Rowena came to see me because she was scared. She’d been caught having sex with a printer repair guy in her office right in the middle of the workday. Her boss told her that if she didn’t fix her “sex addiction” immediately, she’d be terminated.
The twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper had only met the guy the previous day. She had this kind of semi-anonymous, semi-public sex periodically. And although she liked the danger of it (not to mention the orgasms), getting caught was a wake-up call. Was she just a good-time girl who loved sex, or was there something wrong with her?
She told me she was married, and that she loved her husband Jose. “But the adventure is gone,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten married. Do you think I’m just a sex addict?”
“I don’t think ‘sex addiction’ is a helpful category,” I told her. “I think some people have psychological problems—obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality. But what others call ‘sex addiction’ I think is mostly people acting out sexually, and then not liking the consequences of their decision-making. Then these people say they’re out of control—sexually ‘addicted.’”
Rowena wasn’t a “sex addict”; she struck me as someone who had unrealistic expectations about life and sex. So we talked about her need for adventure, the high of taking risks, the thrill of a new sex partner. Most importantly, we talked about how no matter how much she scratched she still had an itch, and the next casual encounter would be just around the corner. Maybe that was a clue, I said, that something else was going on.
“You mean, like when I masturbate two or three times during a day and I’m still horny?” “Exactly,” I said. “Maybe you’re using sex to get something that sex can’t give you. And maybe that’s preventing you from enjoying sex more deeply with your husband.”
But as we continued talking, she got defensive. “Maybe you just think everyone should be married,” she pouted. “Or that casual sex is just for guys. Maybe you’re not the big sex-positive shrink everyone thinks you are.”
“Actually, I don’t care if you stay married or not,” I said simply. “I’m more interested in you living with integrity, whatever that turns out to mean.”
That was a surprise to her, and it got her thinking. After a minute’s silence, she said, “You know, my reflexive feeling was, ‘Well, I don’t care if I stay married or not either.’ How screwed up is that?”
This was a common pattern with us: she’d get angry with me or feel misunderstood, but eventually realize she’d been impulsive, and then emotionally re-enter our relationship.
Unconsciously, she used her sexuality with me that way also. While I’m certain she had no actual sexual intentions toward me, she did manage to tell me several times that she “loved giving head. I’m damn good at it too.” Then she’d look at me and ask if she had embarrassed or upset me.
Rowena was trying to turn me into a controlling mother she could rebel against. This was, I soon learned, an eerie echo of her childhood, when she felt stifled by her strict Catholic mother. But Rowena had muted her adolescent resentment because her mother was sickly and physically weak. Rowena had to take care of her mother, which left little room to rebel—or to get much positive attention, either.
Enter a parade of Spanish tutors, UPS deliverymen, car mechanics, office repair guys, and even her dentist.
“You’ll have to find ways of feeling important, loved, and pretty that don’t involve casual sex if you want to enjoy being married,” I said. “And I understand that might seem like an impossible task.”
In fact it did. “But I can see that growing up is the only way out of this,” she practically whispered. “How can I do that?”
Fast-forward through our first dozen sessions. It’s been months of struggle. Rowena’s been learning to stay more aware of her internal state, realizing what kind of emotional nourishment she needs at various times (exercise, hugs, laughter, meditation, self-validation, wholesome time with friends who care for her, and so on). And she’s learning to talk more to her husband: more about being bored, more about wanting his self-disclosure, more about her reflex to rebel, even if she has to create an adversary to rebel against.
And they’re talking more about sex. They’ve made a deal: she’ll slow down and be more emotionally present during sex if he’ll do the same.
“It’s scary,” she said. “I never thought sex could be scary until now. I guess that’s progress, huh?”
Most grown-ups don’t want to get into bed with someone if they’re angry with or feeling hurt by them. So, for enjoyable sex, you need the skills to settle the non-sexual issues that come up during the week. You also need the skills to not get thrown by whatever happens during sex.
We all need emotional skills to create a relationship in which going to bed with someone makes sense. In case you haven’t noticed, if you aren’t dependable, cooperative, validating, appreciative, and caring—even when you’re not especially in the mood—the times when you and your partner will both be up for sex won’t come around too often.
We also need emotional skills to help us navigate the normal kinds of emotional events that can happen in bed—such as feeling lonely or abandoned, judged or criticized, self-critical, embarrassed, or ashamed, inadequate or disappointing to our partner. If you fall apart every time your partner doesn’t orgasm, or every time you feel chubby, or every time you don’t get exactly the emotional connection you want, sex will become less and less enjoyable—and eventually less and less frequent.
