How do you handle it and what do you do when you partner doesn’t want to sleep with you?
With Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com.
Reid: You got the memo, too. Purple shirt day.
Cathy: What do you do when your partner doesn’t want to sleep with you?
Reid: I’m Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com.
Cathy: I’m Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com.
It can be a really challenging thing, and you just did a great call on this. The link to the call is below.
Reid: Oh yeah, that’s right. We did a telecast. It was fun. It was really good. We had advice, thoughts, feelings.
Cathy: One of the things, you gave some great advice in there, but one of the things I felt like you didn’t have time, you couldn’t go to every topic on that, one of the things I’d love to talk a little bit more about is how do you handle that, a big part of the connection people have in a relationship is often sexual. There can be a lot of pain around that when someone, a lot of people form a relationship with the understanding that sex will be part of that, and if it goes away, one person’s just not connecting that way, what do you counsel people when you coach them about that?
Reid: The big message is we’re all, for the most part, terribly under-prepared, by culture and how we get raised in families, around actually understanding sex and intimacy and romance, in that we were fed and acculturated by the societies we grow up in, with a lot of information and beliefs around relationships that actually aren’t true.
Cathy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Reid: When you geek out and start looking at how brains work, and how pleasure, the chemistry of pleasure and desire and love and interpersonal relationships, we have this romance, this fantasy that when you fall in love, it’s going to stay like that forever. Because it feels like it’s never going to end, because you’re completely cracked out on what I like to call brain cocaine. Which means that the recent brain studies, that when you’re in love, the same centers of the brain that are active, are the same centers of the brain that are active when you’re addicted to cocaine. You’re basically, you have fallen in love with your cocaine dealer, and all that lust and juicy connection is, in part there because of chemistry. You just really, it’s fun, it’s super fun.
The waning of that high is normal and natural, and nothing’s wrong. But culturally, we’re like, something’s wrong. Then for, especially American society, we have this overachievingness that’s seeped into the bedroom so somehow if you’re not having amazing sex and orgasming so hard that you’re knocking over the lamp next door, then somehow something’s wrong with your relationship. When in reality, what’s happening is that waning, which a lot of people experience, not all couples, apparently 1 in 10, don’t ever, you know, they stay high the whole time. Those annoying couples that stay together forever and are happy.
But we have these expectations that for the most part, can’t get met. Now we have all of this disappointment, and then there’s all this fear and then we don’t know how to talk about this stuff, which makes it even worse. Then, people just don’t know their bodies and what they like about sex and how to tap into their own desire, so we just got off lightly because being in love fostered all the desire, and nobody knows how to like re-stoke the flames after the embers have died. Learning these things can be really fun.
That’s the larger answer is you’re not broken. What’s happening has been happening for eons. Now let’s have a conversation about it.
Cathy: I would like to dig deeper into this. Can we come back with another-
Reid: Yes.
Cathy: I have a tough question for you.
Reid: Tough question?
Cathy: Yeah, I’m going to put you on the spot.
Reid: Come back to video number 2 where Cathy Vartuli delivers her tough questions.