The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Orgasm Expert: Women Don’t Like Penetrative Sex As Much As Men! This Is How Often You Should Be Having Sex! Stop Inviting Pets Into The Bedroom! - Doctor Karen Gurney

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Everyone has the desire to be desired, finally, in this episode, the mystery of desire is stripped back. Dr Karen Gurney is a Clinical Psychologist, Psychosexologist and Couples Therapist, she has been helping couples tackle sex problems for over 20 years. She is the author of the bestselling book, ‘Mind The Gap: The truth about desire and how to future proof your sex life’. In this conversation Karen and Steven discuss topics, such as the reasons for a dead sex life, why women prefer non-penetrative sex, how technology is killing your sex life, and why you should invest in your sexual currency. Topics: 0:00 Intro 02:07 What Do You Do and Why Do You Do It? 03:56 Our Attention Is Being Hijacked Which Is Affecting Our Sex Lives 09:57 Why Does Sex Get Harder the More We Think About It 11:50 Why Expectations and Pressure Make Sex Worse 15:56 Our Society Has Created a "Sexual Script" That's Wrong 17:10 How to Talk About Sex with Your Partner 23:09 How to Tell Your Partner You're Not Attracted to Them Anymore 25:56 How to Not Let Kids Ruin Your Sex Life 27:25 The Demographic That Comes to You More Than Any Other 28:16 Why Desire Goes in a Relationship 34:13 How to Trigger Desire in Your Relationship 38:34 The "Initiation" Problem 40:21 Should We Schedule Sex? 43:05 What Should We Be Doing to Keep Desire High in Our Relationships 45:55 How to Talk About Your Fetish with Your Partner 50:54 What Women Really Want During Sex 52:45 Does It Matter Who Initiates Sex? 56:04 If Our Idea of What We Want From Sex Isn't Happening What Should We Do? 58:31 If Men Can't Get It Up, What Should We Do? 01:00:56 If Men Can't Get It Up, What Should We Do? 01:01:15 Should We Have Sex Before or After We Eat? 01:02:22 The Optimal Amount of Times to Have Sex 01:04:16 Sexual Dissatisfaction Between Men and Women 01:07:54 How to Deal with a Sex Life as a Parent 01:11:54 What You Can Do as a Parent to Ensure Your Sex Life Doesn't Go Off Track 01:13:26 The Relationship Between Poor Sleep and Sex 01:16:39 At What Point Should People Reach Out to You? 01:17:21 Have You Ever Seen Relationships That Are Unrecoverable? 01:18:45 The Top 3 Most Common Sexual Problems 01:20:46 The Impact of Pets on Our Sex Lives 01:22:43 Are You Hopeful for the Future of Sex? 01:24:04 How Menopause Affects Our Sex Lives 01:25:21 Our Bodies Changing Over Time and How That Impacts Our Sex Lives 01:26:27 Are We Meant to Be Monogamous? 01:31:51 The Last Guest’s Question You can pre-order Karen’s book, ‘How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life’, here: https://amzn.to/49VnduP Follow Karen Twitter - https://bit.ly/4bEnROQ Instagram - https://bit.ly/49i1AEP Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Sponsors: Uber: https://p.uber.com/creditsterms

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 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 time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you

that listen to this show let's continue everyone wants more sex better sex and there is a huge amount that we can do that can guarantee great sex for the rest of your life. So the best place to start is Dr. Karen Gurney. She is a clinical psychologist and psychosexologist that has been helping individuals and couples overcome sexual problems for 20 years. She's the lead psychologist in an award-winning NHS sex clinic. This might be surprising to some people. 52% of women and 42% of men are unhappy with the sex lives that they have.

And that's because as a society, we've got sex all wrong. For example, the way desire is represented to us is lust, passion, spontaneity, but it's not the norm. And the problem is a lot of people are waiting to feel like that. And they're waiting a really long time. What we need to do instead is be aware that our desire can be triggered using what I call sexual currency. I'll go into that.

We also know that penis and vagina sex is women's least favorite sexual act. But that's how we see how sex should be. So we see less pleasure and less reward for women. But also, if you ask most people how often they should be having sex everyone says three times a week it's actually drastically different than that three times a month and that shows the way we understand sex is all wrong so i have questions do you think you should schedule sex no what you should do though is fantasies fetishes what if your partner says i don't like it well i can talk you through that if you like. Parents who are struggling with sex,

what should they do? We know that people start having sex again from when their kid is about six. And that's because... What if you're in a relationship right now and you no longer found them attractive? What do I say? I would say...

Quick one, quick favour to ask from you. There is one simple way that you can support our show. And that is by hitting that follow button on this app that you're listening to the show on right now. This year in 2024, we're trying really, really hard to level up everything we're doing. And the only free thing I'll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button on this app. It helps the show more than I could probably articulate, and it allows us, enables us to keep doing what we're doing here. I appreciate it dearly. On to the show.

Dr. Karen Gurney. Hi. What do you do and why do you do it? I spend my working week trying to change people's relationships with sex. And the reason I do that is because although we might think that sex is a kind of frivolous recreational pursuit, it actually isn't. It's that when people have great sex, they're even more productive in work the next day. There are so many reasons why sex is important. But unfortunately, as a society, we've kind of got it all wrong about how sex works, about what we should be doing. And because of that, we have hugely high rates of dissatisfaction with people's sex lives in the UK, but also worldwide.

Why did sex take your fancy? There's so much about sex that's fascinating, I think. There's loads we don't know. There's loads we do know, but no one talks about. People find it so hard to talk about sex, and it's so stigmatized that, you know, when people come into the room, you can really see the weight of it on their shoulders. It's hard for them to speak about, it's embarrassing for them, and to be the person that makes that feel comfortable and to be the person that can create change in a part of their life that matters so much, but is perhaps something they've never told their closest friend about,

is hugely rewarding. You also get to work with people across all ages. So, you know, from their teens to their 90s, you get to work with couples, individuals, you get everything with sex therapy. I love it. Since you started your work, what was it, almost 20 years ago, did you? Yeah. What have you seen in terms of changes in the problem set that you're dealing with now i.e what are the new problems that you're you're confronted with in your clinical practice when couples or people come to you yeah that's a good one because lots of things have stayed the same right so we we we know that for example problems with desire remain the most common reason why

people end up in my clinical room. But lots of things have also shifted. Data actually shows those shifts over the last few decades. So we have long-term data into the lives of people in the UK in terms of their sex lives. And we know that we're having less sex this decade than we were the decade before and the decade before that. So the amount of sex we're having, for example, is going down. From my clinical hunches, but also from what's been written about in the research, we have a good idea that that's about our pace of life, our work-life

balance, our distractibility, our use of devices. It's become evident in the last kind of two decades that when it comes to sex, attention is a really key part of it. It's really key. So being able to pay attention to what's happening in your body or being able to pay attention to We're getting more and more in pursuit of distraction. And that shows itself all the time in sex therapy. You know, couples who come to see me because they feel that they're never having sex. But yet when you look at their week, they actually have very little time together. And the time together they do have, they're both busy scrolling, they're watching Netflix and scrolling, they're perhaps doing three things at once, they're checking their work emails, that's taking them to a whole new cognitive place of stress. And so it's no wonder that people don't have space for their desire to emerge. And that's definitely a newer phenomenon. It kind of made me think of some of the things I was

reading about in your books where you say that couples and individuals who do mindfulness practices are those that typically have the most desire. I think the quote is from your newest book, which is, the book is called How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life. Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful. It's a great, great title. It says, research tells us that women who find it easier to have orgasms are typically more mindful in everyday life and find it easier to be in the moment during sex. That's right. That's right. So there's an enormous amount of data about attention and sex. And obviously, one of the ways in which we can sharpen our attention is mindfulness. We know that mindfulness works across a range of challenges that we face, whether it's pain management, whether it's sleep, whether it's about appetite regulation, all kinds of things.

But when it comes to sex, it's super powerful. So when you're distracted during sex, and we know that over 90% of people have non-sexual thoughts during sex. Okay. So everyone gets distracted. We know that from the research, but what happens when we start to get distracted most of the time or when those distractions are what we call cognitively salient, which means they're worrying or they're particularly stressful, like, oh, I'm not going to come or what if I don't stay hard or is she enjoying this? Those types of distractions.

What happens is our distraction is basically turning down our arousal, like turning down the volume on the TV. So it becomes harder for our bodies to respond, so to stay aroused, for example. It becomes harder for us to feel anything, so our pleasure is turned down. It becomes harder for us to come. And ultimately, over time, it gets in the way of our desire. On the contrary, if we work on that distraction, either by trying to remove them or trying to tackle the worries at their root cause, or trying to promote our ability to pay attention where we want it to be, so that's sexual thoughts, sexual sensations, pleasure, then it's like turning up the volume. And we've seen plenty of research that demonstrates the enormously powerful impact of mindfulness on sexual response.

