Just about every couple deals with libido differences from time to time. It seems though, as couples approach middle age and begin to face the second half of their life, the differences in sexual desire, which may have been a back burner issue in the marriage up until that time, seem to become front and center.
It’s the elephant in the room that the couple can no longer ignore. I am absolutely passionate about what I wanna share with you in today’s episode. This is very important work that I’ve witnessed transform hundreds of couples sex lives for the better.
The sad truth is too many couples go through life with a subpar sex life. There’s just too much poverty in the bedrooms and it’s painful. Yet there are so many tools and resources available that if couples can just reach out and implement them and grab them. They can be so much better off than they are. Now I’m sharing a recording of a portion of a live training I did recently for today’s episode.
I’m doing another updated live training on April 10th on the same topic, and you’re invited to join me live.
Resources
Episode with Keith and Lindsay
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.
Episode 232
Dan: [00:00:00] Just about every couple deals with libido differences from time to time. It seems though, as couples approach middle age and begin to face the second half of their life, the differences in sexual desire, which may have been a back burner issue in the marriage up until that time, seem to become front and center.
It’s the elephant in the room that the couple can no longer ignore. I am absolutely passionate about what I wanna share with you in today’s episode. This is very important work that I’ve witnessed transform hundreds of couples sex lives for the better. The sad truth is too many couples go through life with a subpar sex life.
There’s just too much poverty in the bedrooms and it’s painful. Yet there are so many tools and resources available that if couples can just reach out and implement them and grab them. They can be so much better off than they are. Now I’m sharing a recording of a portion of a live training I did recently for today’s episode.
I’m doing another updated live training on April 10th on the same topic, and you’re invited to join me live. I’ll drop the signup link in the show notes below.
Last week we kicked off our sexy March Madness game. Just for fun. You and your spouse fill out a bracket and you get to try something new in the bedroom and potentially win of one of three sweet prizes that we’re offering. And the details are on our site with the link below in the show notes
my team and I are busy with our last minute preparations for our next couple’s retreat going on next weekend.
And I hope you can join us next year for our next retreat. The waiting list and all the details when we announce the dates. They’re gonna be available on our website at get Your Marriage on.com. And uh, hopefully you can join us sometime. Alright, let’s get into this.
Okay, I am not your typical marriage therapist. My path To being with you here tonight is not conventional, but it’s no less valid.
Emily and I started get your marriage on seven years ago when we took our own marriage from good to great. And this shift in our marriage was so profound. I felt compelled that I had to tell the world about what I had learned and share it with everyone. So I guess you can say, I feel like I’ve been called to the work.
I’ve since changed careers and now I invest. Improving other people’s sex lives full time. That’s my job. And I don’t do this blindly or just shooting from the hip. I spent a small fortune over the last few years learning the things I’m going to teach you tonight. I’ve studied Dr. John Gottman, Attachment Theory and Emotionally Focused Therapy from Sue Johnson.
I’ve studied Internal Family Systems from Richard Schwartz. I’ve studied Bowen’s work on Systems Theory. I’ve studied Dr. David Snarch’s work on Differentiation in Emotion. intimate sexual relationships. I’ve worked with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson Fyfe to apply these theories in the context of Christian couples like myself.
So through my own experience in working with hundreds of couples, I’ve learned why very few therapists actually address this very concern in marriage. And I want to tell you about the solutions that I found tonight. But the most important thing I want you to know about me is I feel called to serve you, to help married couples like yourselves have the absolute best sexual and intimate experiences possible, and I want to invest in your marriage.
If you’re normal, your marriage is going to push you up against things that just make you uncomfortable. just by being in relationship with someone, by definition, there’s going to be differences, and there’s a friction there that’s going to force you to grow up.
These pressure points in intimate relationships are designed to push you to grow if you choose the path to grow. I believe marriage is the ultimate people growing machine. All of us are in a process of development from one stage to the next. Most of us have a lot of room to grow in our development, and that’s a good thing.
