The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - World Leading Sex Therapist - How To Avoid Having Bad Sex - Kate Moyle

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

In this week’s podcast I am sharing some of my own sexual experiences which I have never shared before - Things which have gone well and what has caused some relationships, I’ve cared deeply about to end. I am being open and honest. I feel vulnerable about sharing some of these experiences… so keep this to yourself. My guest this week is Kate Moyle. Kate is a COSRT (College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists) Accredited Psychosexual and Relationship Therapist, Sex Expert for Sex Toy Brand Lelo, and host of The Sexual Wellness Sessions Podcast.  Kate works empathetically with people to recognise their personal understanding of their sexuality and sexual health; with the view that issues have roots in psychology, emotion, the physical body, and a person’s history and culture. Kate specialises in working with those who are struggling with difficulties in their sex lives, relationships and sexuality. Many of her clients are like you and I impacted by the stresses of modern life. Kate and I will be having a very open and real conversations about sex, to help you feel more educated, aware of sexual wellness and feel comfortable in your sexuality. We will be taking taboo conversations about sex and relationships (which we don’t normally chat about) out of the therapy room and into the mainstream, so you can hear what is really happening. Follow Kate: Website - https://www.katemoyle.co.uk Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/katemoyletherapy Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

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 oh it's the question everyone wants the answer to. What is the single biggest killer of relationships in the modern age? Let's talk about sex. Today's podcast is very, very different, but incredibly, incredibly important. Today, I'm sitting down with Kate Moyle, who is a sex therapist and a relationship therapist, to talk about some of the taboo topics which we don't normally discuss. Things like erectile dysfunction, sexual inadequacies, issues we all have in our relationships and sex lives, the single biggest killer of relationships in 2021, sexual anxiety, how to keep a sexual relationship

exciting and everything in between. I'm going to share some very personal sexual stories that I've never shared before. Some of the things that have gone well and some of the problems that I've had that have caused relationships that have meant the world to me to end. This is a very, very honest, open podcast today. You know, this is why this is called the diary of a CEO and Kate is the perfect person to put them to. So I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. I certainly did. I feel very vulnerable sharing some of these stories with you, but as I always say, just keep it to yourself. So without further ado, this is the diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

Sex. I think, I think it's fair to say that everybody has some kind of challenge with sex, at least some point, you know, at least at some point within their life. And I am no different. In fact, my last relationship, which was a very, I thought, I genuinely at one point thought that was going to be my wife. The reason that relationship broke down was because of a sexual issue and a sexual issue that showed up about seven or eight months into the relationship. And long story short, I know this isn't a therapy session, but it kind of is as well. At some point, seven, eight months into our relationship, she told me that she didn't like having sex. And I didn't know what that meant. And as a guy that's never experienced that in my life, I read into it probably in the wrong way, but it definitely made me insecure. I was like, what, you don't like having sex?

How's that possible? And I thought that was some kind of condemnation on me. I thought that was something negative towards me or something that I was doing wrong. And I tried various things. I tried to be a bit more, and just listen a little bit more to what she wanted and how she wanted it.

And then it progressively got to a point where I was getting in bed and i was shitting myself because you don't want to once you get rejected i've never been like i've never gone to have sex with someone in my life and been rejected in that way and so you get in bed and you don't want to even ask them for sex because you might take an l and you don't want to take that L and then how how the hell am I meant to get an erection as a guy when I'm that fucking scared of rejection and eventually long story short we're in um we're away one time and the same issue happened and she we were having sex and I clearly I was looking at her thinking she clearly isn't enjoying this at all and we stopped she started crying she said, I've got a problem. She said like, you know, I just don't enjoy sex.

I need to like address it. I said, do you want to talk about it? She said, I'm not comfortable talking about sex with you, even though we've been in a relationship for a year. And I left and then I broke up with her. And I do regret breaking up with her because I did so maybe too flippantly. And I didn't understand it. And I didn't think it was fixable and I didn't know how to fix it and yeah sorry for my brain you know my dumping that on you but

good place to start no I think and you know so much of what you've just said there's so many points there that you know I hear all the time so difficulties with desire struggles with communication struggles with knowing like where to start in terms of talking about it anxiety you know all of these points which can kind of get in the bedroom with us or be in bed with us and we just don't know how we're meant to address them we don't know what we're meant to do about them and we all feel that sense of what am I doing wrong here or what's wrong with me do I have a problem am I broken you know all of these phrases and actually working with all of

the information that you've just given me you know as an example we can kind of target or work with each of those problems in an individual way which isn't terrifying for people, which doesn't create more anxiety, which doesn't damage self-esteem. But we don't have those conversations in a bigger, more normalizing way. And I think one of the biggest things that I talk about is this idea that sex, like everything else across our lives, has good days, bad days, average days, variability,

but we expect there to be this constant and we expect it to be protected from everything else that we have going on in our lives. And that just isn't the case. And somewhat automatically, right? Like we kind of expect it to take care of itself. Yeah. And relationships as well.

We kind of expect that, you know, once they're good, they're always good. That they shouldn't falter. That we shouldn't have to work at them, that they shouldn't struggle. And I think that there's such a problem with that as a basic foundation message around sex and relationships. How do you reframe that then? How do I reframe my thinking in order to make sure that I'm, I guess that is a reframing of my thinking. If I think that this thing isn't going to take care of itself

and it needs to be worked on like everything else in my life, I guess that's the answer to keeping it exciting. Yeah, I mean, I think there's just a normalising of the fact that our sex lives and our relationships are in the context of us. They're not isolated. They're not protected. They don't have their own kind of special area where they aren't impacted by how we feel about ourselves stress anxiety our health our mental health you know physically what's going on for us um psychologically what's going on for us but why don't we just give

ourselves a break and be like you know what we're not perfect or good or great at everything else we do all the time so why would we be here i don't think you know i think as professionals we often talk about like why aren't we applying the logic that we apply everywhere else in our lives to this this part of our lives and in that particular case with me and my this this particular person um she turned to me i remember we were away one time and she said to me you know there's loads of people that are like me that don't have like a high libido or whatever and i have just never encountered these people in my experiences so i thought oh that's rubbish was she right yes yeah and how right is she very right and you know we understand that you know this is a huge part of the conversation

around sex lives at the moment and sexual wellness at the moment is this idea about desire desire is not a fixed concept that we're born with we're not kind of given or holding a set amount it's not like we kind of have an amount and we like use it up it is context dependent it's responsive and we understand that it changes but actually how we can change that within kind of take power of our own I suppose or change that within the context that we're in how we can feel in control of that is based in almost how we define it or how we understand it ourselves and there's a huge problem with just thinking okay well I had it now I don't have it in the same way anymore so what's wrong with me or what's broken or what changed or what's not working here rather than

if I reframe my understanding my thinking about this it makes a lot more sense and it takes the pressure off and when the pressure's off then I can work with this in a more pleasure-focused, enjoyable way, rather than an anxiety-provoking and stressful way. What should I have done? So the first time she turns to me, she says, Steve, I'm just not that interested. Because what it was is we're in bed and we're away on holiday. And I'm like, you know, just, I don't know what I do, whatever I do to let someone know that I want to have sex. I don't know, stroke their arm or whatever.

