Image made with Dall-E
There’s a challenge almost every couple faces at some point.
Sex!
When you’ve been together for 2 years, 5 years, 10+ years, it can be tough to keep up a sexual connection.
And in this newsletter, I’ve got some tips to help you do just that. (If you don’t currently have a long-term partner, you could log these ideas for later.)
But first, let’s relieve some societal pressure around sex.
It’s Normal to Have Less Sex Over Time
If you’re in a long-term partnership (or hope to be in one), it’s 100% normal for your sexual connection to fade over time.
After a few years, your relationship becomes full of silly faces, gut-wrenching morning breath, and questionably offensive accents. When this happens, it’s beautiful. But it can be easy to stop seeing each other as sexual beings, and to slip into a sexless relationship.
That’s not the case with all couples—some partners effortlessly keep up a picante sexual connection for decades.
But for most couples I’ve talked to, sex becomes less frequent over time. And I want to normalize that.
When you’re in the “honeymoon” period (what the poly community calls “new relationship energy”), your brain is shitting out neurotransmitters, so sexual arousal is easy to find.
In those early stages, all you have to do is put your hand on your partner’s knee, and your loins start clapping and cheering.
But a few years down the road, you put your hand on their knee, and your loins are straight crickets.
That said, less sex isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Have as much (or little) sex as you want
You don’t need to have sex all the time if you don’t want to–you and your partner get to pick the sexual cadence that works for your connection. That might mean daily sex, weekly, monthly, or once in a blue moon.
It’s also natural for your sexual connection to fluctuate over time. Sometimes without cause, you just don’t feel sexy. Other times your circumstances affect your arousal—if you’re feeling depressed and anxious because you can’t find a job, your sexual connection might dip.
I want to push back on the mainstream narrative that sex is the most important part of a partnership and that you have to have it all the time. Sex is fluid. And you can have a healthy relationship with as much or as little sex as you want.
That said, if both of you do genuinely want more sex, there are ways to do that.
Here’s a personal story of how my partner and I have navigated this topic.
We’re poly, and she’s recently been exploring sex with other partners. I was feeling afraid and hurt, and she felt overwhelmed by my emotions. Because of our disconnect, sex started to become less frequent.
At a certain point, we both recognized that we were avoiding sex in our connection. Instead of finding physical intimacy, we’d turn to board games or hiking.
So we were tasked to figure out how to have sex more often. Here’s what we found.
3 Tips to Have More Sex with Your Long-Term Partner
Just a note, these tips are helpful if both you and your partner want more sex. But if one of you wants more sex and the other doesn’t, then you’re in a different situation with a different solution. Forcing yourself into sex that you don’t want is a recipe for complicated feelings.
With that said, try out these tips. Tips #1 and 2 set the table, but tip #3 is definitely the rump roast.
Tip #1: Learn to ask for what you want
In a long-term relationship, you can’t rely on the effortless arousal found in the honeymoon period. So you have to figure out what you actually want sexually and then ask for it.
This is easier said than done! It requires locating your desire, validating it, and then voicing it.
In sex, there are two categories of things to ask for: desires from your erotic mind and from your somatic experience.
Your erotic mind refers to your deepest fantasies, hottest sexual dynamics, and favorite fetishes. You likely have a set of turn-ons that have been with you for years.
There’s a book called Coming Together, by Celeste Hirshman and Danielle Harel, I’d recommend. It offers a framework suggesting that we each have 1-3 “core desires.” These are eroticized feelings that underpin all of our hottest sexual experiences and fantasies. Once you understand your core desires, you can more effectively create hot experiences with your partner.
An example of asking for what you want here might be: “It’s extremely hot to me when you express your desire for my body. I love being hungered for. Can we create a scene where you say things like ‘I want you so bad I’m going crazy!’ that involves you ripping my clothes off?”
Your somatic experience refers to what your body wants in a given situation. This requires slowness and presence to find. Unlike the consistency of the erotic mind, your somatic desires are never identical. What your body wants in any given moment is entirely unique.
I’d recommend a book called The Art of Receiving and Giving by Betty Martin. She offers tools to teach you how to find embodied pleasure, ask for more of it, and say no to what you don’t want.
An example of asking for what you want here might be: “Can you gently caress my belly with your fingertips?”
Tip #2: Develop a somatic menu
When it’s time to have sex, it can be helpful to have options to choose from.
In the menu I use with my partner, not all options are overtly sexual.
Sometimes it can be nice to shoot for somatic intimacy instead of sex. Doing so takes the pressure off having a scorching hot sexual experience, and instead invites an easeful body connection, which often, but not always, ends up resulting in a sexual connection.
Here are some items from our menu to inspire your own.
- BDSM scene. Pick who’s the dom and who’s the sub and craft a power-exchange roleplay.
- Dance. We both pick a few songs and co-create a playlist. Then we use dance to explore different emotions in our connection.
- Genital massage. One person at a time receives a genital massage from the other.
- The 3-minute game. This game has 4 parts, and we tend to verbally process in between each part. Part 1: I ask Angela “How do you want me to touch you for 3 minutes?” Then we do it. Part 2: I ask Angela “How do you want to touch me for 3 minutes?” Then she asks me both of those questions.
- Darkness. We put on a timer for an hour-ish, both put on blindfolds, and agree not to talk for the duration. Then we see what our bodies want to do together.
Tip #3: Make sex a practice
Here’s the biggest advice I can give on how to have sex with a long-term partner:
Just do it.
Assuming you both want more sex, but neither of you is initiating, set up a time to just do it.
Angela and I recently set up a container where we met for sex every day for 5 days. Some days we had a whole hour, and other days just 15 minutes.
Each time we met, we bumped into every reason we didn’t want to have sex. We had to work out feelings of sexual pressure, sexual anxiety, and sexual shame. Some of the days weren’t hot at all.
But guess what? We did have a lot of sex!
In a similar vein, many creative people notoriously struggle to create art. They want to do it. But it’s strangely hard to get themselves to.
There’s a book called The War of Art. It’s an incredible guide on how to create art. And the thesis boils down to this: sit down every day and just do it. Your art might suck. Who cares. You’ll never find inspiration if you don’t sit down every day and make yourself available for it.
This quote says it well:
Same thing with sex.
Good sex comes about through sexual inspiration. And if you don’t regularly have sex, it’s a lofty expectation that inspiration will greet you at a moment’s notice.
But if you have a regular sexual practice with your partner, then sexual inspiration will come. You’ll still have some days where the sex is clunky, dry, and meh. But there will also be days when it’s fun, hot, and inspired.
Sexual inspiration won’t show up on its own. You two have to show up first.
As I mentioned before, doing this practice will bring forward all the reasons why you two are avoiding sex. It’ll force you to look at the fears, resentments, and pressures that are keeping sex buried.
This may be challenging, but it’s a good thing. Because when those resistances emerge, you get a chance to work through them together.
For example, if these folks below set up a sex date, they’d be forced to work through some emotions first!
Just make sure you’re not pushing yourself to have sex if you don’t want to. It’s always okay to say “no” to things you don’t want to do.
Action step: To get sex going, set a commitment with your partner to have 30 minutes of physical intimacy (sexual or otherwise) every day for 5 days.
After the container is completed, consider trying a 30-minute physical date once a week for the next few months.
Here’s the appropriate quote for our purposes:
Want Support?
Want personalized support for deeper emotional and sexual connection? I’m offering a free one-off coaching call for any couple. Just book a time here.
One Reply to “In a Sexless Relationship? Here’s How to End the Dry Spell”
Comments are closed.