Memperbaiki hubungan Pasangan Dr. Karen Gurney

Dr. Karen Gurney
.

I spend my working week trying to change people's relationships with sex. And the reason I do that is because, although we might think that sex is a kind of frivolous recreational pursuit. It actually isn't.. it's super important

for our psychological well-being,
for our relationship well-being.

We know that when people have great sex their relationships last longer. We know that when people have great sex they're even more productive in work than next day. There are so many reasons why sex is important. But unfortunately as a society we've kind of got it all wrong about how sex works about what we should be doing. And because of that we have hugely High rates of dissatisfaction with people's sex lives in the UK but also worldwide.

Aku habiskan waktu kerjaku mencoba "mengubah hubungan orang" dengan seks. Dan ini alasanku melakukannya karena meskipun kita mungkin berpikir bahwa seks adalah kegiatan rekreasi yang dianggap sepele. Tapi kenyataanya bukanlah begitu adanya, itu sangat penting

bagi kesejahteraan psikologis seseorang,
bagi kesejahteraan hubungan suatu pasangan.

Kita tahu bahwa ketika orang2 melakukan hubungan seks yang baik, maka akan menjamin hubungan pasangan akan bertahan lebih lama. Kita tahu bahwa ketika orang2 melakukan hubungan seks yang baik, membuat seseorang lebih produktif dalam pekerjaan, daripada hari berikutnya.

Ada begitu banyak alasan mengapa seks itu penting. Namun sayangnya sebagai masyarakat, kita salah memahami bagaimana seks bekerja dan apa yang seharusnya kita lakukan. Dan karena itu kita memiliki tingkat ketidakpuasan, yang sangat tinggi terhadap kehidupan seks masyarakat di Inggris, dan juga di seluruh dunia.

Why did Sex take your fancy
Mengapa bidang seksologi ini menarik perhatianmu?

There's so much about sex that's fascinating I think. There's loads we don't know there's loads we do know but no one talks about people find it so hard to talk about sex. And it's so stigmatized. That you know when people come into the room you can really see the weight of it on their shoulders. It's hard for them to speak about it's embarrassing for them. And to be the person that makes that feel comfortable and to be the person that can create change in a part of their life that matters so much. But is perhaps something they've never told their closest friend about is hugely rewarding. You also get to work with people across all ages. So you know from their teens to their '90s. You get to work with couples individuals, you get everything with Sex Therapy. I Love it.

Ada begitu banyak hal tentang seks yang menarik. Kupikir ada banyak hal yang TIDAK kita ketahui, ada banyak hal yang kita ketahui. Tetapi tidak ada yang membicarakan tentang orang2. Sulit sekali membicarakan seks dan sangat terstigmatisasi, sehingga kau tahu ketika orang datang ke ruangan, kau bisa benar2 melihat beban di pundak mereka.

Sulit bagi mereka untuk mengungkapkan hal ini, yang memalukan bagi mereka. Dan menjadi orang yang membuat hal tersebut terasa nyaman, dan menjadi orang yang dapat menciptakan perubahan dalam bagian hidup mereka yang sangat berarti. Namun mungkin merupakan sesuatu yang belum pernah mereka ceritakan kepada mereka. teman terdekat tentang sangat bermanfaat.

Kau juga dapat bekerja dengan orang2 dari segala usia sehingga kau tahu, mulai dari remaja hingga tahun 90-an. Kau dapat bekerja dengan pasangan individu, kau mendapatkan segalanya dengan Terapi Seks.

Since you started your work what was almost what 20 years ago did you 20 what have you seen in terms Our Attention Is Being Hijacked Which Is Affecting Our Sex Lives of changes in the problem set M that you're dealing with now I what are the new problems that you're you're confronted with in your clinical practice when couples or people come to you

Aku menyukainya. Sejak kau memulai pekerjaanmu, apa yang hampir kau lakukan 20 tahun yang lalu, Apa yang telah kau lihat dalam istilah Perhatian Kita Dibajak Yang Mempengaruhi Kehidupan Seks Kita, perubahan dalam kumpulan masalah yang kau hadapi sekarang. Apa saja masalah baru yang kau hadapi dalam praktik klinismu? ketika pasangan atau orang datang kepadamu?

Yeah that's a good one because lots of things have stayed the same right. So we know that for example problems with desire Remain the most common reason why people end up in my clinical room. But lots of things have also shifted data actually shows those shifts over the last few decades so we have long-term um data into the lives of um people in the UK in terms of their sex lives and we know that we're having less sex this decade than we were the decade before and the decade before that so the amount of sex we're having for example is going down from my clinical hunches.

Ya, itu bagus karena banyak hal yang tetap sama, kan. Jadi kita tahu bahwa misalnya masalah keinginan tetap menjadi alasan paling umum, mengapa orang berakhir di ruang klinisku. Namun banyak hal juga telah berubah.