I did whatever I do. And she was just like, no. And what should I have done then? Cause you know, I think a lot of people would take that as a bit of an L and I certainly did. I was like, what? I was, and I was angry as well. Not like visibly angry, not like, you know, hitting with a pillow or anything. But I was like, I turned, I remember turning away and thinking, oh fuck, you know, know like because I'd never experienced that before I'd never experienced that like it is a form of rejection it's like a form of it's a kick in the self-esteem what should I have done well I think you know I can't talk to what was going on for you two like kind of in in that moment then but you know the biggest problem that couples in situations like that have is assumption so as you said like this is the kick in the teeth for me like that

hurts I feel rejected so we internalize and actually the best way for us to deal with something like that is to try and explain to try and move away from assumption to explanation to understanding. Because actually, if we can have a conversation which opens up, and you hear sex and relationship experts talk about communication being the kind of biggest pillar of sexual wellness or sexual well-being, and assumption and the gap between expectations and reality is actually the biggest place that we have a lot of these problems and i think that it feels like you know that's a good example of that happening fast forward four months uh the same sort of issue happened and

she turned to me and this is when i thought it was completely over is she said to me I'm not comfortable with talking to you about sex right and we've been together for a year and I thought well if we can't talk about it and I don't really understand the issue and you're not willing to talk about it then we are fucked and I thought and that's when I left I left that country um soon after and I broke up with her maybe like a I don't know two three weeks later because I thought if we can't talk about it then how do we fix the situation but I do regret it because I think I reflect and I think I don't want to be the type of guy generally that when they care about someone will walk away from it so easily and I think I should have made a more

active effort to try and support as you say and understand maybe but i would say sometimes the hardest person to talk to about sex is the person we're having it with yeah because of it's so loaded it's so like intimate it's so vulnerable and also the fear of getting it wrong or making it worse or leading our partners on or it going in the wrong direction or us not being able to unhear what we've heard or unsay what we've said. So actually, you know, that natural human response to feeling anxiety around something is avoidance. You know, we don't tend to approach the sources of our anxiety unless we're trying really hard to hone in on it or focus on it. Our most natural instinct is I don't want to go there you know like it's just easier to keep the status quo even if

that status quo isn't working and so it's it's about thinking about how do we how do we help people to approach that source of anxiety or feel empowered to change their conversation around sex because it's really it's really hard it's like talking in a language that we've not been taught you know we're not taught how to have these conversations we're not taught to be comfortable about these conversations we're not taught that sex is normalized as a topic and then we're expected to all be experts and that our partners are going to be experts and we're all expecting that from each other and then when it doesn't work you know we have no solutions or ways of knowing how to

deal with it now some of us muddle through we kind of work it out we're like okay well let's try this or think about this or take expert advice or listen to a podcast or read a book or get the information and we can kind of work our way through it but for a lot of us that's way too intimidating you know sex feels like an off the record you know off the table topic how do you bring it on the table how do and i'm presuming that couples that are successful in the bedroom are those that bring it on the table to some degree is that a fair assumption or yeah i think that's definitely a fair assumption I think that you know it takes the courage to do it it takes the kind of sitting in the uncomfortable it might

be quite anxiety provoking obviously some people kind of seek out therapy or external advice or someone that can help them manage those conversations or they might do it in their own way so it might be kind of reading a book and sharing that with each other or listening to a ted talk and then sharing that with each other and using that as a springboard to have that conversation but i would say it's talking about it outside of the bedroom is the biggest way to put it on the table and is it possible to be just like sexually incompatible with someone yeah i think it is in the way i think you know impossible possible to be incompatible with someone yeah i think it is in the way i think you know impossible possible to be incompatible with anything else but what we can also do is you know when we have different

interests or different preferences in other areas of our lives we can work together to negotiate that to manage that to kind of work to each other's kind of preferences or and kind of switch that around or manage that manage that kind of relational bit that kind of bit in between and it is possible to do that with sex but also for some people they might have deal breakers and they might not be able to meet those for each other this is i don't know if this is too much information but i don't think i care um i i remember one day as well, I tried to introduce, because I typically, when I have sex,

I typically use a lot of additional apparatus. So I'll use all kinds of stuff. I don't care. Like I'll use handcuffs and all kinds of ropes and toys and whatever else. And I remember trying to introduce something like that because I thought maybe it would make it a little bit more interesting for her.

And she was like, absolutely not. She said to me that she thought, I think it was a vibrator. She thought a vibrator was for old people. And, you know, I'm already up against it here, lad. So I'm trying to, like, do something to help. And when she said that, I just thought, like, maybe we are just, like, sexually incompatible. Maybe we just speak two different languages here.

So, I don't know if they're you know like sometimes one part you know what i would say is it's actually more common for couples to not be perfectly sexually matched yeah than it is for them to be like perfectly sexually matched in every way and for some people they are more ready to try something or you know they might be the one that leads something and then the other partner kind of catches up or it's really about also kind of like how we perceive what our partner is suggesting or how we what we think that means because one of the things about sex is we have this idea as humans about like metacognition like we think about our thoughts we think about what that our mean. And I think it's really, really apparent when it comes to sex and relationships, because we're trying to constantly analyze what's happening, or as you

said, kind of looking out for like the risk of rejection or the fear of rejection. We're trying to understand what that means about us, or what that means about them or what it means about our relationship. And so we're always trying to, I suppose, think about like what's going on and the wider context or meaning of that. Now, when it comes to sex, we're already in a culture and a society where it's a bit taboo where it's quite stigmatized where we don't necessarily want to kind of step outside the norms or the expectations because what does that mean about us as a person i you know since that um whole event i you know we we spoke a little bit after we broke up and she she told me that was actually the first time she told me that she had like a low libido and i actually didn't really understand what that meant so i googled it but then i started talking

to some friends about it specifically some male friends and i had another male friend say to me one of my best friends said to me that he also had the same problem where he just lost his um sexual desire um in you know when he got to a certain age which i i was shocked about because you don't people don't have these conversations so you don't think it happens so when we encounter it whether it's in the bedroom or wherever else um yeah it really feels like a real anomaly but how how common is low libido and also what are the what are the typical causes of someone having a low libido i think really common and i think you know like so much of the stuff we don't have huge and huge amounts of at least up to date like sex research so you know it's something that people are really

trying to kind of develop in this space but what we understand when we think about desire so we've got desire and we've got arousal so arousal the body's physical ability to kind of prepare for sex, the desire, the want to be sexual. And what we understand is that it typically changes across relationships. And what feels really difficult about it is that at the start of relationships, when everything is new and exciting, we're getting to know each other, we're exploring, it feels like desire is very high. We're kind of leaning into that because it's a way of getting to know each other, a way of connecting with that person. And it's kind of what we understand as it's triggered, I suppose, a lot

because a lot of the situations we find ourselves in are novel, are kind of tuning into also the area of our brain that likes the new things, that likes the excitement. And we have that sense of wanting to get closer to that person, wanting to get to know them. Now, also what we see, particularly this is with a relationship focus, is there's that exchange of kind of like novelty, newness,

the unknown, exploration for routine, security, safety, getting to know someone. So we kind of see these things switching out almost. And so it's just actually that as we get kind of more used to each other, there are less of those kind of triggering, like exciting moments, which are where desire can tend to thrive.

And what we need to do is perhaps just slightly more consciously or with a bit more of an effort, put in the time to create those spaces. Now, chuck in, I mean, mean you know the year we found ourselves in where no one's had any kind of personal space or independence or ability to go away and come back together kind of change of context but technology the kind of well third and fourth if there's two people in the relationship wheels that are constantly taking our attention kind of demanding

us you know, distracting us. So we're missing signals from our partners. We're missing those kind of, I suppose, quality time moments. We're constantly being notified or we're distracted. And actually then it's harder for us to give each other our full attention, to kind of sit down and focus on each other, to have the things that promote connection eye contact touch we're constantly kind of looking around and connecting I suppose with everyone apart from the person actually that we're in it creates a barrier

and so how do you know you get 5 10 15 20 years into a relationship um and you've started to get you know secure and the things are predictable how do you this is probably the most you know popular question i'm sure you get which is like how do you keep it fresh what advice would you give me to keep my sex life with a partner i've been with for x amount of years still fresh exciting and uh yeah exploratory um yeah i think it's it's the question everyone wants the answer um it's it about, I suppose, first thing, acknowledging that it might be different to how it used to be. So again, one of the biggest hurdles people can get kind of tripped over on

is it's not the same as it used to be or it changed. Now, why does that mean it's worse? Actually, perhaps the quality of the sex that people might be having might be better because they know each other better. They understand each other's bodies better. They feel more in tune with each other. So it's understanding that you might be

in a different phase or stage, and that's okay. It doesn't have to be, you know, that famous phrase, the honeymoon period that kind of everybody quotes or goes back to. So I think that is one thing. And I think actually kind of carving out the time and the space and the effort and not seeing that as a bad thing, not seeing that as problematic, that we have to be a bit more conscious of that part of our relationships is a huge, huge factor. Because what the kind of common narrative we see in society, I suppose, is if I have to make an effort for this, then there must be something wrong with that because sex should be spontaneous, should be something that just happened.

