What Do People Say
They Want from Sex?
What Do They Really Want?
Carlton came to see me with a simple question: “Why don’t I want to have intercourse?”
Yes, just another day in the office.
Carlton is a retired engineer, a friendly-looking sixty-eight-year-old guy with a quick smile. He told me he had a new girlfriend, Lina—“although ‘girlfriend’ is a funny word for a sixty-three-year-old woman,” he laughed.
Carlton was a year out of a thirty-year-long marriage, which sounded terrible. His wife, Genevieve, disappointed that her career in real estate never took off and that she never had kids, had turned bitter and cold decades before. He had withdrawn—first from her, then from life in general. Week after week, he spent his time working and avoiding Genevieve. Sex had never been central to their marriage, and they soon stopped.
When Genevieve finally divorced him in disgust, he was left alone. About eight months later, he met Lina through a friend. “I couldn’t believe it,” he beamed. “She was warm, friendly, colorful, so full of life.” They had lunch a few times, and eventually were spending every afternoon together. Then it was every evening, too.
“She loved to kiss, she said I was good at it,” he said shyly, not quite looking at me. No one had said that to him since he was eighteen. “So soon we were doing other physical things, and eventually we were sexual in lots of different ways. We’d spend all morning fooling around. It was great!”
In the afternoons they’d go out into the world—hiking, biking, seeing old movies, going to museums. He rediscovered his love of music. It was a delirious time. She helped him buy some new, more stylish clothes. “Look, I’m wearing a silk shirt,” he smiled. “And she dresses up for me, even around the house. Fabulous!”
But she wanted intercourse. He didn’t. She asked why. He didn’t know. She suggested he see me.
“So why don’t I want intercourse?” he asked.
“Why do you think you don’t want intercourse?” I responded.
“Well, Lina’s counselor says I’m probably afraid of intimacy. And I saw a therapist for a few sessions before seeing you—she says I’m hesitant to assume my manly role in this relationship, especially after being emasculated in my marriage.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Um, it doesn’t really sound right, but I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone want intercourse? Lina’s so hot for it. She swears I’ll love it. What’s wrong with me?”
“Well,” I said, turning the conventional wisdom upside down, “why should you want intercourse?”
“I never thought of that. Doesn’t everyone?”
“We’re not here to discuss everyone, Carlton, just you. You’re not trying to conceive, are you?” We both chuckled. “Then why should intercourse be special, why should it be at the top of some hierarchy?”
“This is pretty strange talk,” he announced, but he was intrigued.
“You’re having the best sex of your life, right, Carlton?”
“Right.”
“You’re having a great time, almost every day you’re kissing and touching a lovely nude woman who’s energetic and enthusiastic, right?”
“Right.”
“You’re both having orgasms and pleasure, and you’re looking at each other the whole time. Why change anything?”
He thought about it for a while. Then he said quietly, “She’s the one who wants me to want intercourse. She says she wants to feel desired, and that’s how a woman knows a man desires her. But of course I desire her! I tell her constantly, and we’re always having sex, even if I’m not totally in the mood.”
Carlton was no “lazy lover,” and he loved sex and intimacy with Lina. But as he started paying more attention to his actual experience with her, he realized he was feeling bossed around. “And she’s nervous about why I don’t want to screw,” he said. “I’m getting tired of reassuring her.”
Lina kept saying she wanted Carlton to make love to her “like a man.” “I don’t really go for that,” he frowned. It seemed clear to me he wasn’t afraid of being “manly”—he just didn’t find it very entertaining. As her sense of urgency about this increased, he found himself increasingly resentful—and that scared him.
“Carlton, you’re like Sleeping Beauty,” I said. “Your months with Lina have woken you up, which is glorious. At first you welcomed her as your guide back into life. Now you’re becoming more independent, and some of Lina’s rigidities and insecurities are losing their charm.”
“Yes,” he nodded vigorously. “It’s my life, and I don’t have to do everything her way—in fact, I want to keep some of my old shirts!” We both laughed.
“I’m nervous about confronting her,” he continued. “I want to be with her, but I can’t let her tell me how to make love. And I can’t let her bully me into being her kind of man.”
In fact, they almost broke up when Carlton started setting some limits with Lina. But after weeks of quarreling, they understood themselves and each other a lot better.