No matter how hard things might feel for you in your marriage right now, I promise you that the effort is worth it. However, we often stay stuck when it comes to intimacy in marriage because we’re stuck in an incomplete understanding of our situation and that keeps us from getting to our next level.
We’re stuck because the way we understand the problem from our level of development is really limited. Albert Einstein said it this way, he said, We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them. Therefore, we must learn how to see ourselves from a wider, wiser perspective in order to solve our problems.
So, how do you raise the level of intelligence and get a wider perspective in your marriage? No matter who you are or how difficult your challenges are now in your marriage, I believe there are solutions for you. Let’s discuss a few principles tonight and how to raise a level of intelligence, how to raise a level of thinking in your relationship.
The first principle is this, it’s the difference between attachment and autonomy. In marriage, there’s these two opposing forces, and they kind of form a paradox. You know, attachment on one side, autonomy on the other. [00:05:00] By attachment, what I’m talking about is, this is the desire to belong to someone else, to know that you matter, to be loved by someone.
That’s a genuine need, that we have. The other need that we have is autonomy. This is, I want to dictate my own life, run my own show, make my own choices, run my life the way I see fit. When we have too much attachment in marriage though, it leads to psychological enmeshment and codependency. When we have too much autonomy, it’s toxic.
There’s too much Demand for autonomy you can’t handle being in relationship with someone else. So how you handle the tension between these two forces will dictate your level of maturity in a marriage. And it’s a reflection of what stage you are in your development and how you handle these two forces.
A well developed and healthy balance between attachment and autonomy allows you to be in a collaborative marriage, which I define as the very best kind of marriage. For example, a couple I used to work with struggled where the husband felt like he really couldn’t fully express himself in the bedroom because he was afraid his wife wouldn’t like what he wanted to do or say or do.
whatever moves he wanted to do. So, he got used to being really careful about what he says or does because he’s constantly monitoring his wife, like, is she gonna get upset if I do this move or if I do that? So, in the end, he kind of self edits. He’s in the bedroom, he’s with her, he likes being with her, but he’s doing a lot of this self editing.
He’s not really relaxed and being his full self in the sexual experience. For her part, she has her own anxieties, and because she’s anxious about certain sexual acts or whatever, it turns into control or critique of her husband. And, so he feels her, like, sense of disapproval when he might say something or do something that she might not approve of.
He wants to please her, yet he wants to be himself. She wants to kind of run the show of what she thinks is important, yet she wants to be loved by him and let him have his autonomy.
So there’s this tension going on in the relationship, and it wasn’t until they were able to really address it, they could have a, finally have a heavenly marriage. Collaborative marriages. are capable of great sexual intimacy, and it’s just like heaven. And there’s no heaven quite like being completely yourself while being desired by someone else just exactly as you are.
And on the contrary, there’s no hell quite like not being able to feel like being yourself or not being desired by someone that matters to you the most. We develop in stages. For simplicity, I’ve broken these down to three stages, we have stage one, two, three, the egocentric for one, number two, the enmeshed, other centric stage, and three, a collaborative stage.
And it’s in stage one and two is where we really get stuck with our libido and intimacy differences. And it’s in stage three is where we can be more collaborative. This is when you grow to become a more flexible, collaborative couple. You become capable of deeper intimacy, love, passion, and freedom in the marriage.
But it’s a stage of development. And unfortunately too many people just get stuck in their development stage one and two, and they don’t know how to move to stage three. So. Dan, you might be asking, how do you move to stage three? How do you move to something where it’s more collaborative within your, you and your spouse?
The answer might sound simple, but it’s scary. The answer is intimacy. By intimacy, I mean, it’s this, it’s the heart of intimacy is being known deep to the core while also willing to know the other deep to their core. It’s about self disclosure, honesty, acceptance, and sharing of oneself. Intimacy, by definition, is very exposing and scary.
Letting your spouse in on who you really are? That’s scary for a lot of people. Allowing someone else to know all of us, even the parts that are invalidating? Well, that sounds painful and unpleasant. We say we want deep intimacy in marriage, but the reality for most of us is that our behavior shows otherwise.