That's what it says in the movies which is part of the problem right because that's one of the most easily accessible visual versions of sex that we have we don't see into other people's sex lives in the same way now what we do see is social media or pictures of couples or images of couples or and we make assumptions about them we make assumptions about they look happy but they have great sex yeah in porn it's just like the gardener's like outside and then he like comes in and the husband's away and then like it's just perfect lasts an hour everyone looks like they're having a great time but one of the one of the best phrases that i heard and you know um is trying to learn about sex from porn is like learning to drive from watching the fast and the

furious and it's one of the things that i go back to i wish i knew who said it and if you know please tell me so you can claim it um but porn wasn't designed as an educational tool but a lot of people have used it as one and that's again oh i mean like every man ever and also women to be fair like i think men have this bias where we think women don't watch porn but then you ask a woman you know and i've asked several of my ex-girlfriends if they've watched porn and they're yeah they do some of them do but i'd say i and this is a general and i'd love you to correct me here because i i'd love to not be i love to be corrected on things like this where i'm so naive i i would tend to believe that like 90 of my male friends

watch porn and then i think it's probably like 50 of my female friends do you know the numbers is that i don't know the numbers but i you know we know that women watch porn we know that there are also a huge rise of like female friendly female focused pornography platforms kind of coming forward and i think that a lot of those ideas again tie into these old stereotypes or narratives about like male sexuality and female sexuality and then you know we're trying to change the conversation around this and i think that it's also about recognizing that they're not these kind of like two like so separate entities and actually that we can understand that we're all sexual creatures or we all have our own versions of sexuality and what that we can understand that we're all sexual creatures or

we all have our own versions of sexuality and what that doesn't mean is that it has to again kind of line up with the narratives that have always been there which is like men do this women do this but are there distinctions between um sexual appetite and the type of representation of sex that men and women typically want to see i was going to ask you a question which kind of alludes to the same answer but it's like if you were to create a point because you said there's men there's now sites emerging which are like female friendly i'm like what's the what's the what's the difference what's how do they i suppose well you know one of the things that um a lot of these sites are creating is a focus on kind of female pleasure in a way which is that what we know, for example, is that the majority of women or like the most common way of bringing women to orgasm is through direct sexual stimulation.

But for example, in not necessarily porn, but in the movies, we never see that. And so then everyone is kind of replicating what they see in the movies and no wonder it's not quite working so i think that there's also educational elements starting to kind of come forward in a lot of that kind of content as well i guess that makes sense if the demand for pornography has been skewed male then what you're seeing in the pornography would also be catered to what a male likes to believe is you know men as you like alluded to that men typically get their arousal from like what do they call it vaginal penetration i guess that's the time yeah intercourse whatever but women would typically get reach like an orgasm via clitoral stimulation

so porn tends to reflect the the former um so has has porn been a a positive or negative impact on um our perceptions and images of what our own sexual relationship should be like. Do you think? Oh, that's such a big question. Is it again? It's the one that everyone wants to know the answer to. I think that the problem that we've seen is when people have used it as an

educational resource and that's not how it was designed. Um, now what it has offered is people who are exploring their sexuality and feel that it doesn't fit, for example, the norm or expected norm. You know, however you want, whatever terminology you want to use for that. It's offered those people a sense of community or safety in exploring or belonging or knowing that they're not alone, not isolated in their experience. And so there are, you know know like everything in life there's going to be huge pros and cons and like anything in life it's how people use anything but I think for me you know working with people with sexual problems and relationship problems

isolation or feeling alone in your experience is probably the biggest side effect or negative side effect on mental health or on the problem itself of what they're experiencing of what they're struggling with and so combating that which in a way is where therapy helps you know we're kind of sharing that conversation we know that shame thrives in silence we're starting to externalize we're starting to talk about these things is making people feel they're not alone is massive i am one of the things you said i read that you'd said before which i thought was really good advice especially as it relates to keeping sex like fresh and exciting was just to change one thing every time um and i wanted to for you to tell me why you think that's important and how that helps it goes back to some of the

themes you've talked about but it was one of the things that i thought i could immediately do in my own sex life to keep things continually fresh and what are those small things that you're referring to when you say i suppose what i like about that is it's actionable so it's this idea that we can all be like empowered and in control to do something in our sex lives and you know like one of the the phrases we hear kind of all the time is like mixing it up spicing it up and what i think people get intimidated by is the idea that they have to do something massive to do that, that they have to, you know, go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. Yeah, exactly.

Or try something that they've never done before or, you know, buy 25 sex toys or, you know, try everything. And that in itself then becomes a barrier to people trying it because they're like oh god that sounds scary it's expensive as well but you know like that i it's that um god like how am i going to do that there's no stepping stones to that it's a whole like bridge a whole jump and that puts people off so again we're back to that avoidance thing you know what i'll just stay in my safe zone i'll stay in my comfort zone i'll stay where I am like the idea of trying that and it not working or trying that and it failing

feels way scarier than where we're at right now and so I think that idea of like changing one thing every time is it's also that routine doesn't kind of help or promote or um kind of encourage desire because we're like oh i know what's coming i know how this is going to go and what we're then doing is we're more likely to kind of let our thoughts wander or be distracted and we see that with people you know they're like i know what's going to go so actually i wasn't really noticing what was happening in my body or that experience i was thinking about like everything i need to do tomorrow and so what it does is it works as a way of encouraging breaking up routine now these are small things like having the lights on or having

the lights off starting with your clothes on or your clothes off keeping your underwear on or underwear off using lube or not you know taking intercourse off the table for that evening and just focusing on non-penetrative sex trying a sex toy or you know putting even something simple that i talk about is putting like your pillows on the other end of your bed so your room feels different like lighting candles changing a smell having a shower or not you know doing it in the street you can get arrested for that but um you know it's that idea of these are all accessible within range non-intimidating things that we can try to create shifts and changes is it possible for some you know because i've got this one friend and i'm sorry for just rinse one of my friends here i've

got this one friend this is a problem with being friends with me you always appear in the podcast if you've got any slight like peculiarity about you um and like i feel like all of my friends have been mentioned in this podcast at least once they just don't know where they're being mentioned but i've got this one friend who is a guy and he i've known him maybe 10 years and i've i don't think he's ever had sex and he's maybe 27 28 years old or whatever and i don't believe he's ever had sex i've never i've never seen him in a relationship he doesn't talk to girls um at all or guys for that matter um and i don't it's just so unusual because in our in our friendship group we talk about sex a lot so we're always talking

about you know who we're sleeping with and various things and we've basically just learned to just not have the conversation with him or when he's there you know if we're just like joking with each other as friends we wouldn't ever joke with him because it's just this big question mark and none of us know the answer um and i think my conclusion has become maybe he's just asexual if that's the thing yeah that's the thing and what is that thing and and if you, I'm sure you've heard about this before, right? What is, what's going on? Well, I mean, like we, we don't know what's going on for that person,

but you know, asexuality is, is some, is an identity, you know, like people who don't experience sexual attraction and what that also doesn't mean. So we have asexuality and aromanticism. So those are two different concepts. So what we can see is that people can have successful relationships and be asexuality and aromanticism so those are two different concepts so what we can see is that people can have successful relationships and be asexual because they can have connection

and friendship and intimacy and we can see that people who um are so we can understand that it's not a kind of like pairing necessarily and something I also talk about is we can have intimacy without sex and sex without intimacy now what a group that I've also worked with is lots of people who have such bad sexual anxiety and this is in no way me saying what's going on for your friend but that that limits them in sexually exploring or taking their sex life to where they want to go or dating or seeing people because what it can feel a bit like is if we get on the ladder of, for example, meeting someone or dating, then we get closer towards the source of our anxiety,

which might be sex. And I think that people who haven't had sexual experiences, and I suppose bear in mind you're only viewing this from your perspective rather than speaking to the person person you've been speaking to, is that it can feel like a snowball effect of, and it's something that I talk a lot about in therapy with people that I'm working with, is this snowball effect of,

okay, well, the older I get, the more I feel that this is a worry or the more I feel other people will judge me or the more I feel that I won't worry or the more I feel other people will judge me or the more I feel that I won't match up to what's expected of me or that I will get kind of found out. And I think that these anxieties around sex are also because what we assume is sexuality in people. So we kind of assume everyone's sexually active.