And I haven’t even mentioned the more specific things that happen during sex—like getting a cramp in your foot, wetting the bed, needing to stop in the middle, or climaxing unexpectedly. Do you have the emotional skills to handle situations like these? Over time that’s definitely more important than dependable erections or lubrication on demand.
Events like these are about emotions—not about “sex” or our genitalia. As with every other activity (going to parties, watching movies, sitting on the beach, listening to music), during sex our body does what it does; we then assign meaning to what it does (or doesn’t do), and that’s what can create trouble. These emotional events also involve interpreting your partner’s behavior, whether it’s lack of orgasm, or the look on your partner’s face when you undress, or your partner’s refusal to touch you in a certain way or to accept how you want to touch him or her.
The same skill that helps you handle yourself when your partner forgets your birthday or wants to go to the ballet the day of the Super Bowl also allows you to handle not getting oral sex when you hope for it, or being told that your partner doesn’t want to share pornography with you.
Most sex therapists say that a lot of their work isn’t about sex itself. Rather, they’re often helping people develop relationship skills and personal maturity, which ultimately make cooperation much easier. But this takes time, and not everybody wants to do it.
I was unable to do this effectively with Zena and Lamar.
Zena’s distress about Lamar’s lack of sex drive had brought them into my office. Maybe “distress” gives the wrong idea. She was angry, blaming, sarcastic, and sometimes just unapologetically nasty. Believe it or not, none of these made him more interested in sex with her.
She had plenty of reasons to be disappointed. He was what most people would call a slob—dropping his socks and underwear anywhere he happened to undress. He never capped or closed anything—toothpaste, peanut butter, dresser drawers. Not only did he scratch wherever it itched, he farted and belched at will, laughing when she complained.
“You’re immature,” she would complain session after session. “You’re controlling,” he would reply. “Hostile,” she’d announce. “No sense of humor,” he’d respond. After six weeks of this, I started hoping they would call and cancel their next session, or maybe quit therapy altogether.
While Lamar was no picnic, Zena was the tougher one to work with. Whenever I tried to process their mutual hostility, she’d turn on me. And when I noted that her goal of making him feel bad (“so he’ll change”) was creating problems of its own, she blew up at me. After a few of these ugly incidents, I noticed I was starting to withdraw from her. Of course, that’s what Lamar was doing too, which drove her crazy. So one week I stepped up and talked about how I was becoming hesitant to engage Zena—that is, to tell her the truth—just as I imagined Lamar had become hesitant. I thought that describing my own dynamic with them might provide new insight that they could use. Alas, she blasted me with a “you men are jerks” speech, completely erasing my individuality as she lumped me into a category with her husband and two billion other jerks.
No, I did not like this. But I sure was experiencing what it was like to be in a relationship with her.
I learned that it was more effective to explain things to Lamar than to Zena; not only would she get less defensive, but she liked the idea that I was “working on him, the one with the problem.”
Despite this, whenever I came too close to the subject of how she was treating him, she’d get terribly upset and defensive. Finally, I had to just say it: when people don’t get along outside the bedroom, they often have trouble getting into the bedroom—much less enjoying what goes on there. He nodded. She exploded. Apparently, she wanted to be right more than she wanted to be sexually engaged with him.
For one thing, she wanted it clear that she was not to blame for their problems, and she wanted it clear that she was disappointed with her selection of a husband, who was apparently quite defective. When I suggested that having a sex life might require her to accept some responsibility for how things had unraveled, she became mean. So I gently suggested she might be feeling attacked by what I’d just said. This was apparently her cue to get sarcastic. So I backed off, and it took another month before I could even approach the subject again.
Zena and Lamar eventually left counseling without settling their sexual issue. And she did it in a predictably hostile way: she left me a voice mail saying they’d just had another fight, that the counseling was a waste of time, and that she had told him he needed individual therapy or she’d leave him. And that I shouldn’t expect a call from either of them, because he agreed with her.
Zena refused to even consider acquiring new emotional skills in order to improve her sexual relationship. So what emotional skills go into Sexual Intelligence?
Self-Acceptance
“The first thing I learned about sex was shame.”
This is what a patient told me during my first month as a therapist. I never forgot it.
