The holidays are coming up, and this is often a stressful time for a lot of couples.
The stress and busyness can often lead couples to fall into dry spells in their sex life. And Emily and I are not immune to those dry spells either. So whether you’re in a dry spell or looking to avoid one, this episode is for you! We’re going to cover practical ways to keep your marriage and sex life going strong through all the seasons of life.
Episode highlights:
4:37: Seeing the Patterns in Your Relationship
6:13: Calm the heck down
7:18: Notice emotions and how they present in your body
7:40: The measure of your marriage isn’t how you handle yourself when things are going well, but when life is hard
9:00: Separate the act of sex from the meanings attached to it.
11:04: When we look to our spouse, as a reason behind the dry spell, it opens you up to a potential of self-deception
12:25: Routine kills passion
14:34: Need both love and desire
17:37: Offer good sex
19:07: Questions to ask yourself and thoughts to consider
21:55: “But my spouse doesn’t want to change”
Resources:
Sexual Mindfulness Seminar Series with Dr. Chelom Leavitt
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors or inaccuracies. For the most accurate and complete experience, we recommend listening to the full podcast episode.
#211: Sexual Dry Spells: When Safety Kills Passion
Dan: [00:00:00] Sex is about sharing a special moment together or another one. Sex is about just having fun and to play as an adults it’s actually really fun to do and be done by each other. It’s not about routine. It’s not about the same old script. but we’d like to switch it up a bit because we know variety is the key to vitality in a long-term sexual relationship.
Hello, everyone.
Dan: Welcome to this episode of the get your marriage on podcast, whether you’re just out walking the dog or in the car driving, and you’re listening to this or wherever you are, I’m just grateful that I get to be here with you [00:01:00] today.
We recently finished our couples retreat and it was amazing.
The many couples that attended, they really inspired me. And I’m always inspired by the courage, insight and transformation that these couples at our retreat go through in just a weekend.
There’s just something special about setting aside a weekend away from distractions, where you can just focus on doing a deep dive into your intimate relationship.
Anyway, I hope you can join us for our next retreat in March.
Emily. And I are also getting a lot out of the sexual mindfulness seminar series from Dr. Chelom Leavitt. She’s a really gifted teacher and knows her stuff. And it’s no wonder that her research has been cited over a thousand times in academic peer reviewed journals. Emily and I are doing the assignments for each session and we’re growing together and it’s been really fun. The holidays are coming up, and this is often a stressful time for a lot of couples.
This can often lead to times where couples get into dry spells with their sex life. And. W on that immune, Emily and I are not immune [00:02:00] to dry spells either. And we’ve definitely had our fair share. Today. I want to talk about how to break out of a dry spell or avoid one altogether.
So picture this, your regular routine has been disrupted a little.
You haven’t used schedule, let’s say a child is attending a new school, which means an earlier wake up time to get them there on time.
And although you’re waking earlier, you have not yet figured out how to get to bed. And he earlier, so as the week struck on you’re feeling more and more tired, you’re not getting enough exercise too.
And then you get sick. You catch a cold as if it’s your body’s way of telling you, hello, pay attention to me.
Get some rest. That’s good to healthier routine here. And being sick is never fun. Right? You’re not your optimal self. So things you otherwise just take care of, tend to go to the wayside. They go on the back burner and they stockpile and all these unfinished tasks keep mounting. And so does your stress. You might become more guarded about your bedtime or personal time, and you want to take better care of yourself [00:03:00] and mixing there some travel away for a weekend and then added work obligations and other things called life. In the midst of all this, it’s really easy for sex to slip to the wayside. So fast forward a couple of weeks, you realize you and your spouse feel like you’ve drifted apart.
There’s tension between the two of you over seemingly small things.
That emotional connection. Isn’t really close and. Not having meaningful sex in a while is a symptom of U2 just growing apart, you’re in a dry spell. You don’t know really exactly how it happened. It just sort of snuck up on you.
Now it’s 11 o’clock at night and it’s late and you’re tired and you want a good night’s sleep and wake up early, hopefully to even get in some exercise. But you hate the distance you feel between you and your spouse. So you have a dilemma.