We behave as though we don’t want to be known deeper or we don’t want to know our spouse because we’re afraid of the risk of invalidation and exposure. So we instead pursue validation, which is like trying to get your spouse to like you, to agree with you at the expense of intimacy.
I’m thinking of an example of where a person was telling me, you know, he was going on about his relationship with his wife and how he wishes he could just Tell her this and tell her that and I looked at him’s like well for the last five minutes Why don’t you just tell her exactly what you told me and he looked at me like [00:10:00] shock in the face I can’t tell her that he’s willing to tell a stranger me about his woes and his troubles But he can’t disclose that to his wife.
Why because she matters too much to him. It’s hard intimacy. Real intimacy is exposing. It’s risky. It’s she might not like what I might say. It can be painful and pleasant. So instead, he’s like, tell me what to do instead. In other words, I really don’t want intimacy with my wife. I want reinforcement. I don’t want to be honest.
I just want her to agree with my side of the thing, the side of the way I see it. So often, we go for reinforcement instead of intimacy because we’re scared of intimacy. Here’s another example. Travis and Tiana. When Travis married Tiana, he was expecting her to be open to sexual experience and kind of be really fun.
Partly because she had other boyfriends before they had met and she had a lot more sexual experiences than he did when they got married. A few years into their marriage, Travis Travis was so disappointed that his wife wasn’t as interested as she seemed to be at the start of the marriage. And then fast forward 15 years, Travis wants Tiana desperately to be more sexually enthusiastic and invested.
However, Tiana just keeps her distance. Travis resents Tiana because of her low sexual desire and has a lot of contempt for her. Contempt is like when you look down at the other person, right? You’re like, kind of like a hatred, like, Ah, you’re kind of disgusting. That kind of a feeling. Anyway, Tiana feels Travis’s contempt, even if it’s not openly expressed.
You can just feel it. It’s like, it’s like not said, but you can feel that emotion coming from him. So, When it comes to sexy time, she just accommodates Travis. because it’s what a good wife does, but there’s not a lot of self she’s bringing to the sexual experience. So she remains guarded. Her heart is at arm’s length, even though their bodies are pressed close together.
And Travis feels her accommodation and her anger and he interprets it as a rejection of who he is. And he in turn grows even more resentful towards his wife and then they’re in this vicious cycle where they’re just doing it to each other. They’re kind of being condescending to each other in the way they do it without even ever saying a word about it.
So both people in this relationship, they’re pointing fingers at the other person for the reason why their marriage is so blah. Can you see that at least for Travis and Tiana, that neither person is really willing to address the real issue in the marriage because it would be too self exposing and too invalidating.
For example, Tiana, she’d have to admit that she only tolerates her husband sexually and just accommodates them because that’s what she thinks she ought to do, which totally invalidates her good wife persona, because that’s kind of a mean thing she does. On the other hand, Travis would have to admit he’s acting entitled and condescending towards his wife, which is really invalidating the idea he would prefer to have is that he’s acting loving and very patient towards her.
So, in other words, we, most people say they want intimacy, but their behavior is contrary. They actually want reinforcement. There’s another thing couples do when they have this kind of conflict too. David Snart said it this way, people who can’t control themselves try to control others. The way I see it, Travis and Tiana are stuck trying to get control of each other through the three A’s.
A, acting out. This is like being upset or angry or using overt manipulation. You’re trying to get the other person to yield to your point of view. Or accommodating. This is where you’re like giving in, fine, fine then, we’ll just do what you want. This is A, yielding to keep the peace while going along with the other person wants, but you’re going to end up resenting the other person afterwards.
Or the third A is to avoid. We avoid exposing ourselves and all the invalidating things in the marriage. And this avoidance keeps the marriage kind of at arm’s length, but it’s all superficial. This is when people become more like roommates and not lovers. And here’s the reality. You can’t really control another person.
We, we try, we think we can, but you can’t actually control another person. In fact, uh, we try anyway, but have you ever been controlled by someone else or trying to be controlled by someone else? You can’t love a person that’s trying to control you. You also can’t respect people that you feel like you have to control.