I can think of times in my life where, because I was stressed or worried, when I got in bed, I was worrying about something or stressing about something at work. My partner tried to have sex with me and I had zero chance of getting aroused. could not get an erection and it's I remember those moments I'm thinking oh she's gonna think that it's about her but really it's because of this thing I have on my to-do list that's exactly right I got in bed doing my to-do list so I like I was holding my to-do list and I was doing it on my phone and I put the phone down and then I lay back and I'm still thinking about my to-do list and then she tries to initiate and there's zero chance. That's it. And that's also exactly what we were talking about earlier on, right? Which is that our society has changed,

the way we work has changed. So perhaps three decades ago, you wouldn't have been checking your emails just before bed, which means that wouldn't have started that cascade of thoughts about work, which would then perhaps peak your cortisol, your stress levels, and then cut off your ability to get turned on. So that is one of the major things that has shifted for all of us. And I think, you know, one of the myths that we, you know, would benefit from quashing about sex is this idea that particularly men are always up for it, are always ready to have sex. It's just not true. In fact, everybody needs their kind of conditions for good sex, as I call it, to be right. They need to be in the right kind of headspace. They need to be not distracted. They need to know that the

environment is an environment that works for them. It's quite important. So yeah, your experience mirrors what a lot of people are probably sat at home thinking about just now. Do you think there's a bit of a paradox with sex in the sense that the more you think about it and worry about it, the harder it becomes. Yes, absolutely. So what do you do? Just not think about it and worry about it? So it's quite interesting because there's also something else that happens when we get turned on, which is that we get this attentional focused narrowing. So one of the features of physiological

arousal, so when blood flows around the body, particularly to the genitals, is that we know it kind of sharpens our attention. It makes us basically want to block out the rest of the world. And I'm sure we've all had experiences when we've been completely in the moment during sex, when we've not thought about a single other thing that might be happening around us. So that attentional narrowing is great unless your attention has been hijacked by a worry, because then you get attentional narrowing on the worry. And what happens when we worry about something is that it interferes with sexual response in two main ways. The first is that it takes our attention away from what's

erotic, and that turns down the arousal and pleasure like we talked about earlier on the TV. The second thing that happens is that when we worry about something that activates our sympathetic nervous system, sending chemical messages around the body saying, don't have sex. There's something to worry about. It can't tell the difference between a modern day worry, like this email has come through that's ruined my day versus, you know, a saber tooth tiger has just walked in.

You know, our brains are still primitive in that regard. So what happens is that switches off our sexual response. It might mean that you struggle to get turned on. It might mean that you struggle to feel anything. It might be that your body doesn't work in the way you want it to. And then of course, the next time you go into it what are you thinking you're thinking what if it doesn't work you talk a lot about expectations um and the role that they play in sex expectation and pressure make sex worse that's a quote from your new book chapter three i know maybe that's not a quote but that's basically the gist of what it said but it's also the gist of my experience i think it's always felt to me like the opposite of great sex is expectation and like rigidity yes and great sex for me is some sometimes

spontaneous but it's carefree yes and it's worry-free yeah yeah i mean pressure is a total passion killer but the pressure it's like that's again. Yeah. I mean, pressure is a total passion killer. But the pressure, it's like, that's again, the kind of compounding paradox, because the more there's a problem with our sex, the more it becomes a focal point in our relationship, the more pressure, the more expectation. Every night you go to bed, you're thinking, you know, I've had moments in past lives and past relationships where, because the sex wasn't great, I would feel nervous going to bed because it was going to be one of those moments where we kind of both are sat there thinking about it, but we're not saying anything to each other. And then if I fall asleep, I'm going to disappoint them. But if I try,

it's going to go badly. So what the hell do I do? Yes. Pressure is not good for our sex lives. And one of the challenges with pressure is that when you think about initiation, it's often very much bound up in pressure. And perhaps we'll talk about initiation, it's often very much bound up in pressure. And perhaps we'll talk about initiation in a second, but actually the foundation of those problems with expectation and pressure is not being able to talk about it. Because if you think about it, what we really want to say is I'm feeling quite stressed about the sex situation. And the fact that we don't talk about it means that those things are hanging between us. And we know with sex that one of the fascinating things about it

is like other ways in which we learn, we learn about sex by what we witness in the media and what we pick up from social learning, something psychologists call social learning theory when it comes to sex we don't witness how anyone else is doing it really we only see what happens on tv and what happens in porn and maybe hear from our friends but we don't really know if they're telling the truth or not so what that means is we've all got my friends all lie about it yeah everyone does they're all stallions now i'm joking they. They're all very honest. There's actually a fascinating sex research fact, which is one of my favourite facts, which is that men,

when they say the number of sexual partners that they've had, are more likely to round it up to a zero or a five. A number ending in zero or five. I think that's a great sex fact. So what that means then is that we're all living our sex lives based on something we call sexual script theory.

This is a concept that organically came out of the work of some sex researchers in the 70s called Gagnon and Simon. And they discovered that actually in the absence of talking about sex, we all have quite set ideas about what our sex lives should look like. And we've picked this up from the media, from how people talk about sex in popular culture and in how we've used language. What this means is that we have a set of ideas and this includes things like penis and vagina is the main course of sex and everything else isn't really sex. And language backs that up, doesn't it? With the use of the word foreplay, kind of relegating any other type of sex to less than, and the use of the word virginity, which we only really use to refer to penis and vagina sex. So all of these things tell us, well, that's what real sex is. And then you hear people talking about that and backing that up with things like, like well we did everything but

which is like we didn't have sex but you did have sex because you were sexual together so what happens with these sexual scripts is that they benefit us to some degree because they reduce our anxiety that's what sexual scripts are there for to give us some idea of what's expected but what they do to us in the absence of communication is they give us an idea about what we should be doing or what someone else wants to do without us having to talk about it which often means that problems arise for example one of the examples you give in your book is about orgasms yes and pornography giving us a sexual script that men are basically, in a heterosexual relationship, men are meant to orgasm. And there was some crazy stat from some Pornhub research.

Yes. Yeah, that's really interesting research. There was some research that talked about depictions of female pleasure and pleasure-inducing acts for women from the 100 most popular videos on Pornhub. And they found that women's pleasure was shown in about 18% of those top 100 videos. And men's pleasure or acts that produce pleasure for men, mainly around penis and vagina sex, because that's men's most favorite sexual act. It's women's least favorite sexual act. That was depicted in about 78% of cases. So it's quite interesting then when you think about the fact that we're learning from what we see, because what does that then tell us about what sex should look like, about when sex ends, about whose pleasure is prioritized?

And it's one of the reasons that we have an orgasm gap when men and women have sex together, because that's how we learn about sex. On that, I just want to pick up on two things you said there that were really interesting to me. The first one was about us not talking, why we don't talk. It's very difficult to talk about sex with your partner. Very. Very difficult. I've been there. Very difficult because the plethora of reasons why you might not be functioning well or enjoying it can often sound like you're blaming them. Communication is so important. We know that being able to talk about sex is one of the most highly correlated factors with long-term sexual satisfaction and relationship

satisfaction and maintaining desire over time. It's more important than the amount you have sex, liking the same thing sexually. It's so important, but it's so hard to do. And we know why it's hard, is because we're not socialized to talk about it. We're not often given the words that feel comfortable. We are out of given the words that feel comfortable. We are out of practice getting those words out of our mouth. So they feel kind of clumsy and awkward. There's a lot of worry and risk involved. What if I say this and they don't like it?

And because of that, it's easier to avoid. But the most fascinating thing about sex, I think, is that it's constantly evolving for us. So you and I were not the same people sexually than we were when we were 15, 16, and we won't be the same sexual people in another 10, 15 years than we are now. So we need to be able to have the ability for growth, right? Growth and flex in our sexual relationships. But how do you do that if you can't talk about it? It's a bit like going to the hairdressers, the same hairdressers for the rest of your life. And every time you sit down, not saying anything and just hoping that they'll give you the haircut that you want, you wouldn't do it, right? And they continually give you the bad one and you just keep coming back. And you thanks and you tip them and you go so we need to get better at talking about it and it's not easy it's easy for me I talk about it all day every

day but I know that that's not the norm and part of the work that I do is try and help people try and give people the scaffold to talk about it and I can talk you through that if you like please so it might be that the best place to start is to find out how people find talking about challenging topics anyway with their partner. So if you can't talk about other things outside of sex without it going into an argument, then it might be worth just looking at communication full stop.