“When intercourse isn’t loaded down with all this pressure and meaning, I might find it more interesting,” he said. “For now, we’ve agreed that great sex is more important than what kind of great sex. At least, she says we can do that for a while, and then we can talk again.”
What People Say
What do most men and women say they want from sex?
On the one hand, various people mention a broad range of things: orgasm, “intimacy,” feeling desired, a great blow job, lots of kissing, a hard penis, light spanking, and satisfying their partner, to name a few.
On the other hand, almost everyone’s answer comes down to this: what most people say they want from sex is some combination of pleasure and closeness.
Yet, as a sex therapist, I can tell you that that’s not what most people focus on during sex. Think about it—do you?
So what do people—what do you—focus on during sex instead?
• How they look
• How they smell
• How they sound
• Preventing unwanted activity (for example, having their shoulder bitten)
• Ignoring (or preventing) pain
• Hurrying to climax
• Trying not to climax too quickly
• Maintaining an erection or lubrication
• Suppressing emotions
• Trying to function “the right way”
• Silently, indirectly urging their partner to do a certain activity (such as stroking their clitoris)
It’s not surprising that if people say they want one thing from sex and then spend the experience focused on everything except that, they’ll be dissatisfied.
But people say they focus on those other things (like how they look, or suppressing their emotions) in order to have better sex. “I don’t want him turned off by my big butt,” some women say, “so I usually don’t let him get me from behind.” I’ve heard men say things like, “I’m always afraid she feels bored while she’s giving me oral sex, so I guess I’m constantly checking—is she frowning, does she seem uncomfortable?”
In the quest for sexual satisfaction, many people especially insist on focusing on how their genitalia are working: “I need to know I’m gonna stay hard long enough for my wife to be satisfied,” or, “When I think I’m taking too long to climax, I hurry up, or even fake it.”
Most people don’t think of this as a distraction, but it is—bigger than dirty dishes or unpaid bills could ever be. Focusing on how your penis or vulva is working is an enormous distraction from pursuing pleasure or intimacy. Although many people think that’s the way to make sex better, I’m afraid they’re exactly wrong.
A lot of people (and a lot of therapists) apparently don’t understand that. When people come to my office, they never say, “Please help me stop focusing on my erections, my orgasms, my desire to function the right way—it’s preventing me from enjoying sex.” No, if anything, they want me to help them do those things better. “Doc, how can I make us climax at the same time?” “Doc, how do I stay hard during oral sex even when she’s being too rough?”
Helping people identify what they’re actually thinking about during sex is powerful. Helping them realize that their thoughts are often obstacles to satisfaction is even more powerful.
Many people are watching themselves during sex more than they are experiencing sex, which typically undermines sexual enjoyment. We usually imagine, harshly judge, and worry about what our partner sees, smells, hears, and tastes. This is far more distracting than thinking about work or laundry. Because once sex becomes about how we appear to others, we can’t stop monitoring ourselves. We’re constantly making decisions about how authentic to be, and how much to pose. (This is one reason men and women fake orgasms.) This continual vigilance dramatically disrupts our erotic feelings, expression, and satisfaction.
It’s like trying to enjoy dinner while wearing a brand-new expensive white suit. Even if you succeed in keeping the suit clean, constantly paying attention to it eventually takes over, and ruins, the meal.
Okay, so we focus on other stuff. Why?
Whether it’s our big bellies or our increasingly gray pubic hair or our no-longer-quite-so-perky breasts (remember, breasts don’t sag as we get older, they relax), whether it’s our concern about keeping an erection long after our partner has had enough thrusting, or our fear of smelling bad while our partner goes down on us, why do we focus on extraneous stuff like this during sex?
One reason is that we think this is where sexiness lives or dies, and we think “sexiness” is crucial to satisfaction. We’ll address this damaging (and incorrect) belief soon enough. But another reason is that there are, after all, other things we want from sex besides pleasure and closeness.
For most women and men, those needs can include:
• Reassurance that we’re sexually desirable
• Reassurance that we’re sexually competent
• Validation of our masculinity or femininity
• A sense that we’re normal
• Relief from performance anxiety
… and so on.