It goes back to that point about feeling isolated or alone in our experience everybody else is doing it so what's wrong with me and that the problem we have when it comes to sex is we can't know with people until we check it out we can't know until we we're judging someone's inside world based on what we see from the outside and actually what we know with sex is that they don't always match up there's no way of really knowing until we for example you know sit down with a therapist and unpack it or sit down with a friend or a family member or whoever that is we share you know a partner that conversation with i think there's

also like i was just thinking then about there's also this like wider philosophical question of like what is the purpose of sex because if you see sex as being you know just to ejaculate then you know you might encounter a bunch of issues there because the the role that sex is playing for your partner might be a completely different one so i guess at first you have to understand what role sex plays in relationships uh to your partner but also to yourself like is that what how would you define the purpose or the role of sex what is it why do we do it and what's it for we're gonna make a sex sexual therapist of you yet we'll be having my job in a minute sex with steve it's just everything you've said i'm just like reselling it um so one

of my favorite pieces of research and anyone who's listened to my podcast or any of the interviews and stuff i know is going to be so bored of hearing me bang on about this is a paper called why humans have sex um and it was done in 2007 and it identified 237 reasons for why humans have that kind of time unfortunately so next question so that it's just this understanding of like the motivations for why people have sex and there is such a wide breadth of those and that might be um you know my favorite my favorite one from that study is um because i was cold because i wanted to get warm but we can understand that you know it might be because i want an orgasm because my partner looked hot because um i wanted to feel close to them because i wanted to show them i loved them because because because

because so the meaning of sex goes so beyond the what of what we're doing but we are so focused on the what all the time and then we get so tangled up in everything that's kind of psychologically going on for us and I think that you know sometimes we're thinking about the why you know what does it represent in our relationship if we're in a relationship what does it represent to us if we're single what does it represent to us if actually the sexual relationship we have is just with ourselves you know i think that thinking about that is such a big part of us understanding ourselves sexually there's definitely emotional elements but there's also like a physical uh prehistoric maybe evolutionary role that sex plays right and has that been somewhat lost upon us now like because my body my body you know the chemicals in my body will start tickling me

and telling me that I'm horny. And then, you know, that will drive me into action. You know, I feel like the role, the sort of prehistoric evolutionary role of sex has been lost upon us a little bit, especially now that, you know, we have all this contraception and we can swerve having kids.

So I think it's become a bit of a sport for many people well sex is about pleasure isn't it i don't know you tell me well you know i think you know well what we see is that the majority of the reasons that people have sex are not to do with procreation yeah and also the the problem is i think something you kind of said earlier um was it's so goal it can be so goal orientated now again this is where so many people struggle with sex because if sex is goal orientated and as you said like the goal is to orgasm or to ejaculate or to finish, then what happens if that doesn't happen? We feel like we've failed. Yeah.

And so what it creates then is this goal orientated kind of pass or fail model for sex. Now, the complete irony of that is if we're struggling, and we're focused on where we need to get to as a goal the act of focusing on where we need to get to is actually the thing that is most likely to not get us there because it's preventative because if we are in the moment enjoying what we're doing experiencing kind of pleasure and sensations and able to enjoy it then that's actually the thing that's probably most likely to get us there. But if we're so distracted by the negative thoughts that are going on in our heads, we're so distracted by our concerns, our worries,

that is going to break down that kind of process of us getting there. Because I know a lot of people, every sentence I say sounds so strange. I was gonna say, I know a lot of people only every sentence I say sounds so strange I'm gonna say I know a lot of people that struggle with orgasms but I know I've spoken to some of my girlfriends and I've asked I've asked them if they've orgasmed and in fact my one of my ex-girlfriends she said to me that she had basically never had an orgasm in her life um which I obviously as a guy you find quite well not obviously but as a guy that has never had that

problem i found that quite peculiar and i wondered why why some people can orgasm so easily and then some people are find it a lot more difficult um in this particular case my suspicions were that it was an emotional thing in fact what you've just described there about worry this is one of the people that i know that's very very tense about the topic of sex and I just thought you know my suspicion again super naive was that they're not knowing this person um they would probably not be able to relax in bed and then when I when they became a sexual partner of mine I thought yeah they're just like not relaxed at all um but I wanted to get your take on why some some people find it so easy to orgasm and then some people just can't at all well i think it also goes back to almost like the

first time you know early messages about this stuff as well you know early messages about what it's like to have these experiences what it's like to be sexual you know is it something that's never been talked about is it something that's shrouded you know is it something that's never been talked about is it something that's shrouded in shame is it something that we um think that we shouldn't be doing or we think about ourselves a certain way for doing and so there's so many components to this as a conversation um you know probably um too many you know longer than we have time for but it's the idea of how we again think about what we're doing how we know and learn about our bodies what we know and learn about our bodies how we discover what works for us and our preferences so there's the physical element you know we talk

about an orgasm as a peak pleasure experience but also how we feel about it because if we're feeling shame or embarrassment or that we shouldn't be doing this that is going to be something which again gets in the way of us being able to fully let go and enjoy ourselves or giving ourselves in therapy we talk a lot about this idea of giving ourselves permission to be sexual or to let go or to enjoy ourselves or to experience pleasure again this is super naive, but an orgasm is a pretty natural thing, isn't it? It's like a natural physiological reaction to stimulation.

So again, super naive. I will just disclaimer from here on out that everything I say is largely naive, and I'll stop disclaimering every sentence. But someone would assume that if, you know, if we're struggling to orgasm, then there's something maybe emotional, maybe even physical that's going unmetmet there might be something physical going on but you know it's there's probably like something emotional going on but it's also about you know have we learned to do this like have we learned to kind of experience pleasure enough to take us there and

also once we do then we're like okay i understand how my body works now i understand how that feels and i think for lots of the lack of sex education here is a huge part of the problem you know pleasure has historically been left out of the conversation and particularly female pleasure who are your who are your clients who who comes to you with the sex issues and challenges the most normal people with normal problems you know everyday people for everyday problems and genders you know both men and women I work with both couples and individuals I have a lot of younger clients so a lot of my clients are kind of in that sub 45 age bracket but I work with a lot of people in the kind of early 20s and I think that the early 20s kind of 30s but also there's there's a couple of things that are going on

one is that therapy has become less less taboo in itself and sex much less taboo and we have this kind of corner of therapy which is like a sexual therapy where I think people recognise that it now can be a solution or that sexual problems aren't just medical, that actually there can be something psychological or emotional going on. And I think that the idea of accessing help for this stuff now has become much more normalised, which is brilliant, I think, and much needed. And there are some amazing amazing sexual experts and sexual therapists in this country who you know I hope are really being

and I know have really been used by people to help them improve this part of their lives and I think that again a part of it is any other aspect of our life we would go and see a doctor or go and see a physio or go and see a nutritionist or whatever it is. You know, if another part of, if a part of our body wasn't working, we would access help for it without feeling embarrassed. You know, if we'd injured our knee, we wouldn't feel embarrassed about going to ask someone about that. But why, when it comes to sex, do we feel that we shouldn't access the help and then the longer we're struggling with that the more of a problem that becomes because we don't just have the original problem but how we think and feel about it but is there like is there like an age range where people

are more likely to go and see a sexual therapist? No, I don't think there is. So you think it's evenly distributed from like 20 to 80? Yeah. Really? I mean, and I think, you know, again, it's a bit about life stages, isn't it? You know, what are people looking to explore at different stages? We see, for example, people might go after a cancer diagnosis or cancer treatment or, for example, around menopause or that there are certain health conditions that impact

sexuality or you know common side effect of a lot of anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants are an impact on sex lives or it might be that someone is starting their sexual experiences or they've had a relationship where sex has been a problem and they don't want to carry that on into their next relationship i think that it's about understanding like what has brought that person to therapy at that time is a big part of for me as a therapist anyway kind of exploring what's going on for that person what's the trigger for dealing with it now polygamy um do you have a lot of people come to you with in polygamous relationships so you mean like polyamory like multi-partner relationships and what are the issues typically that um are you'd see with yeah polyamorous polygamous relationships yeah i think

that it's something that people have a lot of questions about. It's something that, you know, I've talked about on my podcast because it's what people are curious about. Because it's also a breaking away from our kind of heteronormative, like mononormative model of relationships. And I think the big questions that people have are, how do we do this? You know, how do we navigate this you know how do we navigate this how do we manage it and that's about working out what the rules are for those people you know how do they hold what are the rules for them that work for them how do they understand the rules you know