Do you make a move, even though it was really late? Or do you get some extra sleep? Will making the attempt at closing our gap, start an argument, and then I’d regret that even I attempted to try to close the gap right now. [00:04:00] So do I avoid the situation altogether or I just sulk and resent my spouse for the distance we have. Why won’t my spouse make the first move you might ask yourself.
They’re just as much at fault for distance as of late.
Dry spells and dilemmas like this. It’s just part of married life, but there are some three principles I want to discuss and teach today that will hopefully help you break out of your dry spells faster or avoid them altogether, especially with the stress of the upcoming holidays. The three things I want to talk to you about is first of all, seeing your pattern in your relationship.
Second, how routine kills passion and number three, why we need to offer good sex.
So first let’s talk about seeing your pattern and all this.
It seems to be that the longer your dry spell goes on the harder and more energy it takes to break that dry spell. Now you’re very human. We have stresses illnesses. We drift apart. We fall into routines or fall out of routines. We have a little arguments again, the way these things happen, this is called life.
This means you’re [00:05:00] absolutely human. you have failings and shortcomings, just like everyone else. So give yourself a little bit of grace here and just understand that this is just part of the journey.
Now what can really prolong the dry spell though this is how you react to your spouse. For example, let’s say you go to make a move and your spouse sends a signal that now is not a good time. So you do something else. The immature version will be very reactive, like maybe pout. Maybe thinking like, well, if the shop is closed, then I’m going to invest my energy elsewhere, such as in gaming or the kids or things like that.
The mature version is less reactive. It’s about defining yourself as to who are going to be even in the face of rejection or potential rejection. And what I mean by that is. It’s not about just always reacting or living in reaction to the way your spouse is behaving to you, then they react to you and then you react to them and it just, the cycle goes around and round.
It’s just paying more [00:06:00] attention to what your choices and options are. Now, this may never be really clear in the moment, but let me try to articulate something that actually might help you as a practice. Uh, the first step is in these moments is what I call calm the heck down. And what I mean by that is that we tend to get overly anxious. That there’s a dry spell. And then we react out of that anxious energy.
We have a scarcity mindset about sex and what’s what’s happening and what’s not happening. And so we’re trying to control the situation. And it’s out of this anxious energy. But we need to do is really focus on calming down things on the inside. Even if the outside looks calm, the inside needs a bit. Get calm. Now, this means we got to get really good at recognizing when you’ve become a little dysregulated or highly reactive and maybe a little, uh, regressed in your brain functioning. And then taking the steps to calm herself down. To get a better hold [00:07:00] on yourself so that you can actually think this is a crucial relationship skill, because you can’t solve your problems from a reactive regressed state of mind. And body. Now calming down isn’t about pushing away or clamping down your emotions. That never really helps in the long-term.
It begins by noticing the emotions and how they present in your body. This requires to be really present with yourself. And then the process is requires giving yourself a lot of self-compassion and leaning into and processing those emotions in a healthy way.
I don’t go into depth on exactly how did that in this podcast episode, I have other episodes that cover that.
And for sure, we go into this in great depth in my coaching program.
But just remember this. The measure of a marriage. Isn’t how you handle yourself when things are going well during the fair-weather seasons, no, with the wind at your back. But it’s how you handle yourself when challenges and storms arrive.
Can you handle your challenges together as a couple, as an [00:08:00] intimate team when life is happening and things are just hard that I believe is a true measuring stick of your marriage.
When we feel like we’ve drifted apart or in a dry spell or wished things are a little bit better than the R we tend to look to our spouse and think, come on.
Why won’t you just make the move to break the dry spell? You’re a part of the problem too. Anyway, here’s a few ideas. Number one, we often think that more sex is a solution. But sex is always a function of intimacy as an into me see in the relationship. Right. Sex in and of itself, doesn’t fix anything.
It’s a closeness and openness that closes the distance. So yes, of course it would be great if our spouse made a move initiated for once you might think to yourself and we actually got it on together, that would break the dry spell. But what you’re really seeking for in that sex is this idea of more closeness and intimacy in it.
