The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 171: STOP DOING THIS! It's Ruining Your Sex Life

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

In this moment, world-renowned philosopher and thinker Alain De Botton discusses how communication can lead to a better sex life. Alain says sex is like a mirror to the relationship as a whole. If something is wrong with a couples sex life, it’s usually a symptom of a wider problem. He says that a first step towards a more fulfilling sex life is reflecting on how you are as a partner. Being open about yourself in a relationship is the best way to create mutual trust, which means that you can ‘tease’ out any issue in a relationship. This then leads to being open with one another sexually. Listen to the full episode here - Apple- https://g2ul0.app.link/v1foloy7kLb Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link/5NT1dmK7kLb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Alain: https://www.alaindebotton.comm

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I was looking through some statistics earlier on, because I know that you've talked quite extensively on relationships and sex and sexless relationships. I found this stat that says a 2022 study by Relate, a UK-based counselling network, found that 26% of people in relationships were having sex less than 10 times per year and 8% were having no sex at all. This is a stark rise

from 2018 where the numbers were quite significantly lower than that. It seems like as a society we're getting increasingly sexless. Yeah so the question is where's the problem? Is the problem in the body or is the problem in the mind? Now, you know, being the kind of guy I am, I'm going to shift us to the mind. I'm sure sometimes there are bodily issues and they deserve attention too. But if I can talk about the mind, why is it that sex is easier at the beginning than in a long-term relationship? One of the leading answers is anger. It's not very easy to have sex or want sex with someone that you're angry with. And in many relationships, there's a lot of stored anger that neither party knows is there. And that anger has come from micro incidents of disappointment.

Someone didn't quite call when they said they would. Someone didn't laugh when they might have done. Someone didn't show call when they said they would. Someone didn't laugh when they might have done. Someone didn't show generosity when it might have been required. And these things get stored up. And the result of too much of this is that you don't want someone going anywhere near you. Because you're furious. You're essentially furious. But in the way of these things, you don't know you are. You don't know you are you don't know you're furious again as you know the mind is not obvious to itself so you know if you want to have more sex don't just invest in candles and fancy linen um a quite useful thing to do is to go and have dinner with your partner

and say to them we're both going to ask each other how we've annoyed each other because we have annoyed each other not because we're evil people but because we're human and we're in a relationship. And no relationship survives more than an hour without a buildup of frustration. And the more we can let out that frustration at the dinner table, the more it won't create a blockage in the bedroom. And so the chance to discharge frustration... And often the reason why we don't tell our partners what our frustrations are is that they sound ridiculous it's like well hang on you're upset with me because i use the word really in what you thought placed too much emphasis on the why when i was speaking to your mother are you crazy right you could you are laying yourself open to

your partner pointing to you going are you crazy but i think that we're all in love very small children at least a small part of us is and um as we know small children get upset about really weird tiny things you know you'll move a button and they start wailing and you go what's happened and they go you moved the button and you go i did uh why does that matter but but for them it matters or you know pencil has slightly changed direction so we should learn we should remember what it felt like to be a child and we should acknowledge that there remains even an adult who's very competent in all sorts of areas a small child who is liable to be getting very upset about small things triggered triggered but because they're an adult this is the problem we we think an adult can't possibly be having such childish reactions again we need to just um cast aside our fears of shame

and say you know what yes an adult can get very upset about tiny things an adult probably is upset about tiny things and we're doing ourselves an honor when we can dare to reveal this to our partner and they can do likewise so if i'm if if i'm someone listening to this now and i'm in a relationship where i don't think because it's interesting even when i say i don't think i'm having enough sex the idea of how much sex is enough sex has probably come from movies which is a bit of a trap as well right um but if i'm in a relationship and we are in a sexless relationship by whatever definition solution one you presented there is try and resolve the anger the underlying contempt um are there anything else that you think is

effective ways of solving for that look i think we i think one useful thing to do is to go why does sex matter what is this thing called sex why why does it matter and when people get very upset i think the answer tends to be that sex is a symbol of something very poignant and very delicate which is my partner loves me and they can't the reason why it becomes such an acute issue is that they cannot hold on to the idea that the partner might love them and might not want sex. This is psychologically impossible. Now, it is important to say it is possible. It is possible that your partner both loves you and doesn't want to have sex. There could be other reasons. They're feeling unwell. And then we can ask ourselves, what does sex really aim at? Sex

aims at intimacy. We'll in in in people's polite language they became intimate which means they had sex so what we know about sex is that the really exciting thing about sex is not the sex bit it's the intimate bit um it's the idea that someone is without their guard you know most of the time we approach other people with our guards on. And in this very rare and unusual thing we do, we meet another human being in a vulnerable state. And this is such a relief from the normal limitations of life. And there are other ways of doing this. You know, sex is not the only way of doing it so by understanding better what sex is we can also have a chance to get some of what we get in sex in things that are not sex if that makes sense i had tracy cox on the podcast

and she said something to me which really stuck with me because i hadn't noticed it until she said it which is this idea i believe she called other, which is when your partner almost becomes like a family member, or you start seeing them as like a sibling because they are in their sweatpants around you. And she made the claim, which I think I've read in your books as well, that in many respects, that's the very opposite of the spice that makes sex so appealing in those early days when it's new and novel and risky, you know, and so she kind of alluded to the fact that love and sex were actually set on two different ends of a pole. Right. And again, to come back to my theme, what does a romantic say? A romantic, romanticism tells us sex and love belong entirely together. But I think what you're saying and, you know, what many of your viewers will know is that the relationship is trickier. And again, let's not torture ourselves about this. Let's get curious and then let's communicate about this. And I think that, look, a growing child has

a paradox to deal with. And this is what freud famously doesn't matter what you think of freud it's very useful observation really that um the child experiences love in the first instance at the beginning of life we all experience love um at the hands of people who everything's gone right we will have no sexual connection with right so given the debt that adult love owes to childhood that sets us up with a problem when we as adults start to fall in love with people and start to build up relationships which is that the more we get cozy with someone the more we feel like we did a little bit with our parents when things were really cosy. Which is oddly why people like going to hotels.

Why do people like going to hotels? To revive a relationship. It's because the furniture doesn't remember you. The curtains don't remember you. You are allowed to be, for a chosen moment, somebody without history. And it's the history that is making intimacy hard because that history, while it's knitting you together and making you emotionally close, is also rendering sexual freedom problematic. And I think it's just, we need to go very easy on ourselves for the fact that this happens and um

what do we do about it though um do I need to book a lot of hotel rooms do I need to spend a lot of time away from my partner I noticed even that you're laughing you're smiling as you say that and I think that's partly the clue you know when we come up against the hardest conundrums in in life um having the tolerance of a sense of humor a shared sense of humor you know if a couple can turn the sexual challenges from a tragedy into something you know closer to a comedy it's an enormous achievement think of you think of teasing right there are sides of couples that they find really really hard isn't it wonderful when a couple learns with affection to tease one another? They go, oh, Stephen, there's that thing that you do.

It gives you a little nickname, calls you whatever it is, you know, a little affectionate nickname. That's a wonderful moment because it means that irritation has been sublimated into tender, compassionate understanding for why someone is as difficult as they are. So the best thing we can do with our irritations with our partners is to be able to tease our way out of them. And we may need

to do this in troublesome areas like sex. It's an enormous achievement if your partner can call you, you know, can go from thinking that you are an idiot to smiling at you and thinking, you're a lovable idiot.