Data sebenarnya menunjukkan perubahan tersebut selama beberapa dekade terakhir. Sehingga kami memiliki data jangka panjang tentang kehidupan masyarakat di Inggris dalam hal kehidupan seks mereka. Dan kami tahu bahwa kami jarang berhubungan seks dekade ini dibandingkan dekade sebelumnya, dan dekade sebelumnya. Sehingga jumlah hubungan seks yang kita lakukan, misalnya, menurun dari firasat klinisku

But also from what's been written about in the research we have a good idea that that's our pace of life our work life balance our distractability our use of devices. It's become evident in the last kind of two decades that when it comes to sex attention is a really key part of it it's really key, so being able to pay attention to what's happening in your body or being able to pay attention to what's happening in your mind is crucial. But as a society I think we're getting less and less able to pay attention. We're getting getting more and more in pursuit of distraction and that shows itself all the time in Sex Therapy.

Dan juga dari apa yang telah ditulis dalam penelitian. Kami mempunyai gagasan bagus bahwa itulah

kecepatan hidup kita, kehidupan kerja,
keseimbangan keteralihan,
penggunaan perangkat.

Sudah menjadi bukti dalam dua dekade terakhir bahwa perhatian terhadap seks adalah bagian yang sangat penting, itu sangat penting, Jadi mampu memperhatikan apa yang terjadi di tubuhmu atau mampu memperhatikan apa yang terjadi di dalam tubuhmu, pikiranmu, itu sangat penting.

Tapi sebagai masyarakat, kupikir kita semakin tidak mampu memberikan perhatian. Kita semakin mengejar gangguan dan hal itu selalu terlihat dalam Terapi Seks.

You know couples who come to see me because they feel that they're never having sex but yet when you look at their week they actually have very little time together and the time together they do have

they're both busy scrolling
they're watching Netflix and scrolling
they're perhaps doing three things at once
they're checking their work emails

That's taking them to a whole new cognitive place of stress. And so it's no wonder that people don't have space for their desire to emerge and that's definitely a newer phenomenon.

Anda tahu pasangan-pasangan yang datang menemuiku karena mereka merasa tidak pernah berhubungan seks. Namun jika kau melihat minggu2 mereka, sebenarnya hanya mempunyai sedikit waktu bersama. Dan waktu bersama yang mereka miliki

mereka berdua sibuk menggulir
mereka menonton Netflix dan menggulir
mereka mungkin melakukan tiga hal sekaligus
mereka memeriksa email kantor yang membawa mereka ke tingkat stres kognitif yang benar-benar baru,

Sehingga tidak mengherankan jika orang tidak memiliki ruang untuk memunculkan keinginan mereka. Dan itu jelas merupakan fenomena yang lebih baru.

It kind of made me think of some of the things I was reading about in your books where you you say that couples and individuals who do mindfulness practices um are those that typically have the most desire the I think the quote is from your newest book which is the book is called how not to let having kids ruin your sex life
yeah it's a bit of a mouthful it's a it's a great great title it says research tells us that women who find easier to have orgasms are typically more mindful in everyday life and find it easier to be in the moment during sex which is chapter three

Itu membuat saya memikirkan beberapa hal yang kubaca di bukumu di mana kau mengatakan bahwa pasangan dan individu yang melakukan praktik mindfulness adalah mereka yang biasanya memiliki hasrat paling besar. Menurutku kutipannya berasal dari buku terbarumu yang adalah buku berjudul "bagaimana tidak membiarkan memiliki anak merusak kehidupan seksmu?"

Ya, ini sedikit menarik, itu judul yang bagus dan bagus. Dikatakan bahwa penelitian memberi tahu kita bahwa wanita yang lebih mudah mengalami orgasme biasanya lebih berhati-hati dalam kehidupan sehari-hari dan lebih mudah berada di momen saat berhubungan seks, yang merupakan bab tiga.

That's right so there's an enormous amount of data about attention and sex. And obviously one of the ways in which we can sharpen our attention is mindfulness. We know that mindfulness works across a range of challenges, that we face whether it's pain management whether it's sleep
whether it's about apti regulation all kinds of things but when it comes to sex

It's super powerful so when you're distracted during sex um and we know that over 90% of people have nonsexual thoughts during sex okay so everyone gets distracted we know that from the research but what happens when we start to get distracted most of the time or when those distractions are what we call cognitively Salient which means they're worrying or they're particularly stressful like oh I'm not going to calm or what if I don't stay hard or is she enjoying this those types of distractions what happens is our distraction is basically basically turning down our arousal like turning down the volume on the TV.

Itu benar, jadi ada banyak sekali data tentang perhatian dan seks. Dan tentu saja salah satu cara kita dapat mempertajam perhatian kita adalah kewaspadaan. Kita tahu bahwa mindfulness bekerja dalam berbagai tantangan yang kita hadapi baik itu manajemen rasa sakit, tidur, atau tidur. tentang pengaturan apti segala macam hal tetapi ketika berhubungan dengan seks, itu sangat kuat sehingga ketika perhatianmu terganggu saat berhubungan seks.

Dan kita tahu bahwa lebih dari 90% orang memiliki pikiran non-seksual saat berhubungan seks. Jadi semua orang terganggu, kita tahu itu dari penelitian, tetapi apa yang terjadi jika perhatian kita mulai terganggu hampir sepanjang waktu? atau ketika gangguan tersebut disebut secara kognitif Salient (menonjol) yang artinya mengkhawatirkan atau sangat membuat stres. Seperti oh, saya tidak akan tenang atau bagaimana jika saya tidak tenang? tidak tekun atau dia menikmatinya. Gangguan semacam itu yang terjadi adalah gangguan kita pada dasarnya adalah menurunkan gairah kita seperti mengecilkan volume TV.

