Courage and kindness forge life-affirming sex
Expanding your capacity for profound sexual intimacy and desire takes more courage than time. If you want to progress quickly, keep your focus on addressing how you participate in the patterns and meanings that keep desire low. This is hard to do because our brains are much better at tracking other people’s behavior than our own, and because it takes a lot more courage to deal with your own insecurities and immaturities than to point out your partner’s.
Foundations for success:
You and your partner probably have similar levels of difficulty with intimacy and eroticism even if on the surface that doesn’t appear to be the case. We tend to partner with people who are at a similar level of differentiation (ability to be invested in our own desires and another person’s at the same time) and to raise our level of differentiation in tandem with a committed partner. Being interested in more sexual frequency or variety isn’t necessarily correlated with being interested in the challenge of intimate, erotic sex.
The most effective way to pressure your partner’s growth is to take on your own. As you grow out of the patterns that have played out between you, your partner loses the option of responding automatically to your predictable moves. You can break patterns by seeing your participation in them and not letting yourself do the thing you tend to do. You can also get a checked out partner to pay more attention to what you’re doing by doing any surprising, positive thing.
Self compassion makes it possible to see your contributions to sexual dissatisfaction clearly. Some ways you can offer yourself self compassion:
- Talk to yourself in encouraging ways. Validate the goodness in what you are reaching for and offer yourself the loyalty of patience in sorting out how you can have meaningful erotic sex. Have your own back in treating this goal as worth everything it really is worth to you. Give yourself permission to invest time and resources into it because it matters to your happiness.
— Respond to setbacks and difficult emotions with kindness towards yourself. You might try a mantra for responding to disappointing or painful experiences such as saying “It’s ok, I love you” to yourself. If you cringe at the thought of talking to yourself in a loving way, be curious about the part of you that feels averse to that. Who taught you to treat yourself harshly? Do they have the kind of life you want?
— Learn self compassion skills from experts by listening to guided meditations. A few I recommend:
Self Love Bomb with Jeff Warren
Practicing Gentle Kindness Toward Ourself
Loving And Listening To Yourself
Like any skill, being kind to yourself becomes easier with practice.
Take responsibility for regulating your own emotions and behavior. You can unilaterally introduce emotional intimacy and eroticism to your relationship if you can handle sharing your sexual self with your partner without needing them to validate it. What this looks like in practice is being transparent and unapologetic about what you really think and want, without trying to manage what your partner thinks and wants.
Self-validated intimacy looks like: confronting yourself about your contributions to the challenges in your relationship, and letting your partner see you do it. Sharing with your partner the true depth of what you value and appreciate about having them in your life. Asking your partner to join you in a partnered exercise for calmer connection, ideally every day. Staying clear with yourself and honest with them about what you want, without pressuring their choices.
Self-validated eroticism looks like: letting your partner know what you want to share with them sexually, without trying to make them do it. Sharing fantasies or erotic ideas that resonate with you, without needing your partner to share in return or to respond positively to what you share. Sorting out for yourself who you need to be to know you are a desirable choice as a partner and living up to that. The more you earn your own trust and respect, the less defensive you’ll feel when your partner doesn’t reflect a flattering view of you.
Most of us want partner-validated intimacy and partner-validated eroticism a lot more than we want the exposure and risk of self-validated intimacy and eroticism. Wanting it is normal and fine, and happy marriages include plenty of partner validation, but needing that to be ok or to be able to step into intimacy and eroticism makes it very difficult to actually get it. The more we’re able to validate our own desires, soothe our own anxieties, and manage our own behavior, the more desirable we become and paradoxically the more validation we tend to get from our partner. The only reliable way to get it is to not depend on getting it.
Measuring success:
You know you’re on the right track when you become better able to regulate yourself. This means you take deep responsibility for managing your own emotions and earning your own respect through what you do and say, and you don’t let yourself use your partner’s immaturities and shortcomings to justify your own.
Other measures of progress include finding yourself in more of a struggle with yourself than with your partner, and being more kind and courageous even if you’re the only one doing it.
Resentment is a clue that you’ve lost sight of your own agency. You don’t have to be in this relationship, and you don’t have to do the hard work of creating a passionate marriage. It isn’t likely to be easier with anyone else, but you are free to leave and find out if that’s what you want to do, or to stay and not try to have passion.
If you want to grow faster, take bigger risks — and handle the emotional cost of choosing those risks if they don’t go the way you wanted. Risk letting your partner reject you. Risk not pointing out what they got wrong. Risk telling them the truth about what you see yourself getting wrong that you usually don’t say out loud. Risk letting them be wrong about you instead of trying to defend yourself from their perception.
Get any support you need to tolerate taking bigger risks from professionals; don’t expect it from your partner, because your growth pressures their own, and we all tend to resist change even when it’s the only way to get what we most want.
These books can help:
Passionate Marriage (David Schnarch)
Intimacy & Desire (David Schnarch)
Already Free (Bruce Tift)