A lot of our behavior around sex is designed to address these other needs, whether we acknowledge them or not. As we’ll see, our strategies usually aren’t successful, but we use them anyway. And it turns out that we’re putting a lot of pressure on sex to address these essentially non-sexual needs. To put it another way, most of us have emotional needs that we try to address with sex, but sex is not the best way to satisfy them.
For some people, reassurance, validation, and relief are the real payoffs of sex. Sure, pleasure and closeness are great, but they can’t compete with feeling whole, feeling real, feeling normal, and feeling “I’m good enough and I can relax for a minute.” And I’ve learned that that’s what many people are trying to accomplish via sex.
I’m not saying that people don’t want pleasure or closeness from sex. Most people do want some combination of pleasure and closeness from sex—after their other emotional needs are met.
People don’t necessarily know this about themselves. But if you’re struggling with these emotional needs, pursuing them through performance-oriented sex, and you don’t realize it, you may feel that sex is more trouble than it’s worth, or that feeling alone during sex is normal, or that sex is not the time to feel like yourself.
That’s what my patients usually mean when they say things like, “Sex isn’t as great as it used to be,” or, “Something’s missing from sex, and I’m not sure what it is.”
Attempting to indirectly get validation, reassurance, and other psychological fulfillment from sex—especially if we don’t admit our agenda to ourselves or inform our partner—makes sex complicated, unpredictable, and a lot of work. We make it even harder on ourselves by creating narrow, rigid definitions of the satisfactions we seek; if “manliness” means always being erect regardless of fatigue, for instance, or “competent” means climaxing every time, sexual “success” will be frustratingly elusive.
Perhaps this helps explain why you aren’t focused on pleasure and closeness during sex. It’s because you’re also looking for something else, whether you know it or not. This also helps explain why so many people are sexually dissatisfied—because sex isn’t delivering what they really want, in fact can’t deliver what they want through genital excellence. And any psychological satisfaction you accidentally get doesn’t stick to your ribs because it’s indirect, unacknowledged, and fleeting.
If you don’t tell your partner about this other agenda, it’s easy to feel alone during sex. And of course, it’s harder to create the sex you want when you don’t involve your partner directly.
If you’re someone who wants more “communication” around sex, this is a good place to start: tell your partner that you want more from sex than just amazing orgasms (whether you currently have them or not). But make it clear that you’re not asking your partner to “give” you a good emotional experience (that does sound like drudgery); tell your partner that you see your sex life as a collaboration, and that you realize you need to step up a bit too.
My patient Craig, for example, felt intimidated by his new girlfriend’s very active sexual past. Although Ellie was open with him about it, he always felt there was more to her story. It didn’t help that he hadn’t gotten over his first wife’s infidelity before he became involved with someone new.
What Craig really wanted to hear was that he was the best lover Ellie ever had—partly because he felt competitive with all her previous partners, and partly because he feared losing her the way he’d lost his first wife.
But he never told Ellie this in a simple, straightforward way. After they would make love (three or four times most weeks), he’d always ask if she enjoyed it, if she climaxed (as if he couldn’t see or hear it himself!), if she was satisfied. Not that she was shy about her enjoyment, but getting her to say yes, yes, yes, was his way of arranging to feel sexually competent and important. Although he didn’t admit it to himself until our therapy, this was just as important to him as the intimacy or pleasure he felt from making love with Ellie.
Performance Anxiety
For many people, sex is mostly about success and failure: whether or not they unintentionally hurt, disappoint, or annoy their partner; or expose themselves as inadequate or inexperienced; or make a fool of themselves. Frequently people are concerned that their body won’t do what it “should” (like get an erection) or that it will do what it “shouldn’t” (like wet the bed). For millions of men and women, “I didn’t mess that up too badly” is as good as sex gets.
As we’ll see later, one of the wonderful things about sex is that we can make it a place where mistakes are simply not possible, and where virtually nothing can go wrong—not because we become sexually perfect, but because we radically redefine sexual “success.”
Meanwhile, here are the sounds of “performance anxiety,” straight from my patients. Perhaps you’ve said or thought one or more of these yourself, anxious that you might not “perform” as expected by either your partner or yourself:
• “She’s expecting sex on her birthday—and I can’t guarantee I’ll be in the mood.”