rules around things like disclosure rules around things like how much detail do we go into how do we manage this but actually communication for lots of those relationships is really good because they have to be really good in order to manage that different style of being or you know also just the practicalities of there being more than two partners in a relationship i've always wondered if it would cause a lot more problems but i guess you've answered it there it's about setting setting clear rules and having effective communication my next my next question again which i was really excited to ask you was like what's the and this is a super hard question so just get ready yeah what are the what are the things that men don't and typically don't

understand about women when it comes to sex and vice versa oh it's a hard question isn't it it is a hard question i was just thinking i was thinking because i know men are super naive and we watch we're exposed to a certain type of media and content and then we like rush into the bedroom thinking that i don't know our partners want to be i don't know tied up or dominated or whatever else and then from the other perspective you know when you speak to a woman about sex and what she's looking for there's obviously she's experienced a certain type of media but she also is i think typically again with being super binary here um typically a woman is is is um has a slightly different expectation from the man from my experiences anyway i think part of

the problem in that is that binary approach is that if there's something that i would want everyone to understand is that we can be different but we are also so similar um you know and like this idea about like performance when it comes to sex is hugely detrimental to everyone um and again probably like what is one of the biggest things i want everyone to think about is the assumptions you know what are the assumptions that we're making about each other based on gender norms and expectations based on historical messages how do we break away from them and it might be that that's a conversation between those two people and that's the best way of doing it but also there's you know all of these kind of so many of these ideas about sex are so steeped in

history but we've never asked them we've never had them challenged so an assumption being you know a really historical message that we hear all the time something i hear all the time when i'm talking to people about like myths you know what are the sexual myths or what are the sexual rules that you think are kind of applicable to your sex life a really common one is that men initiate sex like men are the initiators of sex and women are the responders now how does that fit people then when they're like oh but that's not how it works for us or you know a for example male partner if we're talking about heterosexual you know heterosexual relationships who is less confident and a female partner who is more confident and so actually it's

the other way around but then they're thinking okay but this isn't what we think everyone else is doing so maybe there's a problem here when there isn't because that's what's working for them and you see big distinctions between the issues that heterosexual and and homosexual relationships have i think that what same-sex relationships don't battle with as much is the gender assumptions the gender narratives the gender norms that kind of idea of like men do this and women do this but you know there are also kind of every relationship struggles in some way with that dynamic of we're two individuals how do we work on our differences and our similarities together that interrelational part which is what happens between us you know how

what are our triggers what how do we kind of what makes us both anxious or what makes us both feel secure or what makes us both feel closer and also navigating that you know that that's really the battle that all couples have again super naive question but i'm sure it's one of the most popular questions you get asked which is like is there a healthy amount of times for a couple to have sex per week or whatever super naive question but i'm sure it's one of the most popular questions you get asked which is like is there a healthy amount of times for a couple to have sex per week or whatever and you know one would assume that changes over time right because i think i know just judging by my relationships at start we start like fucking

energizer bunny rabbits and then you know life happens but is there you know and i hate these questions because that again they're so like unnuanced and so like narrow but is there an average amount of times that couples you would you know if you had to answer this question and not swerve it in this for the sake of nuance what would the answer be i would like to know what you think the answer is i think again contact like i'm going to go into nuance in here but context matters like if you live on opposite sides of the world then obviously there's there's barriers but if you're living in the same house if you're cohabiting living in the same house i think like at least twice a week you know once in the weekend

tuesday i don't know but where okay so where do you think um that idea of twice a week would comes from just looking at my schedule wait a minute oh look where can i find time probably like once in the week and on the weekends i have a bit more time so um yeah but i mean it obviously changes over time i feel like i'd probably have sex every night but if i you know but just energy levels and yeah what's the answer then so someone i um interviewed talked about the amount of sex we have as a red herring so the kind of regularity of sex doesn't determine like the satisfaction of it or the kind of pleasure of it or the enjoyment of it. And I think what it feels like we've been trying to do is find an objective way of measuring sex.

So it's this idea of, OK, well, we're all trying to find the answer to sex, like how to be good at sex, like what that looks like, how to know where we pitch ourselves against everyone else. And regularity is one of the only kind of objective measures we have of that. So it's the one that we kind of all lean into or we want to know the answer to. Whereas what I would say is, I don't think we do have an idea of, I don't know what kind of modern like surveys say there's a

big survey that's done um kind of every few years but i haven't actually seen the results of that one yet but what about the monkeys how often do they do i feel like they were like i haven't asked them what are the orangutans doing um i haven't got a clue okay i need to find out maybe your next guest yeah i'm still like a zoologist next guest yeah but i think that the the thing is is working out again and what it what we're looking for is a measure of like how we're doing yeah by knowing that um answer and i think one of the things is for some couples it might be as you said they might kind of work in different countries it might be every time they see each other they have great sex and that's enough like that's works for them for other couples it might be we have sex once a month and it's really good you know we're both enjoying ourselves and we feel

like our needs are met great for other people it might be once a week you know I think it's about determining like what your normal is or what your what is right for you but again the kind of worries and anxieties and stresses come from a we're not having enough sex why is that yeah you know is it because my partner is no longer attracted to me that tends to be the first thing people go to and what's going on um is it because our relationship isn't working is it when we don't have a clear kind of obvious answer like we've just had a baby for example um so there's the assumptions that go with that why has sex changed what's going on but also the well everyone else is having sex once a week and we're having sex once a month so that we must have a problem there must be something wrong with

us speaking of my ex-girlfriends i feel like i've slightly thrown several of them under the bus but i had another relationship this go this goes back a little bit further where i just like fell in love with this girl in every other aspect non-sexual so intellectually in every other way and then when it came time to have sex which was actually quite a little bit later than it usually is in the relationships that i have like three four months into to knowing this person um there was i don't know how to say this because it just sounds i'll just go for it um the the I tend to think

especially when it comes to like vaginal penetration that it's like a hand in a glove and the hand in the glove didn't match and again I genuinely thought

that I could have spent the rest of my life with this person but I saw that as a like insurmountable object like my penis didn't suit her vagina and i thought we can't change it can't change this um yeah is this something that people come to you about often they talk about like the

practicalities the practicalities like the hand in the glove yeah i think it is and you know there are for example like conditions that mean that people can't have sex for numerous reasons so like sexual dysfunctions or you know particularly for women there is a condition called vaginismus which is where there's an involuntary contracting of the pc muscles the pelvic floor muscles where they're unable to have sex and that we think affects about one in 500 women in no way am i saying that's necessarily what was happening here but you know we also know that that it's about how we work together as couples how we work with bodies what would make things more helpful how we can

look for kind of practical advice but it's about understanding like okay how do we help ourselves here rather than again that assumption of like something's going wrong because it made me believe in this like idea of like there's a physical compatibility to sex as well not just like a desire compatibility or like you know an experimentation compatibility but there's like a physical um compatibility as well to having like good sex where you can just like physically not be compatible but i suppose it's then aware how do you if you want to like explore working around a roadblock near how do you kind of because that's so hard to talk about like i could never bring my i could talk about the um libido issue with

my partner but i could never tell that partner that i wasn't that I was basically turned off by our lack of physical compatibility. I could never mention it. So I ended up, the relationships, I tried multiple times to like fix it in various ways and I just couldn't bring myself to talk about it because I didn't want to hurt the person. I didn't want to say something that might hurt them and stay with them forever. So I ended the relationship on the grounds of something else, but that was fundamentally the issue. I've actually only had two relationships in my life but like sexual partners in my life that ended purely because of that but yeah and i think it's so hard again isn't it because we

just don't know how to tackle these topics as you say like how do we manage talking about something or exploring something that we just have no idea where even to start and I don't want to offend the person which is that must be it must be a huge thing in the work that you do like not wanting to offend your partner because as you said it's such a sensitive topic and I don't know how I could have approached that situation without offending the person and I think that it's the fear of judgment like the fear of offending the fear of hurting our partners the fear of us not being able to go back once we kind of it feels a bit like Pandora's box for some people like this idea of talking about sex in a relationship you know like if I open this up like

how do we close it or I think a lot of people have the fear of if I open this up then every time we have sex we're both going to be thinking about this and we're both going to be completely in our heads and what we know is when we're completely in our heads when it comes to sex we're not experiencing what's going on in our bodies and that is interrupting arousal you know the body's process of us kind of enjoying you know our body kind of working with us the kind of sexual arousal process and so you know our thoughts are as distracting as they're kind of being like someone in the room that's not the person we're having sex with or you know someone actually like walking in or kind of saying all of that stuff to us just because our thoughts are not a physically represented