So it becomes harder for our bodies to respond so to stay aroused for example it becomes harder for us to feel anything. So our pleasure is turned down it becomes harder for us to come. And ultimately over time it gets in the way of our desire. On the contrary if we work on that distraction either by trying to remove them or trying to tackle the worries that their root cause or trying to promote our ability to pay attention where we want it to be so that's sexual thoughts sexual Sensations pleasure then it's like turning up the volume and we've seen plenty of research that demonstrate the enormously powerful impact of mindfulness on sexual response

Sehingga tubuh kita menjadi lebih sulit untuk merespon sehingga untuk tetap terangsang misalnya kita menjadi lebih sulit untuk merasakan apapun. Jadi kesenangan kita ditolak maka kita semakin sulit untuk datang. Dan pada akhirnya lama kelamaan hal itu menghalangi keinginan kita.

Sebaliknya jika kita mengatasi gangguan itu dengan mencoba menghilangkannya, atau mencoba mengatasi kekhawatiran yang menjadi akar penyebabnya, atau mencoba meningkatkan kemampuan kita untuk memperhatikan di tempat yang kita inginkan sehingga itulah pikiran seksual. Sensasi seksual kesenangan maka itu seperti meningkatkan volumenya. Dan kami telah melihat banyak penelitian yang menunjukkan dampak yang sangat kuat dari kewaspadaan terhadap respons seksual.

I can think of times in my life where because I was stressed or worried when I got in bed I was worrying about something or stressing about something at work. My partner tried to have sex with me and I had zero chance of getting aroused I could not get an erection. And it's I remember those moments and thinking oh God she's going to think that it's about her but really it's because of this thing I have on my to-do list that's exactly right i' I'd got in bed doing my to-do list so I I like I was holding my to-do list and I was doing it on my phone. And I put the phone down and then I lay back and I'm still thinking about my to-do list and then she tries to initiate and there's zero chance.

Aku dapat memikirkan saat2 dalam hidupku, ketika aku merasa stres, atau khawatir ketika aku berada di tempat tidur, sehingga aku khawatir tentang sesuatu atau stres tentang sesuatu di tempat kerja.

Pasanganku mencoba berhubungan seks denganku dan ay sama sekali tidak mempunyai peluang untuk terangsang. Aku tidak dapat ereksi.

Dan aku ingat momen2 itu dan berpikir, ya tuhan, dia akan mengira ini tentang dia, tapi sebenarnya karena hal yang ada di daftar tugasku, itulah yang benar.

Aku sedang di tempat tidur mengerjakan daftar tugasku. Jadi aku seperti sedang memegang daftar tugasku dan melakukannya di ponselku. Dan saya meletakkan telepon, lalu aku berbaring dan saya masih memikirkan daftar tugasku dan kemudian dia mencoba untuk memulai dan tidak ada peluang.

That's it and that's also exactly what we were talking about late earlier on right which is that our society has changed the way we work has changed so perhaps three decades ago you wouldn't have been checking your emails just before bed which means that wouldn't have started that Cascade of thoughts about work, which would thenperhaps Peak your cortisol your stress levels and then cut off your ability to get turned on so that is one of the major things that has shifted for all of us. And I think you know one of the myths that we you know would benefit from quashing about sex is this idea that particularly men are always up for it, are always ready to have sex it's just not true.

Itu saja dan itu juga yang telah kita bicarakan sebelumnya, yaitu bahwa masyarakat kita telah mengubah cara kita bekerja, jadi mungkin tiga dekade yang lalu Anda tidak akan memeriksa email Anda sebelum tidur, yang berarti hal itu tidak akan terjadi. Kita belum memulai rangkaian pemikiran tentang pekerjaan, yang mungkin akan meningkatkan kortisol pada tingkat stres dan kemudian menghentikan kemampuan kita untuk bersemangat sehingga hal ini merupakan salah satu hal besar yang telah berubah bagi kita semua. Dan saya pikir Anda tahu bahwa salah satu mitos yang kita tahu akan mendapat manfaat dari penolakan terhadap seks adalah gagasan bahwa laki-laki selalu siap untuk melakukan hubungan seks, selalu siap untuk berhubungan seks. Itu tidak benar.

In fact everybody needs their kind of conditions for good sex as I call it to be right, they need to be in the right kind of head space, they need to be not distracted um they need to know that the environment is an environment that works for them it's quite important. So yeah your experience is mirrors what a lot of people are probably sat at home

Thinking about just now do you think there's a Why Does Sex Get Harder the More We Think About It bit of a a paradox with sex in the sense that the more you think about it mhm and worry about it the harder it becomes
yes absolutely so what do you do just not think about it and worry about like