• “I can’t compete with Megan Fox or Angelina Jolie.”
• “We went out last week with a couple that just fell in love. It’s intimidating to be with people so hot for each other.”
• “Oprah says if you can’t get it up, it’s either my fault or your fault.”
• “My girlfriend just lost weight and bought lingerie—what if I’m not interested enough?”
• “It’s been a perfect Saturday night—I’d hate to ruin it by agreeing to have sex and then coming too soon.”
• “He hasn’t had sex in a week, and tomorrow the kids return from camp.”
• “That film we saw last week turned out to be really sexy, and we were both squirming uncomfortably.”
Most people want to “perform” well during sex, imagining that it’s the best way to create satisfaction (and avoid “failure” and their partner’s disappointment). But especially since so much of sexual “performance” is beyond our control (we can’t will an erection or lubrication), the need to “perform” well leads to anxiety. Ironically, feeling pressure to perform “successfully” during sex creates and maintains much of the sexual difficulty and frustration that people fear, and ultimately have. People crave relief from this pressure, while lamenting that relief is impossible.
Of course, pursuing relief from performance anxiety by attempting to perform better is exactly the wrong way to do it—but clearly that’s what many people imagine will work. We can laugh at the superstitions of star athletes: Michael Jordan wearing his North Carolina shorts under his Bulls uniform every game, or Peyton Manning reading the stadium program cover to cover before every game. But while these rituals are harmless, focusing on sexual performance isn’t—in fact, it often makes our “performance” worse. Imagine how quickly Michael Jordan would ditch those shorts if he knew they were undermining his shooting!
Today’s self-help industry, psychology and medical experts, and marriage revival workshops—not to mention Victoria’s Secret—ignore this basic truth. They try to help people have better sex by leaving their faulty assumptions and rigid definitions in place, simply adding gender myths and sunny “you can do it” encouragement on top of them. But like constructing a building on a shaky foundation, it’s a mistake, one that makes the sexual “failure” people fear almost inevitable. That’s why so much of my caseload is people who have “failed” with other therapists and programs.
And then “women” are blamed. Or “men” are blamed. Or sex is blamed. While we’re at it, let’s remember to blame pornography, stress, menopause, “you’ve gained weight,” and all that email that’s always piling up.
Attempting to resolve emotional issues around sex by trying to have amazing sex is like attempting to resolve the emotional needs we bring to athletics by trying to be an amazing athlete.
When my patient Juan was a kid, he was terrible at sports. He wanted to please his father, a soccer player who treated his physically awkward son harshly. In response, of course, Juan always tried too hard, which made playing well even more difficult—and even if he had played well, there’s no way he could have enjoyed it. As a child, Juan had emotional needs connected with sports—feeling worthy of his father’s love, feeling connected with others his age—that he couldn’t satisfy.
Rather than using sports as the way to address these internal issues, Juan might have used a different vehicle (interesting conversation, a shared hobby, pride in a career)—except that he was a kid. Understandably, he believed that both his pain and its solution were located in sports.
As an adult, Juan should now realize that weekend athletics are just for fun, but they still feel terribly important to him, and it drives him crazy when he doesn’t succeed. That’s because the emotional pairing he learned in childhood is embedded in Juan’s unconscious.
Would you have told young Juan that the answer to his problems with his father was to be a better athlete? Of course not. What about the adult Juan—would you tell him to just work harder and become a better athlete, or would you suggest something more psychologically sophisticated?
That’s the position many people are in about sexuality. They’re trying to resolve one or another psychological problem by trying to create amazing sex. And it simply doesn’t work. I know most people think the way to resolve the emotional needs they bring to sex is by having amazing sex. Unfortunately, most media shrinks and clinical professionals agree.
They’re wrong.
Besides, you can’t even have amazing sex when you’re focused on other emotional needs (especially if they’re unconscious). That’s like expecting to enjoy a concert or play when you’re afraid everyone’s staring at you, smirking at what you’re wearing. And so people pursue amazing sex, but they get neither their emotional nor their sexual needs met. And then they’re really disappointed—and often angry or self-critical as well.
So let’s go back to what people really want from sex.