When we don’t accept ourselves, it’s almost impossible to imagine someone else accepting us. Think about it—if you don’t like your own cooking, can you imagine someone else enjoying it? If you think you’re a boring person, do you believe someone who says you’re fascinating?
It’s the same with sex. We need to accept ourselves—our bodies, our preferences, our experiences, the way we orgasm (or don’t)—in order to imagine that our partner accepts or even celebrates us. Without self-acceptance, we’re constantly on the defensive. Someone says you look great? You respond with an apology, defensiveness, or suspicion that you’re being patronized.
If you can’t accept yourself, how can you approach your partner to create—much less enjoy—a sexual space between the two of you? If, for example, you have a neurotic fear of somehow hurting your partner with your masculinity, you’ll withdraw and limit emotional contact with her. She’ll undoubtedly experience this as hurtful—which was exactly what you wanted to prevent. At that point you can forget about having relaxed, playful sex—perhaps any sex at all.
Self-acceptance is a key resource in unhooking from sex that’s oriented toward “normality” and performance. It allows you to put your own experience in the center of your sexual decision-making, rather than feeling trapped by conventional societal ideas that may not suit you. It’s self-acceptance that enables you to tell a partner you’d rather do X (your thing) than Y (everyone else’s supposed thing), which is crucial to enjoyable sex.
Similarly, self-acceptance can give you the confidence and relaxation to allow a partner to be himself or herself. When both of you are willing to be yourselves, you’re on the way to sex you can both enjoy.
So “improving yourself” is not the centerpiece of making sex better. Start by accepting yourself the way you are—big butt, small penis, unpredictable orgasm, whatever—without “improvements.”
I fondly recall a patient named Christopher, who came to therapy because his wife complained he was passive in bed. She insisted that he was passive because he didn’t find her exciting, but that was absolutely wrong. Christopher just didn’t feel entitled to get really excited, to make requests (much less demands), to ever pull her toward him the way she yearned to be.
Christopher grew up in a small Oklahoma town where his family owned the only grocery store. His parents worked constantly to keep the store open almost around the clock, and they expected Christopher and his brothers to pitch in every day. The message of his childhood was simple: life is hard, don’t complain, work is everything, survival is the goal. And if you have any feelings or needs, keep them to yourself.
At seventeen, Christopher escaped to a Jesuit seminary in Oregon. Although he appreciated the intellectual stimulation, the place simply reinforced his family’s message about the centrality of sacrifice, adding a crucial twist—sex is not a legitimate need. By the time he finally left the seminary ten years later (and became, of Sexual Intelligence 101 all things, a nurse), he had relationships all figured out: never focus on your needs, don’t do anything that might be considered selfish, and do not exploit others with your desires.
Facing an adult world without having accepted his own needs and interests, Christopher found it impossible to really hunger after his wife. And he found it equally impossible to talk about his distress about this. Our therapy started with a goal that seemed simple, but was totally profound: knowing what he wanted, admitting it to himself, and then sharing it with her. That was way more important than teaching him a new position or getting her to wear lingerie.
Trust
I see a lot of men and women who tell me they have “trust issues.” I tell them, “Ah, so you’re uncomfortable trusting.” I like that formulation better—it’s easier to change a “discomfort” than an “issue.” “Trust issues” sounds soooooo serious—who could be optimistic about changing that? Besides, “trust issues” sounds like the problem is external, like being hit by a bus, or having airport security mistake you for a terrorist. “I feel uncomfortable trusting” pulls the problem down to a human scale that can actually be changed.
There are many things you need to trust during sex: that pleasure is safe and appropriate; that eroticism won’t get out of control in a destructive way; that you can connect with someone without being exploited; that your partner is telling the truth when he or she expresses desire, arousal, or satisfaction with you.
But you also need to trust yourself. Too many people are told all their lives that doing so is a mistake. My patient Douglas, for example, has never trusted himself. With parents who told him he was no good, who compared him (unfavorably) with cousins, neighbors, and everyone else, he grew up with no sense of entitlement. He feared speaking up or wanting anything because he believed that humiliation was sure to follow.
How could a person like this connect with someone sexually? He would be concerned about his erections, about coming too soon, about not being a good kisser. But these technical matters would be the least of his problems. Without trusting himself, he wouldn’t trust sex or his partner. Being betrayed by his genitalia would be only the start of his problems; his anxiety and self-criticism would be the central feature of sex for him. Think he could enjoy it? No.