So it's quite interesting because there's also something else that happens when we get turned on which is that we get this attentional focused narrowing so one of the features of physiological arousal so so when blood flows around the body particularly to the genitals is that we know it kind of sharpens our attention it makes us basically want to block out the rest of the world and I'm sure we've all had experiences when we've been completely in the moment during sex. When we've not thought about a single other thing that might be happening around us so that attentional narrowing is great unless your attention has been hijacked by a worry. Because then you get attentional narrowing on the worry. And what happens when we worry about something is that it interferes with sexual response in two main ways the first is that it takes our attention away from what's erotic and that turns down the arousal and pleasure like we talked about earlier on the TV. And the second thing that happens is that when we worry about something that activates our sympathetic nervous system sending chemical messages around the body saying don't have sex there's something to worry about you know it can't tell the difference between a modern day worry like this email has come through that's ruined my day versus you know a saber-tooth tiger has just walked in you know our brains are still primitive in that regard. So what happens is that switches off our sexual response might mean that you struggle to get turned on it might mean that you struggle to feel anything it might mean that your body doesn't work in the way you want it to and then of course the next time you go into it. What are you thinking you're thinking what if it doesn't work

You talk a lot about expectations um and the Why Expectations and Pressure Make Sex Worse role that they play in sex expectation and pressure make sex worse that's a quote from your new book chapter 3 I know maybe that's not a quote but that's basically the gist of what it said but it's also the G gist of my experience I think it's always felt to me like the opposite of great sex is expectation and like rigidity yes and great sex for me is some sometimes spontaneous but it's Carefree yes and it's worry free yeah yeah

I mean pressure is a total passion killer but

pressure it's like that's again the kind of compounding Paradox because the more there's a problem with our sex the more it becomes a focal point in our relationship the more pressure the more expectation every night you go to bed you're thinking you know I've had moments in past lives and past relationships where because the sex wasn't great I would feel nervous going to bed because it was going to be one of those moments where we kind of both are sat there thinking about it but we're not saying anything to each other and then if I fall asleep I'm going to disappoint them but if I try it's going to go badly so what the hell do I do

Yes pressure um is not good for our sex lives and one of the challenges with pressure is that when you think about initiation it's often very much bound up in pressure and perhaps we'll talk about initiation in a second but actually the foundation of those problems with expectation and pressure is not being able to talk about it. Okay because if you think about it what we really want to say is I'm feeling quite stressed about the sex situation and the fact that we don't talk about it means that those things are hanging between us and we know with sex that one of the fascinating things about it is like other ways in which we learn we learn about sex by what we witness in the media and what we pick up from social learning something psychologists call social learning theory when it comes to sex we don't witness how anyone else is doing it really we only see what happens on TV and what happens in porn and maybe hear from our friends but we don't really know if they're telling the truth or not so what that means is we've all my friends all lie about it yeah everyone does they're all stallion in that now I'm joking they're all very honest there's actually a fascinating sex research fact which is one of my favorite facts which is that men uh when they say the number of sexual partners that they've had are more likely to round it up to a zero or a five a number ending in 05 I think that's a great sex fact um so what that means then is is that we're all living our sex lives based on something we call sexual script Theory this is a concept that organically came out of the work of some sex researchers in the 70s called gagnan and Simon and they discovered that actually in the absence of talking about sex we all have quite set ideas about what our sex lives should look like and we've picked this up from uh from the media from how people talk about sex in popular culture and and how we've Ed language what this means is that we have a set of ideas and this includes things like penis and vagina is the main cause of sex and everything else isn't really sex and language backs that up doesn't it with the use of the word foreplay kind of relegating any other type of sex to less than and the use of the word virginity which we only really use to refer to penis and vagina sex so all of these things tell us well that's what real sex is and then you hear people talking about that and backing that up with things like well we did everything but which is like we didn't have sex you did have sex because you were sexual together so what happens with these sexual scripts is that they benefit us to some degree because they reduce our

anxiety that's what sexual scripts are there for to give us some idea of what's

expected but what they do to us in the absence of communication is they give us

an idea about what we should be doing or what someone else wants to do without us

having to talk about it which often means that problems arise for examp one of the examples you give in your book is

Our Society Has Created a "Sexual Script" That's Wrong

about orgasms yes and pornography giving us a sexual script that men are

basically meant in a heterosexual relationship men are meant to orgasm and that there was some crazy stat from some

PornHub research yes yeah that's really interesting research there was some research that talked about depictions of

female pleasure and pleasure inducing acts for women from the hund most

popular videos on PornHub and they found that um women's pleasure was shown in

about 18% of those top hund videos and men's pleasure or act that produce

pleasure for men mainly around penis and vagina sex because that's men's most favorite sexual act it's women's least

favorite sexual act that was depicted in about 78% of cases so it's quite

interesting then when you think about the fact that we're learning from what we see because what does that then tell

us about what sex should look like about when sex ends about whose pleasure is

prioritized and it's one of the reasons that we have an orgasm Gap when men and women have sex together because that's

how we learn about sex on that I just want to pick up on two things you said there that were really interesting to me