Forget sex for the moment. Just talk about that. Are you creating some like rules of engagement for how we communicate? You listen, I express myself. Absolutely. And I always recommend the gotmans um i don't know if you know their work i do yeah um i recommend them because they have some great resources around general communication it's important to have a good basis if you're going to talk about sex but if people can talk about other things and they find it relatively easy to hear each other

and to share their kind of hopes and fears, then it might be useful to start to create a culture where talking about sex becomes the norm. This is always the place you want to end up, right? We all want to end up with a relationship culture that supports easy communication about sex. That's the guaranteed route to sexual satisfaction. And to do that, we have to make it something that we do frequently without any pressure, without any expectation that something big has to change. So an early way to start that might be, for example, to bring in some novelty in your communications about sex. So people might be listening to this podcast and they might say,

oh, how was your day today? Great. Oh, I heard this thing on Diary of a CEO podcast and it was about depictions of pleasure in porn. And I thought it was really interesting. And it occurred to me, we don't talk about porn much, you know, is that something you'd be open to talk about? Whether you watch it, whether you like it, what you like, that might feel too much for some people. And it might be, I heard a podcast about sex and it talked about the importance of talking. And I thought we don't do that much. So there's ways of bringing it in, which are saying, look, this I think would be good for us. The key point is stating the impact that you think it will have. So I would like to talk more about this because I heard it means you can guarantee great

sex for the rest of your life. So I think that would be good for us. You know, I'm committed to this relationship. I want our sex to stay great. This might be awkward for us, but can we do it? So the starting point, if you're nervous, is always to talk about things outside of your sexual relationship. Things you've heard on podcasts, films you saw with good sex scenes in them. Bring things in rather than talking about the two of you. After that, if you get good at that, it might be worthwhile talking about your own sex when it goes well. So a good time to do this is after sex that's gone well, or another time when you're feeling really emotionally connected. Maybe you're out for dinner, maybe you're having a weekend away and talk about what you really liked and why. Okay. So don't talk about it when it's bad. No, no, not at this stage. Not at this stage. If you feel confident with that and you

get into a habit of talking about sex, talking about what's gone well, talking about sex as if it's any other topic of conversation like business or exercise or diet, then you might want to start to talk about things you'd like to be different. And in an ideal world, I try and encourage couples to have a kind of regular practice of this. So if you think about your goals for your exercise, your work, your diet, often you'll set yourself goals, right? And you might tell your partner about them, you know, in diet. Often you'll set yourself goals, right? And you might tell your partner about them, you know, in six months from now, I want to do this or this year I'm working on this. It's quite good to get into the habit of saying, where do we want our

sex life to go? How would we like things to be? What do we want to continue? What do we want more of? And what do we want less of? And that's a really positive conversation. You don't need to talk about what you don't like. You're talking about what you want more of instead. What if the issue in your sexual relationship is one of attraction? And I've asked a few guests this because I think it's one of the hardest challenges to overcome. And I don't know in a clinical setting what you would say if you're sat there with an individual and they're telling you that the reason they aren't having sex with dave right now is because they're no longer attracted to them what is their path forward there do they dump dave

or do they go tell dave it depends how important sex is to them if it's important say it's important and for them, a relationship, they're in a monogamous relationship, so they can't get sex elsewhere, or they've agreed to not get sex elsewhere. And sex is important. Then it's quite important that attraction is part of it. We know that the sex science tells us that when attraction is high at the beginning, it's really easy to maintain desire over time. When attraction is low, it can be really challenging. It's not unusual for me to see couples who've been together decades with very low levels of attraction, but the work they need to do to maintain a sex life that works for them both is tough. So you need to kind of have your

eyes open, I guess, about what you're signing up for. If sex is important to you, then attraction is fairly important. I think it's also maybe useful to say that attraction can work some way and it might be worth examining what's going on there and whether, you know, there is a certain situation that you find yourselves in as a couple or whether they're at the moment going through some stuff that maybe makes it harder for you to see them in that light. Sometimes attraction can come back when those relationship contexts are worked on. But if it's never been there from the outset, if it's a very strong sense of a lack of attraction, if someone's eyes have already moved to someone else, then it may be useful to address it.

And attraction's not just a physical thing. People think of attraction as being physical. It's a psychological thing as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, attraction can vary in relationships depending on what's happening in the relationship dynamic. So a common thing that I've written about in the new book, it's a book for parents really, is around the dynamic of what it feels like to have a partner who feels like another child. So the idea that you might be having to care for them as well, you know, make their lunches, kind of buy their clothes, tidy up after them, that we know from sex research that that's a super unsexy dynamic. And that is something which often falls on

women in straight relationships once kids arrive and that kind of dynamic can shift attraction and may well shift back if that dynamic is addressed so your new book is called how not to let having kids ruin your sex life that's right why did you title it that i just thought let's say what it is and that's exactly what it is. And that is exactly what it is. It's a guide to not let having kids ruin your sex life. Does that tend to happen? Oh yeah, it's so common. Sexual dissatisfaction is at its lowest for couples in the period after having kids.

So if you've got an under five-year-old at home, it's pretty likely that your sex life is suffering for it. It doesn't have to, but many of the kind of reasons why our sex life struggles when kids come along are amplifications of dynamics that we struggle with outside of kids. So for example, quite often, but of course not always, people are in a long-term relationship. Quite often they're living together. Being in a long-term relationship and living together are two factors which reduce your desire over time. So you're already starting from that point. You may have also been trying to conceive.

You might have had problems with fertility, with miscarriage. Sex might have got boring, but you might have had to do it anyway. You've then got pregnancy, which for some people is a golden time of sexual exploration but for some people means for one reason or another they don't have much sex and then you're expecting to get back to your sexual life when you're getting no sleep, when you're stressed and when you've got another kind of 37-40 hours of work a week to do which is the parenting week. So there's so many reasons why it's challenging. And that's why I wrote the book. Is there a certain demographic of person that you're most likely to see in your clinical practice? And is it parents? I see people of all ages. I see, I probably see people mostly in long-term relationships. I think people know that desire is my specialist subject. So people

tend to seek me out, particularly around desire. I see a lot of parents. I also see a lot of non-parents, but you know, parenthood brings additional challenges for people to navigate. Even if you think about the time available to have sex, it's much more limited. It can be really difficult to initiate. When you initiate it, the other person might experience it as a really clumsy initiation when they've got a lot on their plate. These are all just, as I said, amplifications of what you might get in long-term relationships generally, but it tends to be the more challenging wedge of the pie. Desire. This idea of desire is really fascinating to me. I actually speak to one of my best friends about what we call desire management. And it was a theory that we developed based on just looking at both of our lives and how we'd managed to maintain sexual

desire in our respective relationships. He has an approach to dating, which we all laugh at him for, where he meets someone and he moves them in really, really quickly, like moves them in. It's a very like smothering approach to like finding love and desire very quickly goes out the window whereas I'm probably the opposite of that where in my current relationship it was a long distance relationship for two years she lived on the other side of the world eventually in maybe year three or something we like moved in together but we're still we still both fly all over the world so we don't see each other much which I think is proven to be quite central to our desire management we don't see each other much and which I think is proven to be quite central to our desire management. We don't see each other much.

And that's the theory of desire management. The theory is keep the right amount of distance. There's probably too far away and too infrequently seeing them. And then there's seeing them too much. Absolutely. It's a great theory. So desire is possibly one of the most fascinating aspects of sex that is grossly misunderstood by our kind of collective psyche. And it's quite interesting because if you ask most people on the street how desire works or what desire is, they'll tell you that we have such a thing as a sex drive or libido, which kind of comes into our mind and tells us it would be a good idea to have sex. That is an idea that came from sex science in the 50s and 60s when we believed that desire was the first part of the sexual response cycle. So you first had the idea

to be sexual and then you acted on it. And that's kind of seeped down into our collective psyche and that's how we all operate our sex lives. We generally wait to feel like it and then we act on it. But actually we now know that desire doesn't work like that and that in the early stages of a relationship or if we live apart, there's your desire management, we manage to maintain higher levels of that kind of desire. It's called spontaneous desire. And it happens when a partner is novel or less familiar to us, or perhaps when our dynamic with them isn't diluted by other roles. So for your friend that moves someone in, that person then becomes a flatmate. So that the role of them as a sexual partner is diluted for other people it's diluted also

by being a co-parent so our brain starts to see that person less as a sexual object this is an inevitable part of being with someone for a number of years and we can pretty much guarantee that for most people spontaneous desire will start to decline about a year or 18 months into a relationship. Obviously, it depends how often you see each other. And it sounds like your desire management might keep that going a bit longer. For most people, they have this experience. And we know that this happens for everyone, but that women struggle to maintain this more than men. So in the UK, we know that 34% of women and 15% of men are worried that they don't

feel like sex enough. And that's because they've seen a drop in the spontaneous desire. We talked about sexual scripts earlier, and we talked about how we learn about sex from what we see. The way desire is represented to us in the media is lust, passion, spontaneity, that sexual urge that you absolutely have to act on. And yes, that is how it works for some of us, some of the time, perhaps after we've not seen each other for a long time, perhaps at the start of a relationship. And for some people, you know, lifelong with the same person, but it's not the norm. Actually, what the norm is, is that that type of desire tends to diminish and it's other motivations other than horniness that we're seeking out through sex. So we call these non-sexual motivations and they may be things like

wanting to feel close, stress relief, wanting to feel desired, wanting to demonstrate love or affection, wanting to have fun out of a sense of obligation because it's been a while. These are all non-sexual motivations which lead us to the behavior of sex. The problem is a lot of people are waiting to feel like it before they act on it. And for those people, they're waiting a really long time. We know that for women particularly, it should be considered normal to never feel like sex out of the blue with your long-term partner. Never. How do we know that? From sex research. So when we ask women, how often do you feel like sex with your partner? They say either never or maybe once or twice a month.

This is spontaneous desire. But we're asking the question about only one type of desire. Responsive desire is desire that emerges out of us beginning sexual activity or having what we call sexual stimuli in front of us. a passionate kiss, a flirtation, being naked together, a text that suggests something that we might do later on. The later versions of sex research tell us that actually desire emerges out of being sexual. Okay, so it comes from doing something to trigger it. But if your understanding of desire is that you should wait until you feel like it, there's a large proportion of people in long-term relationships that are just never feeling like it and never doing anything about it.