It turns out that trusting ourselves is fully as important as trusting others.
Communication
Most people don’t realize that when couples have problems, communication is typically an emotional skill, not a technical one.
No matter how clearly and responsibly you intend to express yourself, it’s hard to communicate well when you fear conflict or abandonment, have trouble trusting, or can’t accept that neither you nor your partner is perfect. That’s when communication is no longer about techniques and listening—it’s about the emotions that prevent us from using those techniques and prevent us from listening. To improve communication at that point, we have to deal first with those emotions.
Communication is like many other activities, such as driving, cooking, and public speaking. If you’re comfortable doing them, if you think people like you can be good at them, if you’re not terrified of making a mistake, then you can enjoy such activities and become skillful at them, even creative. At that point these are merely technical skills.
But if you’re not comfortable being a person who drives or cooks Sexual Intelligence 103 or speaks in public without worrying about being watched and judged, then your emotional difficulty is far more important than your technical skills. You can’t learn or do these activities easily—not because you’re stupid or clumsy, but because you’re afraid or uncomfortable.
And so one of this book’s goals is to turn communication from an emotional issue into simply a technical one.
I have so many patients who are told—by magazines, the Internet, various TV personalities—to communicate more or differently. Their partners often tell them in meticulous detail what they’re doing wrong, wanting them to change. My patients generally feel that this trivializes their difficulties; frustrated and discouraged, they then say things like, “I just want to kiss you, but all I get is criticism,” or, “Can’t we do one single thing without wasting a lot of time communicating?”
While some people do refuse to communicate (“it’s none of your business,” “you don’t really care,” “you just want to control me, like my ex”), most don’t. Rather, people who are verbally restrained or who hide behind euphemisms are typically just so bound up that communication is almost impossible. For them communication is an emotional skill, rather than a simply technical one.
That’s why they often answer questions with just one syllable, or they “forget” to start conversations. They’re scared or intimidated, not mean or stingy.
Take Manush, for example, an almost reclusive lab technician who was finally dating again many years after his lover died. He thought the main goal of communication was to prevent his current boyfriend, Carl, from getting upset. Manush tiptoed around him; in fact, he often waited until they’d both had one or two drinks at night before talking about difficult things.
Out of practice, concerned about losing Carl, Manush was looking for the “right way” to communicate—instead of relaxing and drawing on their connection. He still couldn’t accept that Carl wouldn’t always be happy with what he said or wanted. He hesitated to have the more adventurous sex that Carl wanted because he didn’t want to get that wrong either.
After two months of therapy, in which we talked about his fears of communicating, he started “coming out” to Carl: An “I’d like” here. A “maybe we could” there. A mild challenge now and then to Carl’s assumption of being in charge. Confronting Carl’s belief that he knew Manush better than he knew himself. He was scared at first, but the more Manush did it, the more he realized how important it was to do—and how not doing so all along had actually undermined, not strengthened, the relationship.
At that point it made sense to talk about the technicalities of communication—“I” statements (talking about your experience rather than your partner’s supposed intentions), fair fighting (staying on topic, not bringing up old hurts), striving to understand before striving to be understood (the opposite of what most people in conflict do). And that’s when things really got interesting. The occasional conflict meant they had sex less often—but finally, the sex between them could heat up. They both loved it. Much to Carl’s delight, they started to experiment with sex toys and games that Manush had thought were only for other people. How pleased he was to be wrong about that!
Regardless of the topic, the goal of communication isn’t to satisfy your partner or to get your partner off your back; it’s to be more present and to have more power to shape your relationship experiences.
Growing Up
I wish I could say, “C’mon, just grow up,” to some of my patients who are trying hard to succeed in our therapy—but of course this doesn’t help (I tried it as a rookie shrink), and it isn’t good therapy. When was the last time you said, “C’mon, just grow up” to someone and they actually did?
Still, there’s no substitute for growing up if you want a better relationship or want to enjoy sex more. That’s because of the common tendency to use sex as a substitute for grappling with the fears and anxieties of adulthood.
When you’ve worked out those fears—of being unattractive, for example, or irrelevant, or not sufficiently manly—it’s easier to have sex that’s just about sex. In contrast, when sex is about concerns like whether or not you’re still youthful, or lovable, or important, sex—along with your genitalia—is just carrying too much of a burden. Expecting your penis to determine whether or not you’re still relevant, or expecting orgasm to distract you from your fear of dying, is just putting too much pressure on small pieces of flesh. No wonder penises and vulvas sometimes refuse to cooperate.