How to Talk About Sex with Your Partner

the first one was about us not talking why we don't talk um it's very difficult

to talk about sex with your partner very very difficult I've been there very difficult because the plethora of

reasons why you might not be functioning well or enjoying it can often sound like

you're blaming them communication is so important we know that being able to

talk about sex is one of the most highly correlated factors with long-term sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction and maintaining desire over time it's more important than the amount you have set liking the same thing sexually it's so important but it's so hard to do and we know why it's hard right it's because we're not socialized to talk about it we're not often given the words that feel comfortable we are out of practice getting those words out of our mouth so they feel kind of clumsy and awkward there's a lot of worry and risk involved what if I say this and they don't like it and because of that it's easier to avoid but the most fascinating thing about about sex I think is that it's constantly evolving for us so you and I we're not the same people sexually than we were when we were 15 16 and we won't be the same sexual people in another 10 15 years than we are now so we need to be able to have the ability for growth right growth and flex in our sexual relationships but how do you do that if you can't talk about it it's a bit like going to the hairdressers same hairdresses for the rest of your life and every you sit down not saying anything and just hoping that they'll give you the haircut that you want you wouldn't do it right and they continually give you the bad you one and you just keep coming back and you say thanks and you tip them and you go so we need to get better at talking about it and it's not easy it's easy for me I talk about it all day every day but I know that that's not the norm and part of the work that I do is to try and help people try and give people the scaffold to talk about it and I can talk you through that if you like please so it might be that the best place to start is to find out how people find talking about challenging topics anyway with their partner so if you can't talk about other things outside of sex without it going into an argument then it might be worth just looking at communication full stop forget sex for the moment just talk about that are you creating some like Rules of Engagement for how we communicate you listen I express myself absolutely and I always recommend the Gans um I don't know if you know their work I do yeah um I recommend them because they have some great resources around General communication it's important to have a good basis if you're going to talk about sex but if people can talk about other things and they find it relatively easy to hear each other and to share their kind of hopes and fears then it might be useful to start to create a culture where talking about sex becomes the norm this is always the place you want to end up right we all want to end up with a relationship culture that supports easy communication about sex that's the guaranteed route to sexual satisfaction and to do that we have to make it something that we do frequently without any pressure without any expectation that something big has to change so an early way to start that might be for example to bring in some novelty in your Communications about sex so people might be listening to this podcast and they might say oh how was your day today great oh I heard this thing on Diary of a CEO podcast and it was about depictions of pleasure in porn and I thought it was really interesting and it occurred to me we don't talk about porn much you know is that something you'd be open to talk about whether you watch it whether you like it what you like that might feel too much for some people and it might be I heard a podcast about sex and it talked about the importance of talking and I thought we don't do that much so there's ways of bringing it in which are saying look this I think would be good for us the key point is stating the impact that you think it will have so I would like like to talk more about this because I heard it means you can guarantee great sex for the rest of your life so I think that would be good for us you know I'm committed to this relationship I want our sex to stay great this might be awkward for us but can we do it so the starting point if you're nervous is always to talk about things outside of your sexual relationship things you've heard on podcasts films you saw with good sex scenes in them bring things in rather than talking about the two of you after that if you get good at that it might be worthwhile talking about your own sex when it goes well so a good time to do this is after sex that's gone well or at another time when you're feeling really emotionally connected maybe you're out for dinner maybe you're having a weekend away and talk about what you really liked and why okay so don't talk about it when it's bad no no not at this stage not at this stage if you feel confident with that and you get into a habit of talking about sex talking about what's gone well talking about sex as if if it's any other topic of conversation like business or exercise or Diet then you might want to start to talk about things you'd like to be different and in an idal world I try and encourage couples to have a kind of regular practice of this so if you think about your goals for your exercise your work your diet often you'll set yourself goals right and you might tell your partner about them you know in six months from now I want to do this or this year I'm working on this it's quite good to get into the habit of saying where do we want our sex life to go how would we like things to be what do we want to continue what do we want more of and what do we want less of and that's a really positive conversation you don't need to talk about what you don't like you're talking about what you want more of instead what if the issue in your How to Tell Your Partner You're Not Attracted to Them Anymore sexual relationship is one of Attraction and I I've asked a few guests this because I think it's one of the the hardest challenges to overcome and I don't know in a clinical setting what you would say if you're sat there with an individual and they're telling you that the reason they aren't having sex with Dave right now is because they're no longer attracted to them what what is their path forward there do they dump

Dave or do they go tell Dave it depends how important sex is to them if it's

important say it's important and for them a relationship they're in a monogamous relationship so they can't

get sex elsewhere or they've agreed to not get sex elsewhere and is important

then it's quite important that attraction is part of it um we know that

the sex science tells us that when attraction is high at the beginning it's really easy to maintain desire over time

when attraction is low it can be really challenging It's Not Unusual for me to see couples who've been together decades

with very low levels of Attraction but the work they need to do to maintain a sex life that works for them both is

tough so so you need to kind of have your eyes open I guess about what you're signing up for if sex is important to

you then attraction is fairly important I think it's also maybe useful to say that attraction can work some Wayne and it might be worth examining what's going

on there and whether you know there is a certain situation that you find yourselves in as a couple or whether

they're at the moment going through some stuff that maybe makes it harder for you to see them in that light yeah sometimes

attraction can come back when those relationship contexts are worked on but

if it's never been there from the outset if it's a very strong sense of a lack of Attraction if someone's eyes have

already moved to someone else then it may be useful to address it and attraction's not just a physical thing

people think of Attraction as being physical it's a psychological thing as well absolutely absolutely and you know

attraction can vary in relationships depending on what's happening in the relationship Dynamic so a common thing

that I've written about in the new book it's to book for parents really is around the dynamic of what it feels like

to have a partner who feels like a another child so the idea that you might

be having to care for them as well you know make their lunches kind of buy their clothes um tidy up after them that

we know from sex research that's a super unsexy Dynamic and that is something which often falls on women in straight

relationships once kids arrive and that kind of dynamic can shift attraction and

may well shift back if that Dynamic is addressed so your new book is called how not to let having kids ruin your sex