Most people don’t talk about this accurately—either because they don’t have the vocabulary or because they’re embarrassed, hesitant, or scared to use words. (What’s your reason?) If people did talk about what they want from sex thoroughly and accurately, they’d use language that’s primarily experiential rather than functional. That is, instead of talking about what their bodies might do, they’d talk about how they would like to feel.
And how do people want to feel before, during, after, and with regard to sex? My clinical experience suggests that people want to feel…
• Un-self-conscious
• Youthful
• Graceful
• Passionate
• Like they have all the time in the world
• Attractive
• Competent
• Special
• Like they’re inventing sex
• Unintimidated
All this does sound great, doesn’t it? The challenge is to create such experiences while you relax. Otherwise, there’s a limit to how much you can enjoy such feelings. After all, how much can you enjoy being told you’re attractive when you’re afraid you’ll wet the bed or lose your erection?
Changing Your Sexual Vision
Put another way, during sex people want to feel the way they felt when they were emerging adults. Or the way they imagine other young adults felt. And so they say things about sex like:
• “I want spontaneity.”
• “I don’t want to communicate—I just want to do it and have everything work fine.”
• “Why can’t sex just be natural? I hate the way it’s all complicated now.”
• “Thinking too much about sex takes away the romance, the mystery.”
• “Talking too much about sex makes it mechanical.”
Listening to feelings like these, anyone would think that eroticism is so delicate and ephemeral that it disappears if we shine any light on it, or mention it above a whisper. And yet I understand people’s anxiety, frustration, and resentment about this. For many men and women, sex seemed so easy when they were younger, and it seems so much more complicated now.
Early adulthood (roughly age eighteen to twenty-five) is the time when most people are settling into their sexual identities, typically wrestling with questions like: Who am I regarding sex? What’s my relationship to sexuality? What will its role in my life be? What do sexual satisfaction and sexual frustration feel like? What are reasonable responses to each?
It’s while you have a young body and youthful lifestyle that you’re making your most serious decisions about sex: What does “horny” feel like? How do men really feel about women who love sex? Is birth control really important? What kind of sex is manly? Is oral sex really sex? Answer a few hundred questions like these—remember, with the perspective of a youthful body and lifestyle—and that’s your sexual identity, your vision of what it means for you to be sexual.
Logically, as both our bodies and lifestyles change, our sexual vision needs to change too. After all, most of us tend to change our vision and self-image about other important things, such as work, food, family, and health. But many people, misled by the media, the fashion industry, “successful aging” psychologists, and others, don’t change their sexual vision over time—and that means trouble.
A lot of my patients have difficulty reconciling a sexual vision that’s ten or twenty or thirty years out of date with a body and lifestyle that can’t support that vision comfortably. Rather than challenge and reshape the vision, most of them say that there’s something wrong with themselves or their partner, and they want me to fix one or both.
There’s no lack of therapists (or TV commercials for drugs, cosmetics, and alcohol) who agree that such people have a “dysfunction.” But pursuing a sexual vision that’s fifteen years out of date (and performing poorly at it!) isn’t a “dysfunction.” It’s a culturally and psychologically driven mistake.
Instead, I point out to my patients what their sexual vision is—the gender stereotypes, the myths about intercourse or orgasm, the assumption that loneliness during sex is inevitable. I help them see how such a vision is obsolete, and I help them craft a new one. This is where Sexual Intelligence is helpful. We deal with their grief, sadness, anger, or despair about letting go of old sexual dreams—so they can eventually create new, more realistic ones.
People no longer young (that’s most adults) often want a sex life that matches the one they had—or wanted to have, or believe they should have had—when they were young. And that’s what much of the self-help industry sells—sex like when we were young. (There’s even a ridiculous new book called Have Sex Like You Just Met… No Matter How Long You’ve Been Together, by two writers with no credentials whatsoever. With a title like that, of course, the book will sell plenty. Can a Jennifer Aniston film be far behind?)
It doesn’t work. It can’t.
No, sex isn’t going to be like it was when you were young—if by “when I was young” you mean endless physical energy, hormone-crazed lust, all the time in the world, self-indulgent impulsivity with no sense of the consequences, and a partner who’s young and also wild with hormones. No, sex is not going to be like that regularly ever again.
Unless, of course, you have a continuing series of new partners or take really wild risks that get your adrenaline pumping. But that isn’t how most adults want to live—do you?