So both Travis and Tiana, they’re hiding from intimacy. They don’t want to face the truth. They don’t want to address the elephant in the room in their marriage. So they settle for less intimacy and let control and self reinforcing behaviors define the marriage instead.
Intimacy, by the way, is not [00:15:00] for the weak or for the faint of heart. The more you can honestly deal with what is in your marriage and in yourself, the more true intimacy your marriage is capable of having. This is a capacity one develops. So this isn’t something you’re just born with. You develop this by working with the pressures that you experienced in your marriage, and it helps you forge a stronger, truer self.
You get sick of the status quo enough that you muster enough courage to do something different about it. And then you begin to solve your problems, not because. you’re fixing the other person, but you kind of outgrow, you outgrow your problems. That’s how you resolve them. Now let’s apply this all specifically to the sexual experience, which is my expertise.
God in his wisdom has given us a shortcut to this development, this pressure development in, in us, and it’s called sexuality. Our sexuality is very core to who we are. And, just as we are physical, emotional, intellectual, and, social beings, we’re also sexual beings. Sex is, by the way, very high exposure, high meaning behavior.
It presses on the two fundamental forces that press against ourselves in marriage. If you remember those two forces, attachment and autonomy. Sex is high exposure, not just because you’re physically naked, but our brains are like finely tuned to how our spouse experiences us in the sexual act. Like Travis and Tiana are like, oh, she’s just accommodating me or whatever.
We’re really highly tuned to how sex goes in it. Dr. Helen Fisher, she’s a neuroscientist and biological anthropologist, and she concluded in all of her research, there is no such thing as casual sex for humans. Dr. Esther Perel and other sex researchers, agree with her. Think about it this way.
When dogs copulate, the lady dog isn’t thinking, is he really here for me? Or is he just here for the sex? Is he going to stick around after the pups are born? Do I look fat from that side? Like, the dog isn’t thinking about any of those things. This meaning making mechanism that we have when it comes to mating is unique to humans.
This also explains why humans are the only species really on earth that experience sexual dysfunction like premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, vaginismus, and so on. It’s because our human bodies and our minds, even at a biological level, make meaning from every sexual experience we have. Good sex is therefore really good for your brain, your body, and your spirit.
And bad sex is bad for your brain, body, and spirit. This is also why I believe that the fastest way to strengthen a marriage is to strengthen the sexual relationship. You end every sexual encounter with your spouse either loving, or hating her more for it. The way we relate to each other sexually is a microcosm of the amount of intimacy that marriage is capable of having.
So if you have a superficial intimate relationship, like a marriage that’s not very deep, it’s not capable of deeply replenishing soul expanding sexual experiences. we might want that, but if we are not willing to have true intimacy, we deny ourselves the capacity to have those soul expanding sexual experiences.
We’re often so afraid to be intimate, to be fully known, because we can’t tolerate the exposure of self invalidating meanings that sex actually requires. So let’s be honest. There’s another layer to all of this. Sex is weird. It’s a weird part of being human. For example, think about this. Do you remember the first time as a child you learned about French kissing?
What did you think? In sex, our bodies make funny noises, we create funny fluids, we have sexual aromas, we act differently when we’re highly aroused behind closed doors that we’d never act that way in public, or we do certain things to try to attract the opposite sex that we normally would because we want to be desired.
Our sexual desires and fantasies also are not always in line with social norms. But there’s a beauty in sharing all this part of us with someone that you love. That being said, there’s an inherent anxiety about being naked with another person. Bodies pressed against each other and tucked inside of each other.
So, if you want to try to control or harm another person, shame their sexuality or eroticism. Tell them they’re not good enough sexually, or mock them for their sexual desires, or mock them for the lack of sexual desires. Tell them that their body isn’t sufficient. Amplify their own insecurities. The media tends to prey on people’s [00:20:00] insecurities to get us to buy their products.
Most people at stage one or two in their development are not at peace with their sexuality. They have low levels of integration with their sexuality, with their values, and the rest of who they are. When we have low peace with our sexuality or low sexual integration, it might show up like this. Here are some examples.