How to Not Let Kids Ruin Your Sex Life

life that's right why did you title it that I just thought let's say what it is and that's exactly what it is it's a

guide to not let having kids ruin your sex life does that tend to happen kids

so oh yeah so it's so common sexual dissatisfaction is that it's lowest for couples in the period after having kids

so if you've got an under five-year-old at home it's pretty likely that your sex life is suffering for it it doesn't have

to but many of the kind of reasons why our sex life struggles when kids come

along are um amplifications of dynamics that we struggle with outside of kids so

for example quite often but of course not always people are in a long-term relationship quite often they're living

together being in a long-term relationship and living together are two factors which reduce your desire over time so you've already you're already

starting from that point you may have also been trying to conceive you might have had problems with fertility with

miscarriage sex might have got boring but you might have had to do it anyway you've then got pregnancy which for some

people is a golden time of sexual exploration but for some people means for one reason or another they don't

have much sex and then you're expecting to get back to your sexual life when you've getting no sleep when you're

stressed and when you've got another kind of 37 40 hours of work a week to do

which is the parenting week so there's so many reasons why it's challenging and that's why I wrote the book is there a a

The Demographic That Comes to You More Than Any Other

certain demographic of person that you're most likely to see in your clinical practice and is it is it

parents I see people of all ages I see I probably see people mostly in long-term

relationships I think people know that desire is my specialist subject so people tend to seek me out particularly

around desire um I see a lot of parents I also see a lot of non-parents but you

know Parenthood brings additional child Alles for people to navigate even if you think about the time available to have

sex it's much more limited it can be really difficult to initiate when you initiate it the other person might

experience it as a really clumsy initiation when they've got a lot on their plate these are all just as I said

amplifications of what you might get in long-term relationships generally but it tends to be the more challenging wedge

of the pie desire this idea of Desire is really fascinating to me I actually speak to

Why Desire Goes in a Relationship

one of my best friends about um what we call Desire management and it was a theory that we developed based on

just looking at both of our lives and how we' manag to maintain sexual desire in our respective relationships he has

an approach to dating which we all laugh at him for where he meets someone and he

moves them in really really quickly like moves them in it's a very like smothering approach to like finding Love

and Desire very quickly goes out the window whereas I'm probably the opposite of that where in my current relationship

with it was a longdistance relationship for 2 years she lived on the other side of the world eventually in maybe year three or something we like moved in

together but we're still we still both fly all over the world so we don't see each other much which I think is proven

to be quite Central to our desire management we don't see each other much and that's that's the theory of Desire

management keep some distance keep keep the right amount of distance there's probably absolutely there's probably two

too far away and too in frequently seeing them and then there's seeing them too much absolutely it's a great Theory

so desire is possibly one of the most fascinating aspects of sex that is

grossly misunderstood by our kind of collective psyche and it's quite

interesting because if you ask most people um on the street how desire works

or what desire is they'll tell you that we have such a thing as a sex drive or libido which kind of comes into our mind

and tells us it would be a good idea to have sex that is an idea that came from sex science in the 50s and 60s when we

believed that desire was the first part of the sexual response cycle so you you first had the idea to be sexual and then

you acted on it and that's kind of seeped down into our Collective psyche and that's how we all operate our sex

lives we generally wait to feel like it and then we act on it but actually we

now know that desire doesn't work like that and that in the early stages of a

relationship or if we live apart there's your desire management we manage to

maintain higher levels of that kind of Desire it's called spontaneous desire and it happens when a partner is novel

or less familiar to us or perhaps when our Dynamic with them isn't diluted by

other roles so for your friend that moves someone in that person then becomes a

flatmate so that the role of them as a sexual partner is diluted for other people it's diluted also by being a

co-parent so our brain starts to see that person less as a sexual object this is an inevitable part of being with

someone for a number of years and we can pretty much guarantee that for most

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people spontaneous desire will start to decline about a year or 18 months into a

relationship obviously it depends how often you see each other and it sounds like your desire management fantastic might keep that going a bit longer for

most people they have this experience and we know that this happens for everyone but that women struggle to

maintain this more than men so in the UK we know that 34% of women and 15% of men

are worried that they don't feel like sex enough and that's because they've seen a drop in the spontaneous desire we

talked about sexual scripts earlier and we talked about how we learn about sex from what we see the way desire is

represented to us in the media is lust passion

spontaneity that sexual urge that you absolutely have to act on and yes that

is how it works for some of us some of the time perhaps after we've not seen each other for a long time perhaps at

the start of a relationship and for some people you know lifelong with the same person but it's not the norm actually

what the norm is is that that type of Desire tends to diminish and it's other motivations other than horniness that

we're seeking out through sex so we call these nonsexual motivations and there may be things like wanting to feel close

stress relief wanting to feel desire ired um wanting to demonstrate love or

affection wanting to have fun um out of a sense of obligation because it's been

a while these are all nonsexual motivations which lead us to the

behavior of sex the problem is a lot of people are waiting to feel like it before they act

on it and for those people they're waiting a really long time we know that

for women particularly uh it should be considered normal to never feel like sex

out of the blue with your long-term partner never how do we know that from

sex research so when we ask women how often do you feel like sex with your partner they say either never or maybe

once or twice a month this is spontaneous desire but we're asking the question

about only one type of Desire responsive desire is desire that emerges out of us

beginning sexual activity or or having what we call sexual stimuli in front of us a passionate kiss a flirtation being

naked together um a text that suggests something that we might do later

on the later versions of sex research tell us that actually desire emerges out

of being sexual okay so it comes from doing something to trigger it but if your understanding of Desire is that you should wait until you feel like it there's a large proportion of people in longterm relationships that are just

never feeling like it and never doing anything about it what we need to do instead is be aware that our desire can

be triggered and find ways to trigger it and have a relationship context that supports triggering it in that context

we know that people's desire works perfectly well that means they can have desire feature as much as they want in