being doesn't mean they're not as distracting as something else and you're completely right because from then on i didn't say anything but i carried on trying i thought maybe you know one bad experience whatever we'll try again we'll try again and it got to the point where i was i i was almost avoiding sex because i knew that it was going to be an issue and i started to overthink and as a guy overthinking is not what you want to be doing when you're trying to maintain yourself so I um so I started having issues keeping my erection up because I was just I was walking in I was getting in the bed thinking oh my god here we fucking go again and I've got a you know like are you

gonna be able to get it up because you you really don't enjoy this and and that all of that just became too much I couldn't tell her because I didn't want to insult her and I was starting to have problems like you know being aroused because it was a big issue and you're right it's a snowball and performance anxiety is one of the key things that I work with with men because where there is not a physical kind of indicator or reason for why they might be struggling for example with erections because getting into your head too much again creates a speed bump for sexual arousal because when you're feeling stressed or you're feeling anxious you're in that kind of fight flight freeze state your body is preparing not for you to kind of lie down

have sex and be comfortable and relaxed but it's preparing for that kind of threat response and that is not compatible with being sexual in that moment so in a way your body's kind of working against you and so what you have to do then is work on this kind of like frontal bit of your brain, you know, your thoughts, like focusing on that in order to, in a way, like reprogram because sex has become not fun,

exciting, pleasurable, connecting. It's become anxiety provoking stressful fearful you know don't want to be here would rather avoid so in a way the way i describe it a lot is the meaning of sex has changed so the way we relate to it has changed how does one give their partner good positive constructive feedback do you know what i mean like is there like because i'm sure this i was thinking then i'm sure there's so many people listening to this that are in relationships that would like their sex to be slightly different and they they probably in the same way that i was anxious about approaching it with my xxxxx girlfriend um what is the best way to approach these sensitive self-esteem

attached topics with your partner not in the moment when you're having sex so not just kind of like in bed like just before because also what you don't want to do is you know kind of create like a sense a further sense of like stress or anxiety like in that sexual space so what i always talk to people about is like leading with a positive you know like i really love our relationship like i'm loving what we're doing but maybe there's something we can work on here or how can we do this better or so leading with a positive you know the affirmation because if someone comes at you and um you know we're often really sensitive to criticism also in our intimate relationships and this isn't good enough or you're not doing this or

our immediate response is defensive or attacking we're not open to hearing what they have to say we're already like shut down before they've even got there so kind of approaching it with like that positive framework or like connecting framework or open framework and also let's work on this together this is a shared venture something we want to do together some you know it's something for us to think about like how can we go about this because what can also happen is we isolate the problem in one partner yeah when there are two of us there i guess i guess another sort of attached to that would be just telling them what you you like as opposed to what you don't like. So it's just like the same outcome, but different framing.

So it's like, oh, I like when you blindfold me or I don't like when you don't blindfold me. You know what I mean? And just making it... Some of my sort of sexual partners that have given me positive feedback in the past have done so by telling me what they like more of. Because then we can lean into that and we all like to be told we're doing a good job we all like to be affirmed we all like to be especially in sex because we don't have a reference point of you know are we doing a good job and we feel you know if we think we are bad at sex that's really personal yeah isn't it it's brutal you know that's really a difficult

thing to hold on to and then we go into our next sexual situation thinking i'm bad at this and actually what that's more likely to do is make us struggle and actually when people are relaxed and comfortable and calm in those situations they're able to connect with the other person more and we're kind of able to i suppose follow the pleasure path a bit more or kind of affirm each other a bit more and understand that actually if someone says can you touch me here it's not because you weren't doing it the right way it's just because that might be their preference but we cannot be mind readers we cannot know what our partner's like until we communicate that with them that's such a fascinating thing as well that we never know if we're good at

sex we're just like kind of trusting our part and especially because you see all these movies and we read these magazines about people faking orgasms as a guy i swear to god the first couple of times someone said that i was like good and better whatever i thought you're full of shit i thought you say this to everybody and then like I still I still and I've heard that a few times whatever but I still don't know and that's crazy that like with everything else you have a fairly um accurate gauge of whether you're good at it but because we've never seen like pretty much shit really we've never like seen anyone um doing it in real life or really got to observe it outside of the fakeness of porn and you don't know how it feels for the other person and sometimes you don't even

know if they're faking it or if it's real you can't i well for me in my mind i'm like kind of float through life assuming you're doing okay until told otherwise but it also assumes that here we go again good at sex is a formula that you can apply across the board like everybody it's every sexual experience is going to be different between those partners in that time in that moment in that context it is not like a universally applicable formula. Now, what we can do is we can, I thought I was good.

Sorry, I just burst your bubble. But my ex said I was. We know what we can do is we can feel more informed. So we can meet. No, I consider a big part of my job to be helping people to make informed choices about their sexual wellness and well-being so that might be you know thinking about the

narratives that have shaped how they think about sex thinking about their current definition of sex thinking about sex education how can they feel informed about things like anatomy things like their body their preferences their likes and the communication bit how do I then communicate that with a partner and all of that can contribute to better sexual self-confidence and again what we know is like sexual self-confidence is in that person again it's reflected back to them in situations with other people but really it's kind of all about that relationship with self and I know that sounds very therapy and something that all therapists say but it's really true because we put ourselves in those sexual

contexts in those sexual situations for some people they might never struggle with sex they might have kind of muddled through you know like trial and error worked it out kind of and always and be okay and they're satisfied and that's great. And that's great. But for some people, they do struggle. For some people, they have a period of normal sexual functioning, and then they start to struggle. And it might be that they've never thought about sex really before, until they feel like they have to. So again, there's no kind of one route to all of this. And although there are themes, for example, in the conversations that i have with people everyone has their own journey their own story their own experiences that have shaped that

and some of it can start in you know the playground like playground banter about what sex is like but at a younger age when we're quite impressionable and that sounds really scary what people are talking about we can kind of carry that with us and then it presents further down the line or we might have had a negative sexual experience early which means that we then don't want to try again and so we hold on to that negative experience because we've had no in a way like challenging or corrective or other more positive experiences which can go against those ideas we're ever evolving you know humans and people and we're changing in every way uh you know mentally physically i think one of the things that has it's going to be honest because i think

that's just the point i think i think when i'm honest i think i resonate with more people one of the things i'm slightly concerned about is that at some point in my life I'll fall in love with somebody and the sex will be great and everything and then me or them will change in that we could change in a variety of different ways whether it's our desire but but more so even like I'm we might not be attracted to each other anymore I might you know deteriorate in some form and I wonder how much of an issue that like two people changing and falling out of attraction with each other is um prevalent in the work that you do in the pit and the people that you know come to you for therapy and for advice I think it is it's not probably the most prevalent thing i deal with but also what you're basing that on is an assumption that that's not something that can be worked at

it's not something that people accept when they are in a relationship with each other or that they you know i think it goes back to that relationships moving in stages and phases bit as well and i think there's that's that fear of like things not always staying the same whereas actually what I would say is if we accept that things don't always stay the same then we can change and work with that and accept it and improve it or adapt you know as humans we're really really adaptable but we want to feel encouraged in that rather than i suppose kind of put off or challenged by the fact that we need to in the world we live in now there's just this incredible like perception of choice i'd say like more so than when my grandparents around i imagine

their dating their sort of circle of possible matches extended to like the size of their like street or village didn't have tinder yeah exactly they didn't have tinder or instagram but now in my relationships if like if it's not going well i've got apparently a gazillion people right here that are perfect they're all filtered and i think you know 32 000 of them just like my photo so if i lose attraction with my partner in the world we live in now where we've got this huge sort of perceived amount of choice and accessibility just one swipe you know it must make holding relationships together at times when they hit you know rocks more difficult than ever before no yeah I think that there are often ideas that like the grass is always greener, but equally we understand that relationships take work.