It’s not the sex [00:09:00] itself. So you got to separate the act of sex from the meanings attached to it. Second of all. We often look to our spouse to make the first move because we’re insecure. I don’t care if you’re the higher desire spouse or lower desire, spouse sex is anxiety inducing as very vulnerable. Sticking our neck out there to claim what we desire. When we’re not entirely sure or spouse is going to, uh, meet us at that desire means there’s going to be a lot of risk involved.
So when we’re insecure about ourselves, we are more guarded. So we’re less willing to take a risk to initiate. It’s interesting. How many couples I see where the higher desire spouse in the relationship has stopped initiating sex. They put the whole burden on the lower desire spouse. Now there’s a lot of nuance to all this pattern, but a common theme in all of that is the higher desire spouse hates taking a risk, though. They know they will always say yes. So they’re going to wait for their [00:10:00] spouse when he or she is ready to make the move. And it kind of takes the pressure off them. But in the process, what they’re really doing is they’re masking their own insecurity about the idea of being close with someone.
And it actually drives us. The spouses apart when you live in that pattern with those meetings for a long time. And this is where the myth that porn perpetuates is so appealing because then porn, it’s always the idea that the other person is willing. They never say no, they always want more. And they’re immediately turned on just by looking at you. And this isn’t reality for most marriages. I get that we hate feeling insecure.
So we tend to hide. We hide behind ideas. Like if only she were more like this person or that, or if only he would be more emotionally open to me, or if only he or she was into the X, Y or Z sex position, then. Our marriage would be so much better. Those are rabbit holes. We can easily go down because that’s a. [00:11:00] It feels good in the moment to put the focus on our spouse. Which brings me to my third point. when we look to our spouse, as a reason behind the dry spell, it opens you up to a potential of self-deception. Now. There could definitely be problems on both sides.
Right? One person is just not willing to engage sexually. But the problem with self-deception when we think it’s our spouse’s problem all the time. Is that self-deception always feels good. It feels good when we think that we’re the ones that are in the right and our spouse is the one that has it all wrong. It feels good to think that we would give our whole hearts to our spouse.
If only they would accept us right. To put conditions on that or to justify why are, why we’re withholding our full love. But it’s a deception because we stopped taking full responsibility for ourselves. For our half of the relationship, we tend to miss the mark. We start looking at our spouses, speck or moat in their eye and ignore the beam or plank in our own eye.
And [00:12:00] we’ve stopped seeing clearly. The way out of the requires for you to step into a better version of yourself, loving someone well is hard because it requires you to actually grow itself. It asks you to stretch beyond your current capacity just a little bit. And that’s exactly how faith works, right?
It’s takes courage to step in the dark with the hope that the way will be illuminated right in front of you.
The second main point I want to make today. The second principle I want to teach today is that routine kills passion. Now, my wife loves being a homeschool mom, and she’s an excellent homeschool mom now, but she wasn’t always that way. We’ve had a lot of growing to do to become better at homeschooling. A big part of her motivation to homeschool was to create a fertile soil for our kids to learn things that inspire them and not squash out that childlike wonder and curiosity with long lists of requirements instead.
So in her view, she saw the public school system as a rigid conveyor belt, like approach towards [00:13:00] mass education, that beats curiosity, and the love of learning out of children. So at first. Implementing homeschool in our home looked like no structure with the homeschooling. No structure meant that kids sort of got to do whatever they wanted. , which if you’re a child you’re naturally going to resist hard things like sitting, still practicing traditional math skills, writing assignments or anything that really takes effort and discipline, that doesn’t feel creative in the moment.
So some days nothing got accomplished.
Where for me, on the other hand, my vision of homeschool was all about taking what a school curriculum is buying those textbooks and implementing at home, having set times where from like eight 30 to nine is Gonna be this subject and then take a little break, then we’ll have a, the next subject from this time to that time.
And then take a break for recess, basically taking what school does, and then implementing a home. Very structured, very Methodical, just like they would, if they went to public school. So, you can [00:14:00] see how these two views really collided with each other in our implementation of homeschool. You can see that we’ve both had to learn how to balance these two competing forces to give a good education. To our kids.
One force is the require that’s me. That’s providing structure. And the other force is the inspire that’s for my wife. That’s the give the kids freedom to explore and let their interests motivate their learning. So there’s this balance between require and inspire or structure and freedom.