What we need to do instead is be aware that our desire can be triggered and find ways to trigger it and have a relationship context that supports triggering it. In that context, we know that people's desire works perfectly well. That means they can have desire feature as much as they want in their relationship just by knowing how desire works. So our brains code things as sexual, and this could be physical touch. It could be kiss. It could be being naked together. It could be the sight of someone's naked body. It could be physical touch, it could be kiss, it could be being naked together, it could be the sight of someone's naked body, it could be a suggestive text. It's different for everybody but essentially sexual content triggers our arousal which triggers our desire. It's the reason why

the most common thing people say to me in sex therapy is, I didn't really feel like it but we had sex and it was great and afterwards I said, why don't we do that more? That's responsive desire. It emerges out of sexual activity. The problem of long-term relationships is that we see a decline in what I call sexual currency. So how we relate to each other as sexual beings. We start to see sex a bit like an on-off switch. So we're either having sex or the rest of the time we're not being sexual together. You know, we're not passionately kissing unless it's part of sex. We're not sending each other those flirty messages we used to at the beginning. We're not spending time lounging around in bed on a Sunday morning, being naked together in a way

that might kickstart desire. So these low levels of sexual currency and these high levels of familiarity, seeing the same person every day, means our brains just don't code them as sexual stimuli in the same way. And then we go cheat or we go look for porn or something else. Yeah, absolutely, because we want to have that kind of frisson of excitement. Can I just clarify that? Sexual currency, this definition, basically means, if I think of this in a financial context, if you see someone as being highly sexually desirable, they have a high sexual currency in your mind. Not quite.

So think currency more like charge. Oh, okay, like an energy. Yeah, so sexual currency, my definition of it would be it's everything that you do that marks you out as a sexual couple apart from having sex so this is the stuff that you wouldn't do with your friends you wouldn't do with your family you wouldn't do with your kids so you're physically affectionate with all those people right but the sexual side of it the passionate kissing the bum grabs the flirtation the saying you look super hot in that top, these things are sexual currency. So if we think about our sex lives, not as this on off switch of the, you know, 18 minutes, that's the average for men and women and they have sex together.

There's 18 minutes of having sex, however often you're doing it. If you think of your sexual relationship as something which is always happening, something which you're always nurturing, you can imagine the power that that can have on both triggering desire, but also meeting those sexual needs. I'll give you an example that I wrote about in the new book, actually, because parents obviously have limited time available to have sex, and raising sexual currency is one of the ways you can increase sexual satisfaction even when you can't have any more sex. So if you think about an example of a straight couple whereby he is feeling that her lack of interest in sex means that she doesn't desire him as much as she used to and he's worried about that because for

him that means their relationship is in crisis. She might look elsewhere. And also he doesn't feel so good about himself. He wants to feel desired. We all do, right? He gave me an example of a time when they perhaps attended a function and they were in the lift. And as they went up in the lift to get to this function, she pushed him against the lift and kissed him really passionately for the 10 seconds they were in the lift. And then they got out the lift and they carried on with the function. This is sexual currency. And that made him feel more desired, more connected to her sexually than a week before the sex they had that felt like going through the

motions. So you've got something which meets your sexual needs, which makes you feel desired, attractive, close, like a sexual couple, like you've got some sexual secret between you that no one else can see. Sexual currency does all of that. But it also acts as scaffolding to help us move easily into sex. Because we talked about expectation and pressure earlier. And if you have high levels of sexual currency, there's low pressure for it to go anywhere because it is your sexual relationship for its own right. It's not someone initiating sex. The way to overcome this potential psychological barrier is to create a culture of low pressure between you. You say that sex should be trivial and often, not rare and crucial. Absolutely. Yeah. So I always know that my work with couples is done when they find it really easy to invite each other into sex and

really easy to turn each other down. Because what happens when we have low levels of sexual currency and when sex has become an issue is that everything's riding on initiation. So the person initiating waits, they ignore all the other times they want to initiate it because it's quite stressful and they wait until the time it really matters. Maybe it's an anniversary or a weekend away or something where it feels like you should have sex and they initiate it. And there's so much riding on it that the other person knows there's so much riding on it. They feel pressure, Pressure is a desire killer. It doesn't happen. And then the initiation will be even rarer moving forward. More pressure. Exactly. What we want instead is a kind of trivial and often way of sexually relating high levels of

sexual currency, high levels of initiation. So you find it easy to say to your partner, by the way, at work today today I was thinking about doing this to you when when we get home and your partner can say that sounds really hot if only I didn't have this meeting tomorrow on my mind let's come back to that on the weekend so you can let somebody know that sex is on your mind you can invite someone into something which might be a passionate kiss might be let's go to bed early and talk about our day knowing that that is sexual stimuli which might trigger arousal and desire but also it acts as a way of triggering that um initiation it makes it easy to initiate if you're doing it often

and if there's low pressure do you think you should schedule sex no never ever schedule sex because you said let's come back to on the weekend i was thinking let's just ruin the weekend i'd if there's low pressure. Do you think you should schedule sex? No, never ever schedule sex. Because you said, let's come back to it on the weekend. I was thinking, let's just ruin the weekend. I'd like it to be spicy and spontaneous. So it's one of our sexual scripts that sex, spontaneous sex is better. And I don't necessarily agree with that, but I do agree with the idea that scheduling sex just creates pressure for everyone. How can you in advance agree to something that you don't know if you're going to feel like when you get there? And all that does is create pressure. What you should do though, in today's day and age is schedule physical intimacy, schedule

some type of sexual currency, because we're so busy. If you don't do that, when is it going to happen? The issue I have though, is if I schedule physical intimacy, then okay. And I keep doing that. Eventually the expectation comes in that we have sex after the physical intimacy. It's also the same thing with like date night. If you're parents and you get one date night a week, we all know when we need to get this, we need to make this thing happen. So it becomes scheduling sex because you're scheduling date night once a week you know what i mean yeah so you've got two options haven't you one is that you wait until it's really high pressure and you don't initiate it very often you wait for this date night i don't know once a week once a month and everyone knows there's all

kinds of stuff riding on it and that makes it possibly the worst set of circumstances to ever for everyone to feel like sex. Lots of high pressure, sex that might feel formulaic. Everyone's distracted. That means they can't get into it. It's not great sex. The other option is that you keep high levels of sexual currency and you try your best to schedule brief moments of physical intimacy, which could act as scaffolding to take it further. You're right in that you may start to build up an expectation that, oh, every time we say we'll have a bath together, we end up having sex. That might happen. But when you invite someone into the bath, you are inviting them into the bath, right? So you're not inviting them saying,

let's have a bath and have sex afterwards.'re saying do you fancy having a bath together the fact that you both know where the bath might lead is fine because it allows you to get into that headspace oh okay I hadn't thought about sex tonight but the bath might lead to sex so let me get into a sexual headspace for a minute so that's quite useful the problem comes when you say to them afterwards you said you wanted a bath and we've not had sex well that wasn't what you invited them into you invited them into the bath so you have to be okay if it doesn't lead to that but if you initiate these types of things more if you think about it scattergun approach more of them are likely to go where you want them to go

versus that one time of high pressure. If you were to give me a couple of pieces of simple advice on how to keep desire high in my relationship, what would you say? I would say kiss more. Kiss for kissing's sake. Kissing often falls off the agenda in long-term relationships. The number of times I see that with couples I'm working with who've been together decades, they only kiss as part of sex or as initiation of sex. So kissing is a great way of triggering desire. It's also a great way of getting our sexual needs met. So that would be one. The second would be you have to make time to schedule physical intimacy of some type, because remember that desire is triggered by that kind of sexual

stimuli, whether it's getting naked on the couch and watching a film together that, you know, it's got good sex scenes in it, whether it's massage, whether it's the bath, whether it's some kind of date night that involves use of your bodies. Without that, there are no triggers to your desire. So you're just kind of waiting to feel it the third is understand how desire works it's drastically different than what you've been sold and you're normal if you struggle to get in the headspace sometimes what about distance and you know this idea of like you talked about how they kind of your partner can lose their sexual currency if they become a carer or you know I've heard before if they become like

too much of a mum or a dad in your mind and they stop becoming a sort of sexual partner. Relationship dynamics are quite fascinating as you say because when we talk about them we often hear things like well obviously if you're experiencing great amount of relationship conflict it's going to affect your sex life I I mean, that's, of course, right? We all know that to be true. But actually, it's the subtle dynamics that are quite important. It's having distance from each other and being able to bring in novelty and newness. A bit like you do with kind of having that physical distance, but it's also an emotional separation, isn't it? Because you're having experiences separately and then coming back together to

talk about them. It's also about what roles you might get typecast into in your relationship. So something I talk about often is the idea that when we have sex with the same person for a long time, we can start to feel as though there's only one way for us to be sexually, and that's the way they're kind of expecting us to be. So it can feel quite suffocating. And sometimes that's the reason that people go outside of a monogamous relationship is because they want to experience themselves differently. They want to be a different person sexually. And because they can't talk to their partner about that and they feel typecast in that dynamic, you know, you're the dominant one, I'm not, or the sex that we have is really kind of sensual and caring and I wantasies, fetishes, you know, this one wants this person to do this to me, but this person thinks that's, you know, horrific. How does one