Sorry to deliver the news so directly. Psychologist Irvin Yalom, who unblinkingly challenges patients to see themselves and their relationships clearly, was once called “Love’s Executioner” (now the title of his 1989 classic book). Sometimes my patients call me similar names. Like “Youth’s Executioner.” Or the “Grim Speaker.” They’re mostly grateful to hear the truth, but they hate hearing it just the same.
All of this being said, sex can be deeply satisfying—pleasurable, fun, intimate—if you want. But you may have to change your ideas about satisfaction. You need to either want different things, or to redefine the things you continue to want.
You can, for example, feel graceful, youthful, competent, timeless, and un-self-conscious during sex. All you have to do is make room in this definition for imperfect bodies and imperfect “function” (unlike when you were younger). If your back hurts, you go slow instead of pounding your partner and hurting yourself. If you tend to wet the bed, you put a towel down instead of distracting yourself by thinking about wetting the bed. If you like lots of kissing, you ask for (and you do) lots of kissing, rather than wishing for it. If a spanking is more exciting than kissing, you ask for that instead.
If you’re taking a medication that makes your mouth dry, you put a glass of water on the night table and you use it during sex. Ditto lube. If your breasts have, um, relaxed over time, you deal with it—once and for all, because they’re not going to magically get perky overnight. Finish dealing with that issue now, and your breasts will never be an obstacle to enjoying sex ever again.
We’ll discuss how to implement a new sexual vision in Part Three.
So that’s it: Sexual Intelligence means dealing with sexuality in a straightforward way, rather than hiding it, denying it, or blaming it. You talk about it. You don’t put your energy into pretending that sex isn’t the way it is.
A few years ago, I taught a sexuality seminar for student therapists at a fancy southern university. When they couldn’t quite understand this idea, I used the analogy of having people over to your home for dinner. I said that, when inviting someone, a good host asks, “Is there anything you don’t eat?” A good guest tells the truth, responding that he or she is allergic to shellfish or almonds or whatever. Then the host can cook something the guest will like, and neither guest nor cook will be disappointed or embarrassed.
One of the students scoffed at my vision. “If I invite you to dinner, I don’t ask any questions,” she said. “I make what I want, and you eat it or not!” Well, I don’t want to unfairly generalize as to sex—but I certainly wouldn’t want to go to that young woman’s house for dinner—would you?
A Means, Not an End
Like most people, you probably assume that creating enjoyable sex requires that your penis or vulva do the various tricks it did (or was supposed to do) when you were younger. But remember, sexual function is a means to an end, not an end in itself. People talk about erections, lubrication, and orgasm as if those are the point of sex. But this vision of sex is way too limited.
Of course, if one of your primary goals in sex is to “not mess up too badly,” I understand why you have this focus. If you believe that getting your body to do what it used to do (or never did, but “should” do) is what constitutes “successful” sex, of course you’ll get attached to those particular abilities. But unlike many therapists, I don’t support people’s attachment to the functioning they believe creates sexual success—I treat that attachment as a problem.
So a key part of Sexual Intelligence is realizing that your body is not going to have sex like it did when you were younger. Some people find this unacceptable; they’d rather be unhappy and still hold out the hope of regaining (or creating) their sexual youth instead of changing internally and learning how to enjoy sex. After all, most people would rather have and keep a temporary problem than have and accept a permanent problem.
For some people, rejecting this insight is part of their larger (usually unconscious) project of denying their aging or impending death. This can go on with thirty-year-olds as much as with sixty-year-olds. People with this project have bigger fish to fry than sex. They’re dealing with the most serious existential issue there is.
I’m very sympathetic about people’s desire for passion. As we’ll see throughout this book, passion is possible—but it will probably look different than you thought it would. When adults experience passion, it’s usually not in response to incredible sex or the perfect body—it’s usually in response to giving themselves permission to let go emotionally. More on that as we go along.
There’s one more concern people have about being sexually relaxed and authentic. It’s terribly distracting, and it inhibits people before, during, and after sex. You might recognize it in yourself—the desire to be sexually normal, and the suspicion (or outright anxiety) that you’re not. In the next chapter, we’ll look at normality anxiety in detail.