How to Trigger Desire in Your Relationship

their relationship just by knowing how desire works so our brains code things

as sexual and this could be physical touch it could be kiss it could be being naked together it could be the sight of

someone's naked body it could be a suggestive text it's different for everybody but essentially sexual content

triggers our arousal which triggers our desire it's the reason why the most common thing people say to me in Sex

Therapy is I didn't really feel like it but we had sex and it was great and afterwards I said why don't we do that

more that's responsive desire it emerges out of sexual activity the problem of

long-term relationships is that we see a decline in what I call sexual currency

so how we relate to each other as sexual beings we start to see sex a bit like an

onoff switch so we're either having sex or the rest of the time we're not being

sexual together you know we're not passionately kissing unless it's part of sex we're not sending each other those

flirty messages we us to do at the beginning we're not spending time lounging around in bed on a Sunday

morning being naked together in a way that might kickstart desire so these low levels of sexual

currency and these high levels of familiarity seeing the same person every

day means our brains just don't code them as sexual stimuli in the same way

and then we go cheat or we go look for porn or something else yeah absolutely because we want to have that kind of

frison of excitement can I just clarify that sexual currency this definition basically means if I think this of this

in a financial context if you see someone as being highly sexually desirable they have a high

sexual currency in your mind not quite okay so think currency more like charge

oh okay like a thatp yeah so sexual currency my definition of it would be

it's everything that you do that marks you out as a sexual couple apart from having sex so this is the stuff that you

wouldn't do with your friends you wouldn't do with your family you wouldn't do with your kids so you're

physically affectionate with all those people right M but the seual side of it the passionate kissing the bum grabs the

flirtation the saying you look super hot in that top these things are sexual

currency so if we think about our sex lives not as this onoff switch of the

you know 18 minutes that's the average for men and women when they have sex together it's 18 minutes of having sex

however often you're doing it if you think of your sexual relationship as something which is always happening

something which you're always nurturing you can imagine the power that that can have on both triggering desire but also

Meeting those sexual needs I'll give you an example that I wrote about in the new book actually um because parents

obviously have limited time available to have sex and raising sexual currency is

one of the ways you can increase sexual satisfaction even when you can't have any more sex so if you think about an

example of um a straight couple whereby he is feeling that her lack of interest

in sex means that she doesn't desire him as much as she used to and he's worried about that because for him that means

the relationship is in crisis uh she might look elsewhere and also he doesn't feel so good about himself he wants to

feel desired we all do right he gave me an example of a time when they perhaps

attended a function and they were in the lift and as they went up in the lift to get to this function she pushed him

against the lift and kissed him really passionately for the 10 seconds they were in the lift and then they got out

the lift and They carried on with the function this is sexual currency and that made him feel more desired more connected to

her sexually than a week before the sex they had that felt like going through the motions so you've got something

which meets your sexual needs which makes you feel desired attractive close like a sexual couple like you've got

some sexual secret between you that no one else can see sexual currency does all of that but it also acts as

scaffolding to help us move easily into sex because we talked about expect expectation and pressure earlier and if

you have high levels of sexual currency there's low pressure for it to go anywhere because it is your sexual

relationship for its own right it's not someone initiating sex the way to

The "Initiation" Problem

overcome this potential psychological barrier is to create a culture of low pressure between you you say that sex

should be trivial and often not rare and crucial absolutely yeah soal and often I

always know that my work with couples is done when they find it really easy to invite each other into sex and really

easy to turn each other down because what happens when uh we have low levels of sexual currency and when sex has

become an issue is that everything's riding on initiation so the person initiating Waits they they ignore all

the other times they want to initiate it because it's quite stressful and they wait until the time it really matters

maybe it's an anniversary or a weekend away or something where it feels like you should have sex and they initiate it

and there's so much riding on it that the other person knows there's so much writing on it they feel pressure

pressure is a desire killer it doesn't happen and then the initiation will be even rarer moving forward more pressure

for more pressure exactly what we want instead is a kind of trivial and often

way of sexually relating high levels of sexual currency high levels of initiation so you find it easy to say to

your partner by the way at work today I was thinking about doing this to you when when we get home and your partner

can say that sounds really hot if only I didn't have this meeting tomorrow on my mind let's come back to that on the

weekend so you can let somebody know that sex is on your mind you can invite someone into something which might be a

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passionate kiss might be let's go to bed early and talk about our day knowing that that is sexual stimuli which might

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trigger arousal and desire but also it acts as a way of

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triggering that um initiation it makes it easy to initiate if you're doing it often and if there's low pressure do you