Part of dealing with these existential issues is coming to peace with your body as it is. This involves letting your body be what it is during sex and imagining that your partner accepts it too. There’s nothing so offputting as telling one’s partner, “I like your body” (or this body part), only to be contradicted: it’s too fat, too skinny, too wrinkled, the wrong shape or color. No one wants their opinion invalidated, certainly not their positive opinion of their partner’s body. In addition, wrangling over the attractiveness of a body or body part creates distance—generally the opposite state that people have in mind when they’re appreciating their partner’s body.
Being grown-up also involves accepting that tragedies are part of life. When you do, it becomes easier to put a lost erection in perspective—it is not a tragedy. In fact, if you learn to laugh at what life throws at you, it’s easier to laugh at the vagaries of sex, which makes it easier for you and your partner to relax.
I recall one patient who couldn’t grow up enough to forgive her husband for being himself—a nice guy who would never make a fortune. Whenever Elise became anxious about money or felt envious of well-to-do people, she would make snide remarks about how she’d be living in a much nicer house if only she had married her first boyfriend (who became a corporate lawyer) instead of Eduardo (who was a carpenter).
Periodically distraught about her life choices, Elise simply couldn’t maintain sexual desire for Eduardo. She acknowledged that he was attractive and a gentle, patient lover—but the grief she felt when she looked at him simply prevented her from appreciating or desiring him. Unfortunately, therapy couldn’t help her come to terms with the life she had chosen for herself—and for her own reasons, she was unwilling to change her choice.
Maintaining Sexual Self-Esteem in the Face of Disappointment
If you know you’re smart, your intelligence isn’t on the line every time you go to work. If you know you’re a good mother, your confidence as a parent isn’t on the line every time you manage a disagreement with your kids.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could decide that you’re sexually competent and attractive (at least to your mate)? That way, your sexual adequacy and self-esteem wouldn’t be on the line every time you have sex. The ways your body responds during sex wouldn’t “mean” anything; although you might feel disappointed if you didn’t get what you hoped for, your attitude about yourself wouldn’t change.
If your opinion of yourself varies with the outcome of each sexual encounter, you’ll continually be pressuring yourself to do sex “right” (erection, lubrication, orgasm, timing, whatever)—and that makes enjoyment very difficult. It makes each sexual encounter too meaningful—as if this is the time you find out if you’re loved, or attractive, or adequate. And that makes every sexual encounter an opportunity to fail. Who can enjoy that?
While it’s enjoyable to feel that sex has personal meaning, it’s best when the outcome of a sexual encounter determines nothing. Disappointment is not the same thing as failure. Disappointment is a reasonable response to the difference between what you want and what you get. Failure is a global judgment about who you are, as demonstrated by the difference between what you want and what you get.
An example? The millions of women who insist that when a man doesn’t get erect, or ejaculates too quickly, she is a failure. This expectation puts pressure on both partners, who may eventually start avoiding sex in order to avoid embarrassment and loss of self-esteem.
Tolerating Inadequate Attunement
“Attunement” is how I describe the experience of two (or more) people inhabiting a common psychological space at the same time. People refer to this variously as “being on the same page,” “thinking with one brain,” “taking the words right out of my mouth,” “reading my mind,” or “being in synch.”
More practically, people say things such as, “When we cook together, it’s like we’re dancing in the kitchen.” “On a good day, we can get all three kids up, dressed, fed, and out the door without saying a word to each other.” “Right before hosting a big party, we’re like a well-oiled machine getting everything done together.”
Whether through coparenting, playing doubles tennis, hosting dinner parties, attending the Super Bowl, or playing in a string quartet, many people yearn for the feeling of attunement—the sense of joining others in a common experience. It can be a wonderful human pleasure.
Another way people like to do this is through sex, which they may describe as “being touched the way I’ve always wanted to be touched,” “our bodies talking to each other perfectly,” or “making love like we’ve known each other forever.”
But it doesn’t always unfold that way, does it? In fact, for some people, sex never feels like this—from the moment they start kissing or someone starts undressing them, it’s all elbows and knees. And they feel so grief-stricken or enraged about it that they can’t enjoy anything else sex has to offer.