Now that’s a good metaphor for creating good sex life.
It’s very similar for a moment. I want you to consider in your mind, two buckets. One bucket has a label on it that says love, and the other bucket says desire. And there is lists of things that go in each bucket. They’re both needed, but balanced between these two buckets are important.
The things that go in the bucket labeled love are things that any long-term relationship needs, structure, stability, sameness [00:15:00] schedules, sterility. Okay. That’s all the S words I can think of right now. Basically, it’s all about structure sameness. Anything we need for a long-term relationship.
In the desire bucket. These are all P words, such as passion, pursuit, playfulness. Spontaneity. Okay. That’s not it. That’s the S word. What I mean is it’s being messy and not so proper, allowing yourself to be a little wild and unstructured there.
Too many times couples fall into ruts and they have trouble getting out of them because they’ve lost the balance between these two forces. Generally speaking in a marriage, one person is going to want more structure and the other person’s going to want more. Playfulness. That’s the love versus desire forces.
In my experience when the relationship is too much about the love bucket that’s structure, familiarity, predictability. Things that fall into that love category. Take higher precedence over the desire category. And then it squashes out passion and desire.
[00:16:00] Dr. Esther Perel. She’s an author and researcher about couples and sex.
She wrote a fantastic book called mating in captivity. And she said it this way. Love enjoys, knowing everything about you. Desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink, the distance that exists between you and me while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity. Eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, the unexpected. Love is about having desire is about wanting an expression of longing. Desire requires ongoing elusiveness it is less concerned with where it has already been then passionate about where it can still go. But too often as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flames of desire.
They forget that fire needs air.
Close quote.
It takes an attitude of, so what if I’m tired? I [00:17:00] can let go because I want something better for us. It’s about not being so enmeshed about our schedules and our routine and favoring those comforts. That, you can actually let loose a little bit. That’s how you get more passion back in your relationship.
So sometimes you just need to stop trying to be so close, pressed up against her spousal. The time it’s suffocating, the ability for passion to grow. Sometimes you just need a little emotional distance, psychological distance to cultivate and fan the flames of passion and desire. And unstructuredness in your relationship.
The last principle I want to talk about today is to offer good sex. This is something we recently discussed in our sexual mindfulness seminar series with Dr. Chelom Leavitt, which I found really helpful and profound.
As humans, we don’t just have sex like dogs and other animals. Do. It’s impossible for us to make sex just about sex. We’re always participating in our [00:18:00] meeting. That’s the way our brains are designed to give meaning to everything, especially something as intimate and vulnerable and personal like sex. So when you have sex, you’re actually participating in a meaning. We absorbed meanings from our family of origin culture and the way our marriage dynamic has played out over time.
And by the way, not all meanings serve us well. I think about the meanings that are serving you well in your sexual relationship and the meetings that aren’t serving you well.
You can rewrite the meanings you give to sex that serve your highest and best selves.
For example, a meaning that I do not find helpful is sex is something I do for my husband, sexist something men need. It is a duty or an obligation as a wife to give my husband sex. That is an example of a meaning. I don’t think serves people very well. An alternative meaning could be. I like sex, sex, replenishes me sex closes the distance between my spouse and I sex is a way [00:19:00] we rejuvenate and celebrate our union. Sex can be incredibly fun, exciting, and definitely worth losing an hours of sleep over.
You can ask yourself questions like these. What do you hope to experience when engaging sexually with your spouse? Are there meanings you give to sex that you’d like to challenge and change?
When you’re in a dry spell, it’s really important to think about what meanings are actually at play between your spouse. For example, if sex is about. A power struggle between the two of you. That’s not a meaning. Most people want to participate in. Let me give you some examples of helpful meanings, I think can help you in this situation. It is this that sex for us is going to be pleasure centered, not outcome focused by pleasure centered means you’re going to let pleasure. Guide everything. Does this feel good for you?
Does this feel good for me? Are we going to do those things that build us up that we want to do because it feels so good. Another helpful, meaning. [00:20:00] Caring and replenishment. This is not about duty or obligation or to manage your spouse’s feelings. It’s that? I feel really cared for in sex. I feel replenished insects.
This is a time I feel pampered. I feel celebrated and absolutely loved to the core of who I am.