Should We Schedule Sex?

think you should schedule sex no never ever schedule sex cuz you said let's come back to on the weekend I was

thinking that's just ruin the weekend I'd like to I like it to be spicy and spontaneous so um it's one of our sexual

scripts that sex spontaneous sex is better and I don't necessarily agree with that but I do agree with the idea

that scheduling sex just creates pressure for everyone how can you in advance agree to something that you

don't know if you're going to feel like when you get there and all that does is create pressure what you should do though in today's day and age is

schedule physical intimacy schedule some type of sexual currency because we're so

busy if you don't do that when is it going to happen the issue I have though is if I schedule physical intimacy MH

then okay and I keep doing that eventually the expectation comes in that

we have sex after the physical intimacy it's also the same thing with like date night if you're parents and you get one

date night a week we all know when we need to get this we need to make this thing happen so it becomes scheduling

sex because you're scheduling date night once a week you know what I mean yeah so you've got two options haven't you one

is that you wait until it's really high pressure and you don't initiate it very often you wait for this date night I

don't know once a week once a month and everyone knows there's all kinds of stuff riding on it and that makes it

possibly the worst set of circumstances to for everyone to feel like sex lots of high pressure sex that might feel

formulaic everyone's distracted means they can't get into it it's not great sex the other option is that you keep

high levels of sexual currency and you try your best to schedule brief moments

of physical intimacy which could act as scaffolding to take it further you're right in that you may start to build up

an expectation that oh every time we say we'll have a bath together we end up having sex that might happen but when

you invite someone into the bath you are inviting them into the bath right so you're not inviting them saying let's

have a bath and have sex afterwards you're saying do you fancy having a bath together the fact that you both know

where the bath might lead is fine because it allows you to get into that head space Oh okay I hadn't thought

about sex tonight but the bath might lead to sex so let me get into a sexual

head space for a minute so that's quite useful the problem comes when you say to

them afterwards you said you wanted a bath and we've not had sex well that wasn't what you invited them into you invited them into the B so you have to

be okay if it doesn't lead to that but if you initiate these types of things more if you think about it scattergun

approach more of them are likely to go where you want them to go versus that one time of high pressure if you were to

What Should We Be Doing to Keep Desire High in Our Relationships

give me a couple of pieces of simple advice on how to keep desire high in my

relationship what would you say I would say kiss more kiss for kissing's sake

okay kiss kissing often falls off the agenda in longterm relationships the number of times I see

that um with couples I'm working with who've been together decades they only kiss as part of sex or as initiation of

sex so kissing is a great way of triggering Desire it's also a great way of getting our sexual needs met so that

would be one the second would be you have to make time to schedule physical intimacy of some type because remember

that desire is triggered by that kind of sexual stimul whether it's um getting

naked on the couch and watching film together that you know it's got good sex scenes in it whether it's massage

whether it's the bath whether it's um some kind of date night that involves use of your bodies without that there

are no triggers to your desire so you're just kind of waiting to feel it the

third is understand how desire works it's drastically different than what you've been sold and you're normal if

you struggle to get in the head space sometimes what about distance and you know this idea of like you talked about

how they kind of your partner can lose their sexual currency if they become a carer or you know I've heard before if

they become like too much of a mom or a dad in your mind and they stop becoming

a sort of sexual partner relationship Dynamics are quite fascinating U as you

say because when we talk about them we often hear things like well obviously if you're experiencing great amount of

relationship conflict it's going to affect your sex life I mean that's of course right we all know that to be true

but actually it's the subtle dyam dynamics that are quite important it's

um having distance from each other and being able to bring in novelty and newness a bit like you do with kind of

having that that physical distance but it's also an emotional separation isn't it because you're having experiences

separately and then coming back together to talk about them it's also about what roles you might get typ cast into in

your relationship so something I talk about often is the idea that when we

have sex with the same person for a long time we can start to feel as though there's only one way for us to be

sexually and that's the way they're kind of expecting us to be so it can feel quite suffocating and sometimes that's

the reason that people go outside of a monogamous relationship is because they want to experience themselves

differently they want to be a different person sexually and because they can't talk to their partner about that and

they feel typ cast in that Dynamic you know you're the dominant one I'm not or

um the sex that we have is really kind of sensual and caring and I want it to be passionate and animalistic it's really difficult you

How to Talk About Your Fetish with Your Partner

must come across so many couples in um your clinical practice that have two different visions of what sex should

look like yes fantasies fetishes you know this one wants this person to do this to me but this person thinks that's

you know horrific MH how does one bridge the gap and how does one go about even communicating those things because I

imagine so many people in so many relationships it's kind of like what you said earlier having really bad haircuts

having really bad sex and I saying nothing about it and oh yeah I've been in relationships before where I've thought you know what I really want to

do that but I think she'll think that I'm a little bit you know trust me no one is talking about it everyone stays

silent and just hopes that the other person will either get the hint or will accidentally stumble upon the thing they

really want them to do it is fascinating really when you think about it because so much of our satisfaction our life

satisfaction depends on how sex goes but we just almost leave it to Chance by not talking about it one of the things we

might do in Sex Therapy is by getting people separately to write down what

their perfect sex looks like um I have a um an exercise it's actually free you

can find it on my social media or my website which is called conditions for good sex which guides people through the