bridge the gap? And how does one go about even communicating those things? Because I imagine so many people in so many relationships, kind of like what you said earlier, having really bad haircuts, having really bad sex, and are saying nothing about it. And I've been in relationships before where I've thought, you know what, I really want to do that, but I think she'll think that I'm a little bit, you know, too... Trust me, no one is talking about it. Everyone stays silent and just hopes that the other person will either get the hint or will accidentally stumble upon the thing they really want them to do. It is fascinating really when you think about it because so much of our satisfaction, our life satisfaction depends on how sex goes, but we just almost leave it to chance by not talking about it. One of the things we might do

in sex therapy is by getting people separately to write down what their perfect sex looks like. I have an exercise, it's actually free. You can find it on my social media or my website, which is called Conditions for Good Sex, which guides people through the process of doing that. And it looks at three main areas. One is psychological arousal. What turns you on in your head? What kind of dynamic between you and the person works for you? How do you need to feel about yourself and your optimum sexual experience? One is physical stimulation. And that could be anything from where you like to be touched, to the types of sex you like, to the type of positions you like to be touched to the types of sex you like to the type of positions you like to be in. The third is being able to be in the moment. So you might

write there the kinds of things that go through your mind to distract you. And I would get people to do that separately. The way I guide people through that is by getting them to think about their three best sexual experiences and really replay those in their mind. What were the aspects of that sexual experience which you replay over and over again? What was it about how you felt about yourself, about how you could be with that person? What was it about what you were doing? What was it about the environment? And people are able to then develop their own perspective, their own list, if you like,

of the things that really work for them. What if your partner says, I don't like it? Well, that's what we come to next. Then we look for the overlap. So is there overlap? If there's not, then there's a little bit of work to do, right? Are you going to stay in a monogamous relationship? And if so, how are you going to make this work? Are you going to open it up so you can get your sexual needs met elsewhere? Plenty of people do that. Often there is enough overlap for people to say, okay, I didn't realize that that was a thing for you. I like that thing, but maybe not quite to that degree. Can we do this instead? So there's a little bit of negotiation that happens in the middle. But I think perhaps one of the myths around our sexuality is that it exists between us and our partner. And actually our sexuality just exists within us

alone. And we should be allowed to express that alone or in our minds in whatever way that we want. And that could look quite different, what we do alone, perhaps with others, to what we do with another person. So we don't have to get all of our sexual needs met by that one person. There may be other ways of doing it. Should we remain open-minded to the desires and requests of the other? I remember, you know, I like experimenting, you know? And I think I was once upon a time with someone who was less keen to experiment. And I remember thinking, oh, this this is boring this is going to be really boring and then over time I think I was able to introduce things slowly that opened their eyes to experimentation and then they loved it they

love experimentation we had the best sex of our lives okay because we introduced things we experimented more but um I I remember reflecting in that moment that I could have easily walked away from the relationship when this person said oh no that's weird i don't want to do that yeah and it may be that if this other person had done their conditions for good sex they may have written down under the psychological arousal part i really need to know someone or i really need to trust someone before i can do things that are outside of the normal sexual script, right? And experimentation could be part of that. I think it also comes down to how you want the kind of personality of your sex life together to be. So I think for some of us, experiencing kind of thrill or joy or pushing

boundaries or experimentation in sex is a key part of what really ticks ticks us along what really keeps us going for other people it's just not it's it's that they want sex to be predictable um intimate fun but close without anything outside of the ordinary so i think it can be quite useful to think about what do we see as the sexual personality of our relationship? How do we want it to be? What would make us feel most alive? And that's where creating a culture of talking about sex is helpful because without that, how do you know? Earlier you used a phrase, you said it's, when we were talking about vaginal penetration, you said it's women's least favourite act. Yes, it is. Yeah. so we talked about sexual scripts.

Penis and vagina sex being the main course of sex is very much a dominant sexual script. And there are many reasons that's dominant. And it's something that we know from sex research that if you ask people, and they have done many times in sex research, to recount what sex looks like, people will recount a set menu of sex that is, you start

with this, then you do a bit of that, then you go to the main course of penis and vagina sex. The kind of American audience will know that as a kind of baseball analogy. And I think worldwide, we know that analogy too, right? That's how we see how sex should be. But what's most fascinating about that is that suits men's anatomy more than women's. We know that the majority of women, about 80%, don't orgasm from penitent sex, because obviously it's all about the clitoris. And so that's why for women, their most favorite sexual acts are things like people using their hands to stimulate their clitoris or receiving oral sex, not penis and vagina sex. They rate that the least pleasure-inducing sexual act. For men, it's different.

It's the highest pleasure-inducing sexual act, right alongside masturbation, actually. What's fascinating is we talk a lot about desire, particularly between men and women when they have sex together, but we don't always talk about the fact that to move towards sex, we have to be motivated to feel that there's going to be a reward. And so when we're having sex that perhaps doesn't suit our anatomy as much as we'd like it to, or when there's a big orgasm gap and someone else is reliably experiencing more pleasure than we are, of course our desire suffers. We've used the word initiate a lot. Does it matter who initiates? It doesn't matter, but we know that the person initiating often experiences higher levels of

sexual satisfaction in the encounter than the person who's following. There are some really interesting things with initiation. And I actually think that when it comes to sex with long-term partners, when it comes to many of the couples that I see, people often walk through the door saying there's a problem with desire. Sometimes there is, it's usually in their understanding of desire, not desire itself, but often it's in initiation actually because if you think about it, initiation is a communication. You're basically saying, I'd like to have sex now, would you? And there are a variety of ways that people initiate. And in my experience, they can be wildly off the mark. So one scenario is that the person

initiates and it's so subtle that the other person just doesn't pick up on it at all. And it's quite difficult to put yourself out there with initiation, right? So people test the waters with this coded, subtle, I'll put my hands there and they'll know what that means. And often that is completely missed by the other person. and so the opportunity for sex is lost. The other side of the coin is when people initiate in a really direct way. So we know that women having sex with men initiate much more directly and when men are initiating with women or when women are initiating with women they initiate much more indirectly. So this direct initiation from women to men often looks like,

shall we have sex then? Do you fancy a shag? That kind of thing. Which, although it's direct and you could give it points for being direct communication. People say that. People say that all the time.

Really? Do you fancy a shag? All the time. They say it, it's direct, it's getting a point across, but it's inherently unsexy. And it's quite interesting because the social script of men are always up for sex means that in women's minds, often they can just say that and that will do it for their partner.

And actually that's not the case. And what we know from research is that most men actually say, I need a bit more than that. I need to feel intimacy. I need to feel desired. I need to feel as though she's initiating it because she's enthusiastic about doing it, not because she's doing it for me. We also know that people fall into styles of initiation. And just in the same way that I mentioned getting typecast around how you are sexually with a partner, you can get typecast in terms of how you initiate. So there might be one way that you do it. Always.

And maybe it was cute for the first six months, but in month 60, it starts to become quite irritating. It starts to become not a sexual trigger but oh here we go again yeah unsexy it's kind of like yeah predictable pressure so it can be a really useful thing to have a conversation with somebody else somebody you're having sex with around how you actually like sex to be initiated and whether that matches with how each other does it you know it's interesting when we think about sex and what we assume it must be like, we all have a bit of an idea in our head, maybe from pornography or something else or movies, that it should just flow. And so when our sex doesn't flow, we think something is broken and

wrong with it. We should just walk in, hi babe, how oh off we go we're off to the way it's like every day and it should happen every every other night um and if it's not flowing and happening every other night we think we need to go and like yeah you know fix this someone's to blame something's wrong with me or him or so let's come back to frequency because that's a big one but before we get on to that occupying the space in between willingness so that's a big one. But before we get onto that, occupying the space in between willingness, so that's a nice idea that I've had or you've had, but I'm not there yet, and desire, when your desire kicks in, it's actually quite an uncomfortable space to occupy. And one of the things I like to do in my work with people is to try and help them get comfortable in that space. Because as you say,

we have this idea that we should be feeling it before we start. That's wrong. We know that now. But also that it should be easy for us just to slip into that sexual headspace, to lose that awkwardness, to lose that sense of, I don't actually know if I'm going to feel like it. I might do. Can we just continue what we're doing and I'll see? Occ occupying that space in between willingness and desire is really a key part of initiation because if you initiate with shall we have sex it doesn't really give you a chance to see if you can occupy that space does it you have either have to say yes or no do you not think it's harder for men as well in some regards because like we gotta get you know the eiffel tower up in in a heterosexual relationship

there's like it's very easy to see if the man is aroused whereas it's less obvious i mean it is there's ways to tell obviously yes without getting too detailed but it's it's so clear if the man is aroused there's no hiding it for all of us our body's arousal response and the degree with which we're turned on in our mind, so desire, don't actually always match as much as we'd like them to. So I don't know if you've ever had this experience or any of your listeners have, but it can be quite common for men to want to be getting in a sexual headspace or actually be feeling desire, but not be hard. And because it's a visual sign, sometimes their partners, whether they're male or female partners, can take that really personally. What does that mean about me? I'm going to be honest because that's the whole point of this podcast.