Another helpful, meaning. Sex is about sharing a special moment together or another one. Sex is about just having fun and to play as an adults it’s actually really fun to do and be done by each other. It’s not about routine. It’s not about the same old script. but we’d like to switch it up a bit because we know variety is the key to vitality in a long-term sexual relationship. One way to practice playing with new meanings and scripts in your marriage can be to play the yes and game for borrowed from improv comedy. The principle is you don’t say no in an improv routine, you always say yes.
And you provide more information that keeps this story going. [00:21:00] We play this game sometimes as a family. But of course, a PG version with our kids. So let me give you an example of what I mean. so one person can say, I bet you can’t wait to get laid tonight. And the other responds. Yes, and I can’t wait to begin foreplay at a restaurant where we can connect over dinner first. And the other will respond,
yes. And I can’t wait to pick out that outfit that you’ll be wearing tonight. Yes. And you’ll want to stop by the dry cleaners, if it’s that black dress you wanted me to wear. Yes. And while I’m at the cleaners, I’ll stop by the florist next door and so on. And so on. See how you can go back and forth with a yes and, and you expand it. Try it out.
Try it on your next date night. Take turns, coming up with new prompts, but the idea is this attitude of yes, and in a sexual relationship invites more play and expansiveness as you engage together. And I hope you break up your old routines and to try new things.
Now, some of you listening to this episode today might say, yeah, Dan, I get it.
I’ve tried [00:22:00] all of those things. She, or he just isn’t interested. They want a predictable routine, such as a same night of the week, the same position, the same initiation pattern and so on. And they don’t want anything different. I asked her or him about what they’d like to change and they say nothing.
They’re completely happy with the sex we’re having. And I don’t want to change it. Cause I. I don’t think it can be better.
I hear you. If you were a client of mine in a coaching situation, of course, I’d ask more questions of both spouses to get a clearer picture of the relationship between the two of you.
The reality is your spouse might be legitimately happy with the kind of sex he or she is having. This is the routine type of sex. They might be really happy with that. But at the same time, your spouse needs to grapple with the reality that the routine they favor isn’t working for you either. Successful or should I say sexcessful couples are willing to confront themselves here and work together as an intimate [00:23:00] team. The first step is to take a Stephen Covey’s advice from the seven habits of highly effective people: and to seek first to understand. And then be understood.
I’d asked you these questions to think about such as what is the reality of my spouse’s experience with me. Or. What is hard about being married to me. Or. Could it be that my or my spouse’s lower sexual engagement, might be good judgment on his or her part.
How do I behave when I don’t get what I want? What is it about the way I do things that makes it hard for him or her to choose me?
The last thought I have on this topic is to love someone also means you’re going to have to accept loss.
Love and loss go together like opposite sides of the same coin.
It’s a fantasy to believe that there was some faceless, nameless person out there. That will love everything you love in exactly the same way you love it.
And you’ll be so compatible that you won’t have [00:24:00] any trouble when it comes to sex ever again. To fully choose someone means you’re going to choose the whole of them, including their weaknesses and their faults and their shortcomings. Loving well means choosing to accept what you’re not going to get with this whole person. The sooner you can come to this point of acceptance, the more you’ll actually cherish your spouse. And sense freedom in your relationship.
If you’d like more help with this in your marriage, I invite you to consider joining our, get your marriage on program. Over a hundred couples say this program delivered a tremendous amount of value and it has really helped them get to their next level with intimacy in their marriage details are on our website at get your marriage on. Dot com and click on program.
In conclusion today, if you’re in a dry spell, I hope these three principles we talked about today really help you. It’s to have faith and courage to make the first move. It’s the balance love and desire and relationship, but don’t let structure squash passion in your relationship. [00:25:00] And participate in meanings that make sex worth having.
Thank you for listening and I will see you next Friday.
Thank you for listening to this episode, please share it along with our apps and timidly us. And just between us with their married friends. I promise they will thank you for life. If you want a more meaningful sexual and intimate connection in your marriage, I invite you to check out my, get your marriage on program.
Over a hundred couples have said this program packs tremendous value and has helped their intimacy grow to the next level. Now go get your marriage on.