You become indulgent about your sexuality, or you’re boundaryless in the use of your sexuality, or you clamp it down, you repress it, because you’re afraid of it. You become legalistic and use inflexible thinking all about your sexuality. You have difficulty trusting others with their sexuality, so you try to control their use of their sexuality, or you adopt an entitled attitude towards sex, like, I deserve this.
Or you have an attitude of contempt for, like, your spouse’s sexuality. These are all examples of low peace. low integration. And when we have low peace and low integration, we seek validation and self reinforcement behavior. For example, you might ask after sex, this is low integration, low peace. the husband might turn to his wife.
So how was it? What he’s really asking is how was I, was I good enough for you? Do you want to do it with me again? Sometime soon? Hopefully. Do you see there’s a sense of like, insecurity behind that question? Let me just give you another example. when you have low peace with your sexuality or low integration, it might look like this.
Men can’t handle their sexuality, so women need to be the sober driver or the designated driver in the relationship. In other words, women not trusting men. Let’s do one more example. It’s the thought that unless I initiate, she’ll never think about it, and it’ll never happen in our marriage. This is an example of men not trusting women with their sexuality.
So you can see when we have low peace, low integration, we adopt attitudes that are very validation seeking or self reinforcement thinking to help us make sense of our low peace and low integration with our sexuality. So how you get out of it is what we’ll talk about next. But on the way, we have to talk about this one more really important point that I see that too many couples get stuck in, and it’s this.
Sex can either be work or play, but never both. And when it’s underdeveloped, sex feels like work. When sex feels like a work or a duty, it absolutely kills passion. It’ll, it’ll die right there on the spot. There’s a difference between taking care like Really caring for someone and caretaking taking care is investing in goodness in another person While caretaking is like managing their physical emotional psychological state.
Here’s an example what I mean by caretaking mothers caretake children, while lovers care deeply about each other. Passion can only exist in a marriage if the meanings present when engaging in sex is about play, caring, and not about work or caretaking. Let me give you a negative example caretaking would be, uh, it’s end of the day.
Mom had a busy day. She’s tired from being with her six children. She comes into the bedroom. She sees her husband and he is anticipating having sex with her. And she’s like, it’s been three days. He’s going to be moody and pouty. If I don’t give him sex, I’ll just give him what he needs. That’s a lot easier to deal with than, you know, you know, trying to, avoid the situation.
That’s caretaking. She’s trying to manage someone else’s emotions through sexuality. Here’s the opposite. This is taking care. She comes to bed. She’s tired from a long day, but the energy from her husband’s very different. This time it’s about Hey, let me take care of you. Let’s let me rejuvenate you. Let me replenish you.
Let me pamper you. Let me care for you. Let’s play. Let’s stop being parents for a minute and just be adults and be lovers. That’s that’s taking care and using your sexuality to nourish and nurture and replenish each other. Another important point is couples are always communicating something whether you like it or not.
You’re always communicating something contempt or criticism or cherishing or adoration. Our brains are highly tuned to pick up signals and cues from those around us. So couples come to me and say, Oh, we just, we’re just horrible communicators, Dan. And I, what I think what they really saying is, I just don’t like what’s being communicated in the marriage.
For example, I worked with a husband. He struggled with compulsive [00:25:00] pornography use when he was stressed. And he hid it from his wife, and he was not proud of it, and he really wanted help, and he really wanted to tell his wife, I really struggle with this, but he was really afraid of how she might react if she found out that he had this habit.
Anyway, one day, she found lots of pornography on his computer, and she flipped. out. She was so angry, and he was so ashamed. she was so mad about it, he couldn’t talk to her about his struggle, and she expected him to handle it all on his own. And he was lonely in his struggle, so instead he learned how to hide his pornography use even more.
Now she could sense he was hiding it, but she didn’t have any evidence of it, so she started to trust him less and less and less. And he trusted her less and less and less, because he knew he couldn’t go, to her to help. So, she couldn’t handle the reality of his struggle, and he knew it. So, he couldn’t go to her, so he just kept that clamped down.