I've had multiple times in my life where I've not been able to get an erection. And it's so awkward. And the minute they realize that you're not going to be able to get an erection what do I say you know what do I say yeah I'm so glad you mentioned it because it's so common and it's common because this is called arousal non-concordance so an idea that our bodies don't always do what our brains are thinking so you might think you want to have sex but your body doesn't always respond and that happens for people of all genders it's just more challenging for people with penises right because you can see it yeah so it brings with it that extra level of

pressure as soon as you've got that pressure then as we know your attention goes elsewhere your worry increases that turns down arousal like turning down the tv less chance of an erection so can i ask then what do i do in that moment and what should they do as in like how do they help me in that very embarrassing moment and what do i say yeah so they first need to understand that no erection doesn't mean that you don't want to have sex it might sometimes of course but if you're saying look i'm i'm really keen for this. I'm just not there yet. Then they need to take that at face value. Okay. That's really important. Otherwise you end up feeling as though it's a judgment on your attraction or your desire for them, which it's not.

The second thing is there needs to be less focus on the need for the penis to be hard. And that comes from delineating this idea of this set menu of sex, which means our penis has to be part of it. There's plenty of other things that you could do sexually if you're feeling like you want to be sexual, which will move your attention back to sexual things, things that might really turn you on. So for example, giving oral sex is often something that a lot of men say really turn them on. Obviously it's not for everyone. The vibrator out. Yeah, all kinds of things.

Watching someone else's sexual pleasure can really turn us on. For some people, it's really hard for them to get used to enjoying sensation when their penis is soft. They kind of want to avoid it. It'd be great if they didn't and they could be comfortable with enjoying that touch even then. But it might mean moving moving your attention to another person what usually happens then is that at some point it comes back but it only comes back if you don't worry about it and if you don't put pressure on it that has to be not just about you it has to be about the person you're with as well

because you know if they're like oh never mind then we'll just do it another time okay so that's really interesting so the foundation of all of that though is communication absolutely because without that if if i go flattered and then i don't say anything about it and i just lay there like dormant and then she's laying there dormant and then we try and go to sleep and then we you know we never address it we never get to communicate because maybe i did want to have sex but maybe for some reason my to-do list was still on my mind. Exactly. And notice that the assumption behind it is that the sex that you're going to have is penis and vagina penetration. Is that even what she wants? And if we could initiate sex in a way that was clearer, if we could say to our partners easily, I'm really horny. What I'd really like to do is X and it all be about me. Are you up for that? That's quite different. If we're able to be clear about that, what would that

do to your confidence with erections? Does that make sense? If she'd actually gone into that sexual encounter saying, you know what, all I want you to do is make me come. I'm not, I don't feel like penitent sex tonight. If she'd felt confident to say that, I can guarantee there would have been no problem with the erection. The erection would have come as part of it because the whole process would have been arousing. This is a bit of a left field one, but I just remembered a debate me and my friends had in our little like mates chat. Is it better to have sex before or after you eat because he was like oh no i this i thought this was weird he was like i have sex before we go on the date i'm like what

you have sex before the date he was like yeah no sex after no sex after food that is a good idea to be fair a lot of people say they struggle really When they're full, they feel quite unsexy. They feel a bit lethargic. Bloated and stuff. They feel a bit bloated. They don't feel great about their body, perhaps. A lot of people do that. If they're going to have a date night, I mean, I never like date nights because I think by the time you get home from a date night,

you've maybe had a bit to drink. You've maybe had a bit to eat. It's maybe quite late. It's not the best conditions for having sex, actually. I'd rather, if you had a date night you kept it on fun emotional connection relationship satisfaction and then you plan an in at home date night that's more about physical intimacy okay do you know what i mean it's not it's not that easy to do the two so your friend's probably right probably before food is better but you want to come back to frequency sure yeah because we

talked about that earlier, and this is one of the big myths that people talk about around sex life, which is that the amount of sex that you have matters, and it really doesn't. So what I mean by that is that if you ask most people how often they should be having sex a week, I mean, what do you think they would say?

Your friends or people on the street? How much they should be having sex? Yeah, a week, a month. How much do you think they'd say? Three times a week. Everyone says three times a week. It's this kind of urban myth that again, forms part of our sexual scripts. If we're not having sex three times a week, there's a problem. It's actually drastically different than that. The average time is people in the UK and actually it's kind of replicated around the world. But what's fascinating is that we're using frequency as a yardstick of a good sex life. And there is no correlation between the frequency of sex and sexual satisfaction, none whatsoever. So you're saying it's quality over quantity? Absolutely. You could be having sex, you know, once a year that completely blows your socks off,

makes you feel alive, makes you feel super connected. That's really exploratory where you lose yourself in it. And that is better than having sex once a day where you're not enjoying it. Your mind's not in it. It's not pleasurable. You're feeling disconnected. You're feeling awkward. So it's so interesting that we get so hung up on frequency. In fact, the average amount of times people are having sex in the UK, if people are interested, is around about three times a month. But there is a huge amount of variation there. So plenty of people in relationships that haven't had sex for months and are quite happy with that, and plenty of people having sex more. But I think having that average is quite useful to talk about because actually it's quite surprisingly different to how most people perceive it should be. Over 40% of women want to be having more sex than they are currently having,

which is in chapter two of this book in front of me, Mind the Gap. What about men? So women want to be having, over 40% of them, want to be having more sex than they're currently having. Yeah, there's huge levels of sexual dissatisfaction for people of all genders. Everyone wants to be having more sex, better sex, than they're currently having. We know that for women, it's around about, what's just over half of women, 52%. And for men, it's about 42% are unhappy with the sex lives that they have. Enormous numbers. That's UK data, 15,000 adults between the ages of- So men are typically more satisfied. Yeah. And I suggest that the reason for that is that although men experience challenges with desire as well, men find it easier

on average to maintain desire for the same person. And as we've already talked about, women struggle to access their spontaneous desire and label that as a problem when it's not. You know, I'm aware we're talking very much about straight couples because that's where we see the majority of sexual problems. But when we talk about men and women having sex together, we also see that orgasm gap. So we see less pleasure and less reward for women, which I think accounts for that slightly higher number. So you said something in between there that was curious to me. Just to confirm, over long-term relationships, the man is more likely to maintain their desire for the woman in a heterosexual relationship. That's right. The woman is more likely to lose desire for her partner. That's right. And we're talking here remember about spontaneous desire okay okay

is that remember there's there's the responsive desire we talked about earlier and we know that this is the interesting bit when it comes to women's desire it's actually much more easier to trigger with a wide range of sexual stimuli than men's. So women's responsive desire works brilliantly. You could say it works even better than men's. So spontaneous desire is only one type of desire. It's that feeling of out of the blue, lust, horniness, want to rip your clothes off. It's partly attributable to higher levels of androgens like testosterone, but certainly not exclusively. There's a massive social component to it as well. So yes, men find it easier to maintain that. But I think it's really important to say, because there will be men listening to this that will be worried about their desire.

As we've said earlier, 15% is actually quite a large number. It's not all men. Some men really struggle to keep hold of that spontaneous desire in a long-term relationship. And just to clarify, the reactive desire is the desire that kicks in once you've begun. Basically, yeah. Some kind of sexual stimuli, some kind of sexual currency. It comes after arousal. I want to close off on the subject of parents. I'm not a parent yet,

but my brother has three kids and they're under the age of six. They're six and under. Wow. And he's got three of them. I'm going to send him my book. Yes, I'm going to, I'm sure he's going to listen anyway. And from that, I've been able to understand on a surface level, the plight of a parent, sleep, kids waking up in the middle of the night, work pressures. A lot of people are working at home now as well. So that has impacts on sleep and

how you're feeling and your mental health and all those things and to think that couples irrespective of children are struggling with sex you've you said at the start of this conversation but it says in your book as well that we're having less and less sex um when you compare one decade to the previous decade and there was another study that i saw that said there's been general declines in sexual frequency in other countries around the world as well like japan australia finland and the usa so we know that like we're having less sex with each other anyway and then you throw kids into the mix which i just i don't know i've not been there yet so i've not crossed that bridge but i'm trying to figure out when I do come to that bridge how on earth I'm going to be able to have sexual desire when I'm a very busy CEO running multiple

businesses traveling all over the world seeing my partner currently not very much you know and trying to make those moments where we do spend time together special then you throw in little Timmy who's gonna and he's not gonna care about my schedule no and Timmy won't's going to ask and he's not going to care about my schedule. No, Timmy won't care. It's going to become my priority, rightfully so, if he behaves himself. And then where's sex going to go? Yeah, this is why it's a real challenge for parents. And I think one of the key things, one of the reasons I wrote the book actually, is because the first thing that we can do for parents is talk about the fact that it's normal.