And I think we've seen a breakdown of norms. We've seen that divorce rates are at an all-time high, but it's not the same stigma that it used to be, that people changing their models of relationships or changing relationships is not such a big thing. But also something that I think is important to say is just because a relationship has ended doesn't mean that in itself it wasn't successful and I think that's another thing that we need to it's like to reframe you know people can be in a

relationship for 10 years and it ends that doesn't mean that relationship failed or was a failure it might have been for that person at that time this is part of the issue in my view with marriage because marriage you say till death do us part but we all know that if there's the only constant is change we're all going to change so how can you honestly make a commitment that you're going to stay with this person or why would you want to until death knowing that you're both going to change in various ways that are yet to be seen but can't you also change together in a positive way you can like i think i think people are moving they can move if you think about it as like two parallel lines they can go they could be slightly tilted one degree to the right which means that in 10

years time they'll be too far apart or they could be slight one degree to the left which means that in 10 years time they'll be closer together um or they could be perfectly straight right so perfectly parallel which means that in 10 years time they'll be the same they'll resonate in the same way they'll be as close you know whatever but you don't know that yet so i think that that's why i've always been slightly let down by the concept of marriage because i think you know you can't predict the future so why would you want to make something like that so final um and i've i've i think like you know the men in black have you seen men in black oh god a long time ago where they get the pen and they they hold it up and if they press the button on the pen basically it raises your memory i sometimes think i think if if we held that pen

up to the world and it raised everybody's memory what are the things that would come back like science would come back religion would never come back the same we wouldn't it wouldn't come back the same right science we would figure all the same things out same experiments marriage i'm like no it wouldn't come back the same not in 2021 i don't think that would come back the same um i think we'd have a much more bespoke open flexible form of marriage that would involve less of the law and would involve less of the church um and i probably think would be a little bit more effective so i guess my question is about marriage what do you think about marriage are you married I am

so okay well careful what I say now you know I think that it's what what does it offer people you know like what are people looking for and I think for a lot of people it's security you know and it's it's not from within security though like I think I tend to I'm gonna play devil's advocate here because I think if you're looking for security from like a legal contract, I'm like, then that for me speaks to a little bit of insecurity somewhere else.

But I think it's also about, you know, I suppose marriage has been the norm, right? Historically, it's always been the norm. It's always been also considered the gold standard or like what we should kind of aspire to be or aim for and I think that again you know that that impact of history like us doing the things that we've always done but it is an institution and a lot of people subscribe to that now what we see now is that people can be married multiple times and be happy in every relationship or it be perfect for that stage

or for them or for that relationship that people don't need to get married that people can parent and become parents without being married that it's I suppose the biggest um representation of commitment that historically we've always had and people now can find other ways to commit to each other you know buying property together that doesn't require it so i suppose children it's probably the biggest commitment but it's also about what those people are looking for i think i think that's you know people think i'm really against marriage it's actually not the truth and my friends say to me oh steve's against marriage

i've listened to his podcast i'm like no you didn't listen what i'm against what i'm for is a more bespoke um tailored approach to how two people come together i actually had a friend of mine say to me this week that he and he will be listening to this podcast for sure he said um he thinks he can only be with someone for a year at a time he says after a year i just i don't think i can you know the relationship can't go on so So he's having these continual one year relationships. And look, I guess the most important macro question is like, are you happy? Yeah. And people's happiness is derived in various ways.

I do think marriage is somewhat, do you know what? I think maybe it's because I tend to have a perspective that conventional solutions aren't always very well equipped to solve new problems. And the world we're living in is a very new one. We're living longer than ever before. We're exposed to different types of information. We have much more freedoms than I think some of our ancestors used to have. So maybe the way that humans commit to each other

should not involve the law. It shouldn't take two years to divorce someone, which I think is crazy. But i think it doesn't have to and i suppose it's about what people are looking for and i suppose as you you know you're asking earlier about like multi-partner relationships or like you know consensual non-monogamy it's about us making informed choices about what works for us and our relationships and I mean this is actually a conversation I was having with someone just yesterday is how do we feel more informed you know how do we explore what that might look like in another way because for some people trying to

fit into what they feel they're expected to do might not work for them it's a it's a system or a model that doesn't work so how do we then start to like open up that conversation for ourselves but also we have our fears you know we're humans we like to I suppose feel that we fit the normal fit what's expected or you know some of us do at least that what will other people think of me if i step outside that so as humans we have that balance of like what do i want but also what will other people think yeah which i think is typically quite awful yeah but it isn't it one of the biggest things that drives people in a lot of ways drives them drives them where though like i think i just think in every facet of life it's like your mom wants you to be a doctor but you really want to

be a ballet dancer in costa rica and it's like you know what's expected of you you know you're expected to go get married or and then become a doctor but like your intrinsic joy will come from going and being a ballet dancer in costa rica and uh not getting married or whatever and smoking i don't know whatever in the mountains over there but you know i tend i tend to believe and this is probably there's no like i don't have a huge scientific basis for this i have a couple of like philosophical studies i've read but that um people who abandon like their true selves or that conform to society's expectations typically have at some point in their lives some kind of um moment of realization where they realize

that they've not not fulfilled themselves as they could have isn't this back to that point of like expectation versus reality though yeah i guess so like the gap between what we expect and then where we kind of find ourselves to be or what we what that looks like yeah because I think again that's that and also you know I'm it's that idea again we I feel like I talk about gaps a lot but that idea that gap between the person I kind of know myself to be in the person I show everybody else that I am and the bigger that gap the more space for struggles or battles or mental health challenges around that. And this might just be the title of this video, because I think it will be. So we'll clickbait this part.

What is the single biggest killer of relationships in the modern age, in 2021, in your view? If you had to say this one thing is the the single the biggest killer of relationships what would it be unrealistic expectations one of the big problems you you talked about it earlier this idea of like what we see in the movies so we're like oh that's what it's like so then when it's not like that we're like, oh, that's what it's like. So then when it's not like that, we're disappointed. Our partner fails us. They haven't met our expectations. They haven't met all of our needs.

You know, we talk about this idea, lots of relationship experts talk about this idea of how we shouldn't expect one person, our partner, to meet every single one of our needs, but we do. And so they're kind of doomed to fail then in that way so how do we change that how do we start to kind of like open that up how do we you know we have other relationships in our lives we have family we have friends we have colleagues you know we need to start to think about like how we can do that for ourselves and then we work with our partners to create

something together I completely resonate with that and I think most of my relationships fail because the expectation that my partner has on me goes unmet because I am very selfish and I like to work all the time and to think about my stuff all the time and I'm like very self-absorbed and when I have free time I just want to like I don't know do something for me um I've tried over the years to like manage that expectation by making it clear as early as I possibly can that like work is a huge part of my life and I am very selfish selfish sounds like such a negative word but it means that like I'm so consumed with my passions and the things yeah like you could say focused I use selfish because it makes it because I'm trying to take a little bit of blame i guess but i am so consumed with my passions like

i will work all day and then i'll go on youtube and want to watch something about spacex and elon must taking spaceships to mars and then in the morning you know i just want to do and i i kind of want them to do their own thing as well so i try and very early on lay that expectation down but it just never seems to work because at the start, someone will tell you that they, oh, they're cool with that. They're never cool with that, ever.

I suppose it's about that, you know, relationships are about that balance of independence and dependence. And so it's where that balance sits. I want independence. I want them to be independent, me to be independent and will like me in the middle sometimes.

But yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm the problem because I think that compromise is important. I don't think I compromise very often as much as I should. I went through my life, I think pretending that I was just so focused on my work and no one could deal with it but i probably think that i'm also like i think selfish is probably the word and

unwilling to compromise and like i think like the negative version of selfish is also the word where like i prioritize my my needs more than someone else's i think that's caused me a lot of problems i sit with people on this podcast all the time that's super successful and they they'll they largely struggle in relationships do you think that's because their primary relationship then is with their work yeah and themselves because it meets you know and we we see that right we know people talk about their businesses as their babies you know like that's my first baby or that's my baby and i think that you know are we for some people we get our needs met through our businesses through our passions through our sport through our careers and for some people they might get enough of their needs for relationships met

in those kind of smaller doses or not in those kind of like single intimate or couple or relational relationships but they have that met in other ways across the board or in kind of smaller ways now who are we to pathologize that i suppose difficult i was hoping you'd have all the answers i'm sorry i definitely don't have all the answers i can but compromise is important right yeah but in any relationship you you compromise with people you work with you compromise with friends you compromise with family member like we all we all have to compromise because relationships are however many people there are but you know if we're talking about couples two people who are independent different people trying to work together and they're not going to perfectly fit together or be aligned in every single way so how do we navigate