So, imagine it’s a Friday night, and this couple is coming to bed. What do you think is being communicated? Not verbally, but just what’s in the air between the spouses. What he’s communicating to her is You can’t handle the truth, so I have to mask it in order to get what I want in this marriage. I don’t trust you.
And what she’s communicating is, you’re not trustworthy because you hide and you’ll pay for this and I hate you. So they try to control each other by hiding or contempt. Let me give you one more quick example. in this case, the husband wants a more adventurous sexual experiences in their marriage. His wife.
Vanilla, and she’s happy with that. She doesn’t want a lot of variety. Anyway, over time, their differences become more and more stark in difference. And he struggles that his wife isn’t open to X, Y, or Z in the bedroom. And he sends her podcasts, which she kind of half heartedly listens to. It’s like, read this book, but she doesn’t ever get to it.
He over functions in a sexual relationship. She then under functions in response. Anyway, when they come together, he’s communicating, I’m sexually superior to you because I’m more open to a wider array of novel sexual experiences. And she is communicating to him, her resentment. And I don’t want to feed this man’s ego any more than it already is.
So they try to control each other with an attitude of superiority or, or just trying to withdraw emotionally. So they’re always communicating something and they don’t like what’s being communicated.
As we let the pressures of our marriage develop us forward, even painfully forward sometimes, we realize that the only thing that we actually have control over is ourselves. Look in the mirror. That’s the only person you have control over. And this pushes us to live more honestly and to live a more well integrated life.
Integrity is matching what you say with what you do. It’s behavior and words. in line. It’s what I, how I act is in line with my values. And the more pressures that we have, this is, it pressures us to live a life of more integrity. It’s the only path forward. When we try to control or pressure a spouse by acting out, accommodating or avoiding, remember those are the three A’s, we stop fully stepping into the marriage.
Stepping into the marriage fully means choosing your spouse. The sad reality is many people actually don’t choose their spouse. They don’t choose them fully. They like to be chosen by their spouse, but Choosing the other feels risky. So they have a marriage where they have one foot in and one foot out.
so, these couples, they’re so busy trying to manage the other person rather than honestly addressing what’s real in the marriage. And our dance steps, we get so used to them because they’re so familiar that it becomes a new normal. However, when one person decides to courageously change the dance steps to something better, it invites growth into the marriage.
But we say, if I were to fully let go of control attempts and honestly accept responsibility for my part in marriage and commit to create a more true intimate friendship, there is a risk that she would reject me. She may not choose me back. And that is a real risk. There was a couple I worked with where they struggled in their sex life, really early in their marriage.
And a previous counselor told them that they should schedule sex to overcome their sexual differences. So they put on the calendar three times a week, they were going to have sex. And for a long time, like for a few years, they had this routine of sex three times a week. But it was really done out of obligation and duty.
There wasn’t a lot of joy in it. And after the baby came, they struggled to even have sex once a week. And he was [00:30:00] growing really impatient. And he told his wife that he wasn’t feeling loved. Meanwhile, she lost all desire for sex, which is understandable, right? Sex was work and a duty for her, which is antithetical to desire and eroticism in play.
So I suggested to this couple that forget the scheduled sex thing, throw it out, and instead take intercourse off the table for a long time in your marriage, in order to breathe, give her some room to breathe and give her some space to develop her own sexual desire that’s not connected to duty and obligation, and for him to work on his entitlement.
But this was a risky move for him because this meant no sex for a while and which means In his mind, this means no love for a while, and he’s afraid his wife would actually be happier with no sex than actually work on developing her sexual desires. There’s a risk she wouldn’t work on her sexual desires, and he was afraid she wouldn’t choose him.
And for her part, She’s afraid that he wouldn’t be able to handle no sex for a little while for a season and that he would constantly be grumpy and moody. Do you see how it always feels risky? When we let our fears run our marriage, we settle for control and a low intimacy relationships because it feels comfortable and familiar even if it’s less than ideal.