It's not you. It's not. Okay. It's not you, it's not your relationship. It's nothing about the two of you together that means you shouldn't be together. It's challenging to have a good sex life when you've got young kids at home. It's challenging for everyone. I think the second thing that we can do is explain to people what the factors are that tend to make a difference. So people know about pregnancy. People know about trying to conceive. They understand that these things will impact on their sex life. But I think the things that they don't acknowledge or don't realize as much is the trajectory that that sets them on in the early stages and the trajectory that that first year of having a newborn baby will set you

on in terms of that reduction in sexual currency, in terms of resentments that might start to breed and how your relationship dynamic becomes, in terms of how equal the mental load is. And we know that the mental load, so that's kind of the unequal division of labor, which often falls on women in heterosexual relationships, particularly when kids come along. We know that there's a direct correlation between couples who divide that household labor in a kind of equitable and transparent way and sexual satisfaction. So it seems quite hard to believe, but actually it doesn't have to be completely equal. But if you feel as though your partner is pulling their weight if you feel as though it's not all automatically falling to you we know that people generally tend to have better sex so there's all kinds of things which parents need

to know about their sex life that they don't is that about resentment though is that yeah it's resentment and it's about what i mentioned earlier about seeing your partner almost as a third child okay you're you're you're the captain a third child. You're the captain of the house, right? You're the boss of the house and you have to hold in your mind everything. You're the CEO of the house. You have to hold in your mind everything that needs doing, even for your partner. Yeah. They're not holding anything. They're not remembering the kid's birthdays. They're not thinking they need to buy a present. You're having to do that. That takes your attention away from sex

and it also raises your resentment and sexual satisfaction can really suffer but there are a few other things that I like to talk about in the book that I think are really important for parents and one of them is I compare the journey of parenthood a little bit like a kind of navigation across the seas right so parenthood is the storm and it's a storm for everyone. And there are different phases of the storm. And some of it, you just need to batten down the hatches and get through it as unscathed as you can and not worry about sex so much. That might be like the newborn phase. But then there are also parts of the journey where you might've found yourself knocked off course a little bit. And what you actually need to do

is take stock of the boat and say, hold on, what's going on here? What are we doing? If we continue on this trajectory 10, 15 years down the line, we're likely to be in a place where sex is unrecoverable. Versus if we make a small change, a degree or two to the left or right, very small changes, over the long term, we might end up in an entirely different destination. And so the book is all about what are those small changes? And this might be surprising to some people. It's not having more sex. It's other ways of increasing sexual satisfaction. So for example, we know that when we turn each other down gently for sex, it increases sexual satisfaction. We know that when we turn each other down gently for sex, it increases sexual satisfaction. We know

that when we increase sexual currency, which doesn't have to take much time, we increase sexual satisfaction. So there are many things that people can do, even if they don't feel they have time or headspace for sex, or until they have the time and headspace for sex, that can just keep that boat kind of heading in the right direction what about what's the relationship there with sleep and sex then because obviously if if i've got little timmy crying at night time at 3 a.m i'm going to be poorly slept the next day which means will that have an impact on how horny i am yes yeah big relationship between sleep and sex for all of us we know that if you get a good night's sleep, your chances of having sex the next day increase by 14%. So that's for all of us. When it comes to parents, there is

some quite interesting data about the impact of nighttime waking on your sex life. We know that the number of times you get up in the night to tend to a child, like to go to the cot or the bed to see to a crying child, the number of times you get up has an impact on what's happening in your sex life and for your desire. So we tend to see the more times you get up, the less happy you are with your sex life. And the reason for that is because not getting a good night's sleep disrupts how the body responds to sexual response. So the chemicals in the body that help us be prepared for arousal to build. But also it's the cognitive distraction of being woken up by something quite upsetting, someone else crying and having to deal with it, which we know disrupts the part of our sleep,

the REM sleep, which actually we need for our sexual functioning. So even just knowing that as a parent and knowing that, look, if you're getting up many times a night, don't worry about your sex life for the time being. What you can do as a couple is focus on sharing that more equally. Because if one of you is getting a good night's sleep and feeling horny all the time, and another one's getting up three times and sex is the last thing on their mind probably the best thing that you can do is try and share it is there a certain age where sex comes back in terms of your children's age is there like when you get to i don't know 10 years old then sex comes back in typically yeah so we know that people start getting sleep from when their kid is about six but obviously if you've got another one that's a bit younger, then you might be starting the process all over again. So given that sleep is so important, the older they get,

the better that is for people's sex lives. I mean, it's hugely variable. So there are plenty of people that start having sex again, you know, within three months of their baby being born. And yes, it may be less frequent than before, but it doesn't disrupt their sex lives as much. And then there's plenty of people whereby it might take them a year to even start having sex again. And then the frequency of having sex might stay quite infrequent for some time. What's interesting though, in how quickly people get back to it is that how quickly people get back to it is often about the habits that they've then fallen into as a sexual couple. So low levels of sexual currency, high levels of

awkwardness, not prioritizing time together. You know, parenthood is basically a juggle of priorities, right? All the time. There's always something else you should be doing. And so the sex that you have has to be enticing enough for your brain to say, yeah, I'm going to sacrifice that for sex because there's always something else that you should be doing with your time. So it's those habits that we fall into around our sex lives that dictate how quickly people get back into it. At what point does someone, should they reach out to a person like you for help? I wish people would do it sooner. They always wait until it's got really bad. And by that time, it's fine. We can still reverse it. There's a lot

we can do. But all these habits have kind of settled in. All of this awkwardness, pressure, resentment. People have moved to quite polarized positions. It would be great if people came earlier. I'd like people to think of someone like me a bit like a personal trainer for your sex life. But you don't necessarily go to a personal trainer just when, I don't know, things are terrible. You go because you want to improve something. Or maintain.

Yeah, or maintain. I'd love people to see it that way. You use the word, we can always reverse it. But then a couple of moments before, you use the word unrecoverable. Now I wanted to know, is there ever a situation, have you ever seen patients in your practice where you knew intuitively this is unrecoverable? Oh, of course, of course.

And what were the hallmarks of unrecoverability? So the Gottmans talk about the four horsemen and they talk about resentment as being an aspect of a relationship dynamic that often means that it can be quite hard for people to recover from that and for the relationship to survive. Sometimes when you're talking about sex, if resentment comes across quite strongly in the way that people talk to each other, it gives you a good indication that this is going to be quite challenging. I would say though, that sometimes unrecoverable is a good outcome because we're not necessarily destined to be monogamous. We're not necessarily destined to

be with one person. Yes, social convention makes us feel that that should be the case, but for some people, a good outcome is having a split and a good sexual relationship with someone else so sometimes identifying that it's unrecoverable because it's gone so far it's been so long perhaps they were never that sexually compatible in the first place decades later there's tons of resentment maybe it is the best thing at that point and perhaps that is a good outcome for some people point of curiosity what are the the types of problems that people come to you with the types of challenges they come to you with what what is you know you see a couple sit down um the first sentence out of their mouth what are those sort of five most popular sentences that come out of

their mouth um it would be the first one and by far the most popular is we have a great relationship but and it's a problem with sex usually a problem with initiation or desire that is by far the most common presentation we love each other immensely you know we have so much respect for each other we have a great partnership but sex just doesn't happen or it doesn't happen in the way that we want. The second is probably specific problems that people have with their bodies and sex. So people that are experiencing pain, particularly painful penetration, people who are worrying about erections, worrying about orgasms, these things are all quite common. The third is probably navigating change. So we talked earlier about how sexual relationships

need to be able to flex and allow growth for us as individuals. And quite often, because we can't talk about it, growth happens for one person and then they're suddenly not getting their sexual needs met. So for example, they might suddenly decide that there's something that they're into or want to explore that they do not feel able to talk about with their partner and without it the sexual relationship is a crisis point and so we need to be able to allow space for that sexual relationship to see whether it can withstand that change and growth and create that culture of growth i'm just playing in my mind all the all the really incredible things you must have heard from people about like their fantasies and stuff like that. And I'm trying not to break your client

patient confidentiality. I'm just thinking about the other like the unexpected things that people come to you and ask you about you know what's one of the most unexpected things after 20 years of doing my job one of the things that has come up a lot recently that has surprised me and it may not surprise you i don't know if you've got any but the impact of pets on people's sex lives oh have you got any pets i've got a dog and he loves to watch there you go and you know this was a massive surprise to me i've been doing this job decades and only recently i something came up on my insta and it blew up with people saying yeah my pets constantly ruining the mood they're either trying to get involved or they're watching or they're in the room or it puts the other person off this was one of the biggest surprises to me honestly so what's the so people are saying that what the pet is jumping in or

my pet my dog um i think he was concerned about my partner yeah i think he thinks that she's being attacked right yeah he's very very protective so sometimes i think he thinks he looks really upset and then when he was younger he used to like wee himself oh when he was watching which is like a nervous wing because money and daddy are fighting that's like yeah well i think it was way i mean it's it's a big deal when you think about what we talked earlier about attention and distraction because nobody really wants to have to take account of a third person in well unless you want a third person in the room but you know a pet in the room basically it's quite distracting right it is yeah and if you put them outside my understanding because i've heard this as cats as well my understanding is

that they will bark and scratch at the door it's not like you can keep them away very easily this is a massive challenge pets should come with a warning label for your sex life so you think pets should not be invited into the i would say not but i mean some people are obviously fine with it but the reaction i got from people on my social media was this is a major problem and i'd never heard of it before i've never seen it written in research it's a new thing maybe it's locked down everyone got pets are you hopeful for the uh trajectory of sex in this world i really am actually there is i think there's been a a boost of sex positivity um in the media on social media on tv shows like sex education i think what i've noticed is that's not yet