that when you're running your own business though and you're the ceo you don't have to compromise as much do you know what i mean things tend to go on your schedule when you know you get to kind of lay down so in your and then transitioning into your personal life, you have to almost perform the opposite behavior, which is like high patience, listening. When you're the CEO, you can, you know, condense things how you want. You're leaning into your natural way of working. And things are kind of going at your cadence within your, how you want things to happen. Whereas in your personal life, that's maybe where I've struggled. i'm like i've learned one behavior in my professional life which is about

saving time on everything and optimizing everything to be more productive and performance based yeah and i'm like i don't want any sentence to be longer than like it needs to be um so then transitioning into my private life where things you know you can shall we go for a walk a fucking walk like i'm like what are you doing what a waste of time what for like do you know what i mean and i think i've struggled with that transition because the decision making framework i have whether that i use at work can't be the same isn't applicable oh my god it's the worst and sometimes maybe it seeps over into my personal life so they're different it's almost worst and sometimes maybe it seeps over into my personal life so they're different it's almost like different operating systems exactly exactly two different objectives

do you think that so if i like kind of push that back onto that kind of question of like how relationships work back onto you then do you think that entrepreneurs or people who then kind of go out on their own and do that are more prone to that different way of relating or more that's their more natural style as in do i think they're more likely to say sorry just to make sure in terms of you were saying like you know as a ceo you're like the person in charge you set the agenda you set the time like it's more you're kind of leading that that in a way that might be a piece of being an entrepreneur is someone who kind of puts their head down and does that yeah but and it's also like heavily learned it's like you learn imagine if you put i don't know they say like you know how diamonds are made that it's like the pressure over a million years or whatever.

You get pressured over 10 years and you learn a philosophy for your use of time, for how you want things to happen, whatever. And that becomes part of your character. Even if it wasn't when you were, you know, 10 years before, when going through that experience, it makes it part of your character where you're like quite impatient. Things, you know, typically operate in, when going through that experience, it makes it part of your character where you're like quite impatient.

Things, you know, typically operate in the way you want them to. So you learn that personal philosophy because that's what made you successful. And also that's what's required to succeed. It's also what's celebrated, right? Yeah. And I genuinely think that it's,

for me anyway, I mean, of course I've got these crazy hindsight biases, but that's what was required for me to get to where i needed to get to but if i want to be successful in my relationships then it's like all these other things which is like compromise and patience and doing things for the sake of doing them as opposed to where they're gonna get you yeah with some kind of outcome that's what i've struggled with anyway um but anyway enough about me you know a lot of stuff, right? Questionable.

Yeah, you've learned a lot of stuff. So how easy do you find it to implement all of this stuff that you know into your own life and your own relationships? I always, whenever I have like an expert and a specific topic on, I'm always fascinated by their own ability to apply their knowledge in their own lives. I mean, I think, you know, speaking for myself in this space like I think we can I can be a hypocrite I think we can all be hypocrites in our own ways and you know that's

because we're also all human you know we all still have our our triggers our anxieties our defenses and I try my best and I think that you know that's the best you can do but I think that relationships there's an acknowledgement that relationships take work and take nurture and I think that you know that's the best you can do but I think that relationships there's an acknowledgement that relationships take work and take nurture and I think actually when you kind of talk about this stuff all the time you actually sometimes need to kind of step back and be like okay so what am I doing here you know like at home how do I implement this as a partner as a parent as a family member as a friend And it's kind of acknowledging that and being thoughtful of it. And I think that there's also that idea of how am I best working with or serving the people close to me

rather than everything else, something else to do. For me, it's about pulling away, I suppose, from being a yes man. There was a stage in my life and career when I said yes to absolutely everything. And now you have to be a bit more selective because otherwise then you lose the quality time and I think that quality time is an important part and it's actually making sure that it's carved out protected

so I think for me that's a big part of it but yeah I think not you know what what is the perfect relationship you know we're all working at everything all the time and I don't pretend because I'm someone that works with relationships and sex I've not to be working at it myself I bet all your friends come to you so last night are you like did you get that a lot I think a bit but you know I think I feel incredibly um fortunate that I have a very you know emotionally open, emotionally intelligent group of friends. I surround myself with people where we have those open conversations. We are able to go

to the difficult places. It is very mutually supportive and none of us pretend to have it all worked out or that it's all perfect. I think there's a celebration of the perfectly imperfectness yeah of it all and also putting our hands up and be like wow this week is tough or I'm really

struggling with this or you know this is going on and I think that there's something in knowing you can pick up the phone and just say that that is hugely hugely important do you ever instruct or advise any of your patients to this is a fucking rogue question but it just came to my mind to go and get some kind of like training sexual training is that a thing i've seen it in like a documentary i think like a place in amsterdam you can go and they'll teach you how to you know give someone a hand job or something i don't know no i think you know i think the where we're at now you know in the world is that there are online platforms kind of creating i suppose like more instructional content so there's an amazing one

and which launched by the kinsey institute which is one of the leading kind of sexuality research institutes in the world. And it's a platform called OMG Yes. And it's basically about helping like instructional videos and interviews about like how to create female orgasm or stimulate female pleasure. What was that website again? I'll send it to you. but i think that you know we are now you know with sexual wellness and well-being becoming such a big important topic we're seeing that these platforms are coming up which are to help instruct or to help offer advice and that means that the educational content is available to people and i recommend lots of that stuff because if people feel informed

they feel more confident and that means that they can have actionable things to work on to build on and that they're more able to be like okay yeah i can i understand how this works now whether this is our bodies or someone else's bodies to a certain extent so that can kind of help set me up for a sexual experience and lastly just to wrap sort of loop around from the from the start what are the if you were to say that they were there were similarities in couples that do enjoy great sexual relationship just principles top-line principles what are those sort of key distilled top-line principles um such a big question communication communication yeah is like top of the tree and i think i think it's top of the tree and i think it's the one that people don't want to hear because it's less actionable and it's quite scary yeah exactly it's like

in a way i think talking about it is the hardest thing to do and but it is you know any relationship kind of expert any expert in the sexual kind of do. And, but it is, you know, any relationship kind of expert, any expert in the sexual kind of wellbeing, health space will say to you that communication is that. And then it's like, okay, but how do I do that? And,

you know, we talk about these communication exercises, things like kind of speaking from your own position. So like I say, so there's a place called the Gottman institute and they have you know done so much research on couples but it's this ownership like my feelings are i'm feeling my perspective is because actually what you're not saying to your partner is you yeah it's not blame it's not blame exactly so i think that the communication part unlike positive communication is a big part of

that but it's that break away from assumption it's like clarification on assumption assumption is what trips us up so much of the time because we're mind reading we think we know what our partner's going to say before they say it so we don't even give them a chance yeah that's true well listen thank you so much for your time i feel like um it's been a very enlightening conversation and i i appreciate that the fact that you've taken the burden of all of my sexual every sexually sure i've ever had and it's good to get it out of there i feel like this was therapy for me more than anything else but um where can people find you and i know you're involved in a bunch of other projects i know that you've got a sex toy project which you're involved in as well

so where can people find you and reach you yeah so my website is my name katemoyle.co.uk I host a podcast called the sexual wellness sessions where we have informative but informal conversations about different areas of sexual well-being so whether that's desire sexual functioning kind of sexual mindset infertility and sex you know try and I try and cover kind of um specific subjects around like what people might be struggling with um and then i'm on instagram at cape oil therapy but um the sex toy project is i'm the uk sex expert for lilo so um luxury sex toy brand and they do some amazing amazing products as well so and i work with um brands kind of creating like sexual kind of

wellness focused I suppose projects or huge products yeah and I think brands are really trying to get it right and I really really respect that I think that's amazing so I actually love that work because it feels like it's taking the learning from inside the therapy room and putting it out into the world and hopefully then that's creating that social cultural kind of sex positive shift that i think we all need well thank you so much for coming on today it's a real pleasure to speak to you and i was so i've been so excited about this conversation for a long time probably because i've been able to unload on my own personal issues but because you're someone that really um has a powerful insight on a part of our lives that as you say is taboo and often not talked

about enough and that's why I thought it was good to to have this as one of the pages in this podcast's diary so thank you so much and um I'm sure we'll uh we'll I'll be in touch with you all my other issues every year I'll be in touch just just wanted to say thank you. Thanks.