Sex in Marriage: Rekindling the Fire of Desire

The very essence of marriage in the basic understanding of modern couples looks very different than before. Historically, in Western culture, the first sex happened after marriage. Now the wedding symbolizes that we have stopped having sex with someone else. This transition radically changed the meaning of selectivity.

“After many years in family therapy, I have ceased to see sexuality as a synonym for marital relations: rather, they are parallel concepts,” writes the famous Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel, bestselling author of Captive Breeding. How to reconcile erotica and everyday life”, “Right to “left”. Why do people cheat and is it possible to avoid cheating”, “Always welcome. How to keep passion in a long-term relationship.

Let’s talk about it

Today, partners seek to combine the need for a serious long-term relationship with the need for freedom and self-realization. What does this mean for those who call themselves family therapists? The need to ask more leading questions. And they should be formulated differently than before.

“Instead of asking, ‘How often do you have sex? How important is this to you? What changed? Has it gotten better since you’ve been together?” Perel says. At the same time, such a conversation does not in any way imply that at the beginning everyone is fine with sex, but over time it inevitably gets worse.

The purpose of such a conversation is to understand how maturity, experience, self-acceptance influenced mutual erotic affection. How comfortable are partners with discussing their sexual preferences? Can they calmly talk about sex, or is it an uncomfortable topic?

The most important thing is to talk about sex not as an action, but as a kind of space that you can enter both alone and with a partner, the psychotherapist emphasizes.

secret world

As soon as we abstract from the idea that “all people either do it or they don’t,” a whole erotic world opens up to us. It has fantasies, desires and preferences, disappointments, unsatisfied needs and suppressed impulses, past and present grievances, levels of arousal and passion – everything that contains our sexual experience, which many carefully hide from each other.

Most of us have been brought up in an information vacuum as far as our knowledge of sex is concerned. We have been taught that pleasure is associated with guilt and shame. Adults carefully hide the intimate side of life, because they were taught this as part of the normative program of sexual socialization.

Most parents don’t talk about sex with their kids, and most couples talk about sex with people they know more than with a loved one. “The task of the therapist is to teach people normal language and even set a certain aesthetic tone in order to counter the degradation that very often becomes part of the sexual experience,” Esther Perel is convinced.

Are love and sex the same thing?

People should realize that love and passion not only go hand in hand, but can also conflict. This is the secret of eroticism. Our emotional and erotic needs don’t always match perfectly.

For some, love and passion are inseparable, for others they are completely incompatible. Self-sacrifice, care, protection, responsibility inherent in love are often the opposite of what feeds passion. In fact, for most people, sexual desire does not arise from a sense of responsibility or duty at all. We become sexually free solely through complete ease.

How can one and the same person provide us with a reliable rear, security, confidence in the future, but at the same time remain a mystery that evokes a quivering sense of novelty?

Some people think: “I have a family that I have always dreamed of. But this is the last place where I would dare to express my sexuality. For them, the sexual “I” is associated with looseness and even sinfulness, which have nothing to do with stability, virtues and a sense of duty.

Many people are unusually creative in different areas of life, but they leave all their creative aspirations and impulses outside the bedroom.

Some are generally sure that their partner seeks not to give pleasure, but, on the contrary, to spoil it. It is very difficult for them to be sexy for each other. They say: “It feels like I live with my brother. He looks at me and doesn’t seem to see me as a woman.” Or: “She does not perceive me as a sex object. Touches like I’m her relative or child.”

Often these are loving partners, but at the same time, gentle touches dull their sexual appetite. So people become reliable spouses, but the passion leaves their relationship.

“I had to work with a man who sincerely loves his wife,” says the psychotherapist. – At the same time, he did not particularly like her hands, touch, smell, voice. But since his emotional sensitivity has increased, something strange has begun to happen to him: as soon as she approaches him, his body freezes, as if he were under hypnosis. He couldn’t understand why this was happening. He then described how he made love to her last weekend and realized that he was doing it in order to “be good.”

He found where his “erotic block” was hiding when he said: “Since I love her, I feel responsible for her, and it is difficult for me to feel pleasure, to surrender to the growing excitement in her presence. I don’t know how to be with her and with myself at the same time. If I’m with her, I literally disconnect from myself.

For some, the opposite is true, notes Dr. Perel: “I am comfortable with myself, but I have no idea how to connect to it. I mean, it’s much easier for me to be sexy with people I don’t have to think about. Accordingly, I prefer porn where you don’t have to try to please your partner.”

The same behavior in sex can be delightful and pleasant, or it can be rude and cruel. You need to make sure that excessive pressure does not cause pain. “When men say:“ There is no greater joy than to see how it gets turned on, ”I hear:“ If my girlfriend likes it, I understand that she definitely doesn’t hurt, therefore I’m not afraid to look like an animal.

Women, on the contrary, tend to patronize the other. To be liberated, they need to allow themselves not to care too much about his good. For unfeigned excitement, they need to show selfishness. Only when people stop worrying too much about their partner do they have really amazing sex, ”says the expert.

exercise for two

Of course, it is one thing to reason, and it is quite another to apply any findings in therapy and in life. Esther Perel offers an exercise to help couples better understand how each of them responds to erotic touch.

“Swipe over your partner’s arm, from the hand to the elbow. You can do it fast or slow, hard or soft. The most important thing is to fully focus on your partner, try to understand: “Does he/she like it? Does he/she know that a bone is protruding here? What if I lightly press here or here?”

The point is to give tactile pleasure to another. Some like to touch their partner, while others get annoyed. Thoughts like this go through their minds: “Am I doing this right? But I myself am so bored … Yes, I’m tired. Honey, what are we having for dinner?” As a result, touch turns into a formality, loses its meaning.

It would seem that this is nothing special. However, such a simple exercise can tell us a lot about a couple’s sexual relationship.

“At some point, when we try this method with a couple, I say: “Now shift the focus. Take your partner’s hand and stroke yourself. Switch from giving to receiving. This is how you go from “I’m doing this for you” to “I’m doing this for myself.”

Many people experience unexpected relief when they see that their partner really enjoys being touched. Turns out you don’t have to worry about it! You can just do what pleases both.

At the end of the exercise, Esther Perel invites couples to evaluate the new experience: “Which was easier: giving or receiving, giving pleasure to another or receiving it yourself?”. By acting and thinking in this way, people manage to expand the boundaries of their own eroticism, the expert explains.

Marital duty or free will?

According to the expert, claims against a partner and long conversations about why he does not want sex have not yet inspired anyone to engage in it more often. In counseling, she tries to engage the couple in a conversation that evokes sensory memories. They help to reconnect with the sexual “I” and restore erotic energy. After all, by and large, the work of a family psychologist is to help people rediscover desire in themselves.

Of course, sex cannot be separated from relationships. There is no hope that the couple’s sex life will improve if the two practically do not notice each other. Get out of the bedroom and go somewhere else, the expert advises. Find new ways to arouse mutual interest. And then you can talk about sex again.