For other people, sex works fine until it doesn’t—and then it really doesn’t. Like their cousins just described, they suddenly feel hurt or lonely or abandoned, to a degree way beyond what a specific situation seems to merit (a lost erection, an accidental hair pull, a disagreement about who’s going to get on top, feeling tickled instead of caressed).
When that happens, sex is the least of their problems. Depending on their character style, they may lash out or emotionally collapse. Suddenly there’s a relationship problem (or “drama,” as their partner may complain); some couples, in fact, always seem to be stumbling from one of these conflicts to the next.
It’s hard to be enthusiastic about sex when you don’t know how to tolerate the disappointment of insufficient attunement. Eventually, such people hesitate to initiate or respond sexually. Their partner loses enthusiasm too. Since no one gets that sense of attunement from sex (or from anything else) every single time, Sexual Intelligence gives you the ability to tolerate not having it when you want or expect it.
While the desire for attunement during sex can be perfectly healthy, some adults put way too much emphasis on it. Perhaps they unconsciously yearn to experience the profound attunement they didn’t get enough of as a child. Particularly if they feel they deserve such attunement, or if sex is laden with mystical meaning for them, the lack of attunement during sex can be excruciating.
Unfortunately, their partner may make things worse by criticizing such an intense response to a provocation that may seem minor. The upset person then feels the additional pain of their partner apparently trivializing their distress.
Predictably, people who can’t tolerate a lack of attunement soon reveal this in therapy. Every week I deal with patients attempting, consciously or not, to manipulate, whine, bully, or seduce their way into a sense of attunement with me. Their fondest wish is that I will acquiesce to this “invitation.” Instead, I generally comment on their desire—which often leads them into a terribly familiar sense of disappointment right in session. That’s when serious personal growth is possible—for those who have the patience and determination to examine their feelings rather than insist that I and others have done something wrong. Not everyone does, of course. You can see how this kind of self-observation contributes to Sexual Intelligence—the ability to enjoy sex when the situation isn’t perfect.
I recall working with a woman named Malika who’d grown up in a privileged home in Karachi, Pakistan. There, the servants were trained to not just satisfy her, but to anticipate her material and emotional needs. Raised to expect this treatment, she never learned how to cope with everyday frustration while growing up. This wouldn’t have been such a problem if she’d stayed in Pakistan, either living in her father’s house or marrying a rich man. But she did neither—she went to California for college, and stayed there afterwards. She then married an American—a nice enough engineer, but a middle-class guy who was clueless about what he was getting into.
Four years later, she came for therapy, assuring me that the problem was her “unsophisticated” husband, who was driving her crazy with “suburban ideas.” She couldn’t feel desire for such a “pedestrian fellow,” someone who “didn’t have stars in his eyes.”
The first few times Malika felt frustrated with me in therapy she was quite vocal and snooty about it. Working with her to build a respectful adult relationship with me was a big—and slow—step toward building her tolerance for disappointment, especially where her husband was concerned. She had to learn to appreciate the small satisfactions in everyday life, and to accept that not every moment in her life would be filled with “stars.” She wanted children, for example, but was planning on them being gifted, self-disciplined, perfectly behaved, and tidy—virtually effortless to raise, of course. Was she in for a surprise!
How does this connect with sex? When Malika learned she could survive imperfect moments—a tired husband, a bruised banana, a rude waitress, a doctor keeping her waiting—down-to-earth sex became easier. Until our work together, she had experienced love-making as a series of assaults on her five senses—such as not being touched perfectly, the room not being the perfect temperature, her husband not being perfectly shaved. As our therapy proceeded, she stopped constantly criticizing her poor husband and started to notice what she was enjoying about sex.
I knew we were making progress the day a car alarm went off in the parking lot below my office window and she was able to continue the session. Thanking me for my insights (and patience!), she said, “I suppose if I can talk with you while that’s happening, I can even make love with my husband when the world isn’t perfect.”
Now that’s using your Sexual Intelligence.
And So…
Emotional skills are like oxygen—invisible, and unnoticed unless missing. We talk about emotional skills primarily when they’re lacking. But the emotional skills of adulthood are essential for desiring and creating enjoyable sex. These skills enable us to relate to sexual situations that aren’t ideal, which may be the majority of our experiences. And they enable us to deal with a partner who inevitably must struggle with imperfect sexual experiences too.
Perfect bodies? Perfect “function”? They’re worth very little in the real world of adult sexual expression. Maturity, patience, perspective, a sense of humor? Now that’s sexy.