trickled down to the therapy room. So, you know, what I see and think is happening, I guess, because I'm plugged into those things and the types of people I follow on social media, I really feel like it's changing and people are understanding more about sex, feeling more assertive about sex, understanding that it doesn't have to look one way, looking at different relationship structures, not just assuming monogamy, not just assuming heterosexuality. But actually what I see in the therapy room is that's not trickled down yet. And so my hope is that in the decade that follows, we'll be in quite a different place. And, you know, for me as a parent of two boys, that's quite an exciting place to be because we know that our first sexual experience is actually

quite influential in dictating our sexual satisfaction lifelong so to be able to go into sex with more knowledge to be able to have an experience that is good rather than bad which is most people's first experience i think that's a great gift that we can give younger people you use the word change there talking about how we have to sort of grow and adapt through our sexual journey with a long term partner one of the changes that I've come to learn that takes place from doing this podcast is menopause and how that can have impacts on someone's sexual desires which has an impact on our hormones and how we're feeling I'm learning more and more about menopause but I imagine some

of the people that come to you and talk about their sexual desire are referencing the impact that menopause has had or perimenopause. Absolutely. The symptoms of menopause can be really unpleasant for a lot of people, not for everyone, of course, but things like hot flushes and aches and pains and mood changes, they obviously can really disrupt your interest in sex. There's also other things going on in menopause that are more kind of psychosocial as well, often around stage of life, long-term relationships, all the things we've talked about around desire. And sometimes the work is figuring out how much of it is to do with menopause, which some of it might be, how much of it was there

before and is exacerbated by those symptoms of menopause but it's really important in fact hormonal fluctuations for all people with menstrual cycles actually are quite important when it comes to sex and we do see changes across the monthly cycle in people's receptiveness to sex and also the types of sex that they're interested in changes Changes. One of the changes that happens when we have kids is our bodies change. Yeah, hugely. And that can have a big impact, I imagine, on self-confidence, but also potentially attraction. Yeah, I think there's often a big worry that those body changes will influence attraction. And again, because we don't talk about it, people never get to find out. So a lot of people tell me that they're worried that their partner won't find them as attractive because they've got stretch

marks or because their body looks different. And actually they've never voiced that. Part of the success of therapy is people speak the things that they don't speak elsewhere. And sometimes just having a conversation about those things means that the problem is removed instantly by someone saying, well, actually, no, I can see your body's changed, but you know, the way your belly looks isn't the sole attraction that I have for you. So yes, it's changed, but no, it's not shifted my attraction for you. So, so yeah, changes to body image and how that affects you during sex, but also what you worry a partner might think can be a huge thing for parents. Are we meant to be monogamous?

No. Is that a shitty question? Are we meant to be anything? No, you know, it's not a very popular answer this. And actually when I post about this on my socials, people hate it because it really disrupts what a lot of us are doing. I'm monogamous myself, right? But we are not destined to be monogamous. There isn't anything about humans that means that we're designed to maintain sexual interest in the same person for a long amount of time. That's why if we have sex with the same person forever, if you don't work at it, if you don't nurture it, if you don't allow growth, it's going to be challenging because we're not designed to do it. Our brains, they get bored. They need novelty. They don't like predictability. So we're not designed to be monogamous. And I think what's

fascinating is that we all just kind of fall into it because it's a social construct that is kind of politically and economically and historically present. We just think that's what we should do. It's fine if people choose it. Of course it is. But I think if you choose monogamy, I think you have to have your eyes open to the fact that you can't expect that that means you'll maintain sexual interest for that person without any effort.

That's what we know about long-term monogamy. Spontaneous desire will drop, sexual currency will drop, person will become very familiar. You'll need to find ways to keep sex novel. You'll need to not order the set menu. You'll need to go for the buffet. You need to bring different versions of yourself into sex. There's so many things that you need to be conscious of if you choose monogamy, if want a good sex life and I think monogamy tends to bring with it an idea that that person will just always remain sexually interested in you because you've married them or perhaps you don't need to work at it and I think those things can be quite harmful those ideas I've read like only four or five percent of people identify as being polygamous. Is that the right word? Polygamy? So, I mean, there are many different words, but in terms of open

relationship structures, of which there are many, I think they're on the rise. And I think that's a good thing because I think all of us, a bit like, as I said earlier, that idea of compulsory heterosexuality, you're kind of monogamous and straight unless you prove otherwise or choose otherwise, right? It'd be great if we all had an idea that, well, you could be any of those things and there is not one that's best or right, but why don't you look at all the options before you make your mind up? Do you have people come and see you that are in those polygamous relationships? Yeah, absolutely. And I have plenty of people come and see me that are moving from monogamy into opening up and want to think about how they can do that in a way that privileges their kind

of primary relationship. So that's actually a really wonderful thing to work with. I love working with those couples because actually they're really able to think outside the box and they can separate their love from each other and their commitment to each other from their sexual interests and they cannot be threatened by the idea of sex elsewhere um it's yeah it's really fun to work with a new set of problems? And does it work? I would say a new set of solutions. Interesting. Does it work? Yes. But like monogamy, it only works if you work at it. Because there are another set of things that you might need to work at that are, you know, you might not need to work on novelty, you might not need to work on predictability, because you're getting that with

different partners, but you do need to work on boundaries communication um how you manage it together and the constant flux of that so it all requires work what if you're in a relationship right now and you want an open relationship what is the best way to broker that conversation with your partner is it just uh hey babe let's sit down and have dinner um i'd like to have an open relationship i think you know direct is good but also if you want to test the waters you might say like we talked about earlier with communication i was listening to this podcast turns out that you know a lot of us choose monogamy without even thinking it through did you do that did you choose monogamy did you know that was right for you

i've been thinking about this for myself recently i don't know why i chose it you know my partner said that to me it would be like a dagger in the heart i'd be oh gosh got nervous even hearing that because it because you know what they're implying they're implying that they want to go shag someone else yeah and we you know one of our ideas about sex and sexual relationships is that the attraction and desire we have for our partner or the romantic love we have for our partner is finite. And that if it moves to someone else, it's lost from us. And it's a really interesting concept that we only really have with romantic love. Like we don't have it with love for our children. We don't think if we have another one, we'll stop loving the first one. And we don't have it for our friends, right? We can have multiple friends and love them all

equally or love them all differently. So you think we can love multiple people? Absolutely. Yeah. But I think we are, we feel fear about the concept of it simply because in our mind that is a threat to our connection. I think, you know, it's a really, it's a really interesting concept and it'd be, it'll be fascinating to see where we go with different relationship structures in the decades that follow. Dr. Karen Gurney, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And there's two questions that have been left for you.

The first one is, what's the worst advice you've ever received? The worst advice I've ever received was to not become a psychologist because I wasn't cut out for it. Who gave you that advice? My first supervisor. I hope she's listening. When she said you're not cut out for it, what did she mean? She said to me, there are many qualities required to be a good clinical psychologist. Unfortunately, you don't have any of them. What a thing to say to somebody. I know, it was very early on in my career.

I must've been, you know, 19, 20. So yeah, I'm glad to have proved her wrong. And the second question is, what's the best advice you can offer Stephen Bartlett on how he can improve? Well, I'll obviously have to focus it on sex. And it's going to be create a culture of talking about sex. Often, initiate freely and be really comfortable with being turned down.

Thank you so much. It's been an absolute honour to go on this journey of sex with you. I mean, that sounds a little bit strange. It does, but we'll know what i mean yeah um to learn about your perspective on sex it's really refreshing i've spoken to a few people that are experts on the subject matter of sex and orgasms and everything in between but your perspective is um really refreshing because it focuses on first reframing what sex is and some of the like underlying um psychological barriers that we create about our perceptions of what sex is and if we start there then we probably won't have a lot of these other upstream symptoms of that like misunderstanding that's exactly what sex is um

and also i've from doing this podcast had tons of parents that have contacted me asking about when you become a parent what happens in your sex life so your book has come at a fantastic time in culture i recommend people go and get both books um both of which are available now and both are incredible reads they're really inclusive and easy to read and your new book how not to let having kids ruin your sex life is essential reading for all parents that might be struggling with this so thank you thank you it's been a pleasure i think it was about a year ago i became obsessed with sleep to the point that as many of you know i pretty much have it as a non-negotiable one of the things that i found is a brand called eight sleep that sponsored this podcast and that is the cover that i have on my bed some of you will know that in order to have optimal sleep our bodies need to be a certain

temperature and there's slight variance between all of us. That's exactly what 8sleep does. It learns my body and regulates both sides of my bed with two people on it so that we both have optimal sleep. And on the app, you can also see how much you've slept, if you've underslept and how you've performed across multiple stages of sleep. It is a bit of a revelation in my life, I have to be honest. It automatically regulates our temperature so we sleep deeper and therefore wake up feeling more restored, more energized and more capable to pursue our goals. The podcast sponsors that I have are brands that I love and use and 8sleep is one of them. I've had so many technological game changes in my life and 8sleep is certainly one of them. Check it out at 8sleep.com

slash Stephen for holiday savings. Bye.