So they’d rather schedule it and have something duty and obligation because that’s where they’re familiar rather than opening up a possibility for something more richer. but it’s just risky to get there. So we hedge. We wait for our spouse to make their first move. It’s the attitude of, I would be perfectly happy and invested in you in this marriage, if only you would do this differently.
So this straddling costs the marriage, it’s letting fear run the marriage. It takes courage, honesty, and integrity to choose your spouse and to choose your marriage, but at the same time, it’s the most freeing, liberating, and worthwhile choice you’ll ever, ever make. Choosing your spouse means identifying what is getting in the way in your marriage and courageously addressing it.
There are no guarantees that your spouse will choose you back or want to pick up and do the work too, but at the very least, you’ll learn what your marriage is capable of, You’ll also earn your own self respect in the process. there’s this couple, that I’ve worked with. They’d been married over 10 years and sex at first was really painful, like physically painful and not pleasurable for her at all.
And she was really let down because she had saved herself for marriage and she was told it was going to be fantastic. And then it was nothing but wah, wah, just not fun. She didn’t know what all the fuss was about. And he would initiate. and she would decline and he’d feel hurt and rejected. So over time, he stopped initiating.
Even though he’s higher desire, he left all the initiating up to her. He told himself, he will say yes if his wife ever came to him, , but I’m not going to initiate. This might sound like some of you perhaps. Anyway, she hated all the pressure of carrying the sexual burden for the marriage. which made her shut down sexually even more.
And things changed once they got some help and could see things more clearly, and they started to address What’s really going on in marriage. And if you want to, this couple came on my podcast about a month and a half ago and they shared their story. And if there’s hope for them.
And there is, there’s hope for anyone. It’s a sad, but true reality that many people come from a home that didn’t experience much true love growing up. So they get married, but they don’t know what it’s like to really love another person. And unfortunately, some of us don’t know what it’s like to be loved by another person.
It just wasn’t modeled for us. It’s not intuitive to choose and love another because you haven’t seen it modeled. You haven’t developed that capacity yet. But you can develop that capacity if you decide to try. If this is you, don’t wait your spouse to come around. Go first. Love first. Don’t wait for your spouse to take the first move.
Take the first move yourself. Begin by addressing honestly what is in your marriage that’s convenient to ignore or pretend isn’t working. Women want to know, do you want to have sex with me because I happen to have a convenient apparatus for your orgasm? Do you want to have sex with me because I’m your only legitimate option?
Or, if you could choose to have sex with anyone in the world, morals aside, would you still choose to want to make love to me because I matter that much? That’s what women want to know. Men want to know, Are we sexual friends? Do you choose to blossom and thrive in the sexual energy I bring? This also explains why, biologically, women take more time for [00:35:00] arousal than men.
It gives their brains adequate time to act. accurately map if this man that they’re with is trustworthy. Can I let this man into my body, into my mind, into my soul? This also explains that when you ask men about their peak sexual experiences, you ask men what are their best sexual experiences they’ve ever had.
Nine times out of ten, they wax poetic about to what heights of pleasure they’re able to take their woman in the sexual experience. They thrive on their woman having sexual So much pleasure in the sexual experience. It’s a very healthy masculine sexual trait. You can’t fix what you can’t see in your marriage.
This is why it’s so valuable to have a friend you can trust that will talk straight to you and not just reinforce you in your blindness. This is why good friends are so valuable. If you have a good friend, keep them. This is also why a spouse that will be honest with you and talk straight to you is also such a gift.
This is why a good mentor or a coach with experience can be a great gift in your life. I want to help you see what you can’t see. This is the very first step because once you can see what you can’t see, now you can actually do something about it. You’re more empowered to do something about it.
Now I talked about stage one, two, three in our development, and that’s where we want to head tonight. In all of our development, what we do I have a friend who’s joining us tonight, who has gone through this. He and his wife had gone through this I want you to hear it from them, what their experience is like.
