely they got agitated by a blowjob request for no reason—something about that particular request has triggered an underlying issue or resentment or trauma for them, and it’s important for you to understand what that is in order to troubleshoot the situation.
In some relationships, says Darnell, even these tactics will be unsuccessful, and your partner will stonewall you and refuse to work toward a solution. Sometimes they will refuse to talk about your sex life at all. In this case, she says, your relationship likely has bigger issues than sex, and it is probably time to seek the help of a professional therapist.
Marin offers one final suggestion for avoiding this all-too-common scenario. “A huge mistake couples make is we wait until the very end of the night to initiate or to even start thinking about sex, and it's just too late for the vast majority of people,” she says.
Most couples would benefit instead from initiating far earlier in the day or even engaging in a two-part initiation. “People think you need to initiate immediately at that moment, but instead you might try approaching your partner in the morning and saying, ‘I would love for us to make some time later tonight, or this afternoon…’ so that you’re giving your partner a heads-up and some time to prepare,” she says.
But if you fail to take this approach because life—and spontaneous horniness—happens, Darnell says this is once again an opportunity to interrogate your desire. She says that most likely, what you’re really craving is either stress relief or intimacy.
If it’s the former, you don’t necessarily need to involve your partner. If it’s the latter, there are ways to experience that intimacy that don’t involve sex. “Say to them, ‘I really want to connect with you right now. Can we cuddle?’ ‘Can we have a glass of wine?’ ‘Can you rub my feet?’ or whatever,” she says.
And if you’re truly just horny, Darnell says this may be a time to grow up a bit and “sort yourself out.” “There is nothing less sexy than someone who can’t take care of themselves,” she says. “It’s so unattractive.”
[ Via GQ US]
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