I’m going to bring them on in just a second and, let them, let them speak and share their experience, but real quick, let me share with you what others have gone through in their experience. Once they can see what the next step is, what their development, this is, this is what they experience. This couple says, we truly made passionate love five times this weekend after a marriage of obligation and duty.
This next couple said, suddenly we started having some absolutely next level sex, something that took years of slow progress. Now we’re having it. Another said, when we joined the program a few months ago, it has changed our lives and really appreciate you and your team and everything you do. And this couple said, we’re so much more connected now and not just in the bedroom, because this isn’t all about what goes on in the bedroom, what goes on in the bedroom influences everything outside and everything outside goes on.
What’s in all right, Keith and Lindsay, are you there?
Do you want to take a minute? Talk about your experience?
Keith: Yeah. We’re actually down in Mexico right now. working on, on these same things that we’ve kind of talked about. Our experience I think was very similar to what he we had a great relationship. We’ve always had a great marriage. But I, as a high desire spouse, I always wanted more. I wanted to have sex more often and, and kind of going into that starting off. I think you were describing me, Dan, actually, as you were talking about, and I hate saying this, but the controlling and the sending podcasts and you know, the books and that type of stuff thinking, Oh, she’ll read it and we can, you know, grow.
She’ll finally start seeing it from my point of view. There
Lindsey: wasn’t any resentment on my part.
Keith: None at all. She was perfect. None resentment. but I think ultimately we, we started slowly kind of working on it together as we, you know, we have four kids and the kids after having our kids, we really kind of started working on it.
She found your intimately us app. That was a, I think a very pivotal point in our relationship because it gave us a space where we could talk. It gave us a space where we could discuss those things without, I think feeling taboo, I think is the right word, right? so when we found that, we started digging into it a little bit more, um, started working on it by ourselves and, Quite frankly, as we improved a little bit, we realized we needed a little bit more than, than that.
And that’s where we, we came onto the next level and joined the next level and having you there, helping us coach through it, helping us see what we couldn’t see, I think that’s a really good way that you put that because it really did, it pointed out the things that we couldn’t see and really took us to that next level.
And we still have a long ways to go in our development, but we’re so much farther than we were when we started for sure. That’s so
Dan: good. That’s so good.
Lindsey: Yeah. And I would just say, um, you know, from the lower desire partner, everything you’re talking about when things are coming from a, I don’t know, that duty type of attitude.
And I would say most lower desire people probably feel that way, you know, intimacy is important and you want. To make it important in your marriage, but you don’t know how. And that would say what has been the biggest thing for me is that we’ve really bridged that gap between him being just higher desire, me being lower desire.
I don’t know, we understand each other more now and it’s not duty. It’s like, I just really wish I could convey [00:40:00] to people the difference it has made. Like, you know, the intimacy is important, but. It’s been a game changer. It’s taken her marriage from great to like fantastic. If you do not put your intimacy first and foremost, you can have a great, a good marriage, But this has been a game changer for us, for sure, and I never thought I would, like, say that.
That sex is great, and I love it, and it’s such a great part of my marriage, and But it’s just hard to know how. How do you get better? How do you improve? Where do you get the resources? Um, I think a lot of people think they can do it on their own. But as we learned, it almost took us 15 years of trying on our own and we kind of only got to here.
But once we started working with you, it just took us to a whole, a whole nother level. So thank you, Dan. You’ve been so great for us.
Keith: One thing that I want to add to that real quick, Dan, um, is that the intimacy part of it absolutely is amazing. But it has changed the other aspects of our marriage as well.
We’re able to be more open. We’re able to be more honest. We’re able to connect more because we have this connection that we’ve started building. So it’s not just about the sex. Trust me. I love the sex. It’s awesome, but it’s not just about the sex, the improvement from in every other aspect, even as parents, it’s crazy how this permeates into every part of our relationship.
Dan: That is so good. Yes. Excellent. Thank you, Keith and Lindsay.
Thank you for listening today. If you and your spouse would like help implementing these principles I discussed in this episode, I encourage you to check out our program at Get Your Marriage on.com, and I look forward to the opportunity to work with you to help take the intimacy in your marriage to the next level.
