In this episode, I respond to a vulnerable question from a wife navigating desire differences, purity culture, and a husband who seems to always want more—more novelty, more frequency, more intensity.
If you’ve ever felt like:
- You’re not “enough” sexually
- Your spouse is never satisfied
- Sex has become a source of pressure instead of connection
…this episode is for you.
We’ll talk about:
- The three core drivers of sexual desire
- Why anxiety can increase desire in one spouse and decrease it in the other
- The “try-sexual” dynamic
- How ego can quietly sabotage intimacy
- What true sexual maturity actually looks like
This isn’t about doing more, but becoming more mature, grounded, connected and intentional.
Resources
Episode 101: Overcoming Roadblocks to Intimacy & Sexual Desire (mentioned in the episode)
👉 Join our exclusive Men’s Only and Women’s Only groups starting in May! They are limited to 10 people each, so check them out before they’re gone.
👉 We’re cruising in the fall, and we currently have ONE spot left. Make it yours!
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.
299: “I’ll never be enough” vs the Try-sexual
Hey, friend. Thank you for listening to the Get Your Marriage on Podcast. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate that you download our apps, that you share what we’re doing with your married [00:01:00] friends. And I can tell by a lot of the emails and the comments that I see. That, you’re finding a lot of strength and inspiration to, improve intimacy in your marriages, and I hope that the resources I can offer and the others like me out there offer are all helping you build a stronger, more intimate, more sexually fulfilling and joyful marriage.
I received this anonymous question via email and I loved it, so I’m gonna address it today. This is what this wife writes. It’s kind of long, uh, but bear with me. This is, this will set up the frame for what I wanna talk about today. This is what she says.
We recently started listening to you and really appreciate your openness and insight. I am the lower desire spouse and listening to you to help me realize how many purity culture ideas I have absorbed and how that was really working against us as a couple. My husband has struggled with porn in the past, and I feel like his viewpoint was unreliable when it came to sex.[00:02:00]
So listening to you and sharing with each other, what we’re hearing has been really good for us. But I find myself wondering how much of our life as a couple should be about sex. My husband is up for trying every single thing mentioned and becomes discouraged when there is something I’m not open to or when he feels I’m not moving fast enough to incorporate all the things.
I feel that while these things are great, and we could definitely use new ideas and ways to connect every time we have sex doesn’t have to be something new. Sometimes it feels like this is consuming him and he’s forgetting that we have other priorities as well. Our kids, our spiritual wellbeing, our church life, and so on.
I am not sure what is a good amount of energy to be devoting to this. We overall have a good marriage and enjoy spending time together, but sex feels like it’s become an issue for when he thinks I’m devoting less mental energy towards it, [00:03:00] like not having fantasies, not initiating enough, not interested enough in new aids, et cetera,
because I’m coming out of a different mindset. That’s the purity culture mindset that she mentioned. I find myself unsure if maybe I am the issue being slow to adopt new things, or if we need more balance is sex three or four times a week with one of those experiences being something new to us enough.
Great question and uh, this is something I’m sure many of you can relate with. Uh, and this is, uh, this is very typical of that higher desire, lower desire, discrepancies, and also, for her to say, you know, I really struggled with purity culture and my husband struggled with pornography use.
So we both had on some level, an unhealthy view towards sexuality. We’re working out that things are better now, yet I’m in a marriage where I call it the trisexual. she is married to a trisexual. someone that wants to [00:04:00] try everything and wants to do it all. So if you have conflict and you’re married to a trisexual, by the way, just remember this is very common.
You’re not alone. Uh, there’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing has gone wrong. And my approach towards sexuality and the way I coach couples and my, uh, worldview, I guess you could say is that conflicts in sexual relationships in marriage. Are God’s design to help us grow up.
It’s an invitation for us to learn how to love our spouse, how to love God, and how to love ourselves even better through it. And it’s these little challenges that are actually more like invitations for growth. So let’s go through this together. I have a lot of thoughts on this. And, maybe we can
help you in your marriage to find a solution that works great for you and your husband.
First of all, I want you to know that human sexual desire is very [00:05:00] complex. I read a study where they surveyed, thousands of college students, why they had their most recent sexual encounter and they got all of these responses and they compiled them and turns out they came up with 237 different reasons why people have sex.
The most common being. I want to feel good or I want to express love and appreciation, or I’m attracted to this person down to things like, I want to give this person a sexually transmitted disease, or I wanna have revenge on this person. Like the motives why we have sex. They’re all over the map.
I bring that study up just to show that human desire is very complex, but on top of all that, you’re not some college age student, right? You’re in a long-term, committed relationship and maintaining healthy sexual desire over the long haul. It brings with it new kinds of challenges or, uh, another way to look at it, opportunities for growth.
And opportunities to learn how to love Well,
just to make things [00:06:00] simple on a boil down sexual desire, this complexity down to three main drivers. One driver is, we’ll call it horniness or hormone driven. This is when you’re really attracted to the other person you feel sexually aroused The thought of orgasm or that sexual release feels great and wonderful.
And you engage and it’s, it’s a great experience for that, right? That’s that, uh, youthful, hormone driven, Drive.
The second fuel for sexual desire in a marriage is desiring the other person, the whole of the other person. Once my wife said to me, I know you want to have sex with me, but do you want to have sex with me or Do you wanna have sex with me? What she was really saying is, she knows that I like sex and I like the desire, I like the thought of sexual adventure and things with her, but do I want that?
Because she’s like. My legitimate outlet and she’s my convenient sexual partner that I get [00:07:00] to go on these adventures with. Or is it more so because I desire her, the whole of her, uh, her mind, her heart, her body, all of her, is it her that I desire and just the fact that she was questioning that was gave me pause to think about my motives too.
There’s a movie my family and I have watched recently. In fact, we liked so much. We watched it a few times. I highly recommend it. It’s called Seeking Persephone. You can find it on Amazon Prime. Without spoiling it too much, the most romantic moment in the movie is when the main characters show their genuine desire for the full person in the most humble and touching way.
That’s what we crave. Often that kind of desire surpasses, horniness or homeowner driven, right? The third kind of desire that a lot of marriages experience and what I see is happening in your relationship is I call anxiety driven. And I’m gonna break this into two parts. Anxiety is driving the higher desire spouse to have [00:08:00] higher sexual desire and anxiety is driving the lower desire spouse to have lower sexual desire.
So let’s first talk about how anxiety actually drives sexual desire higher in the higher czar spouse. And I’m speaking a little bit from my own experience on these points too. I’ve been there as a hired desire spouse. My marriage, I’ve let anxiety drive my sexual desire.
Now if you’re to tell your husband, Hey, you’re just really anxious about sex, he’ll probably give you that puzzle to look like me. Anxious. I’m the one that wants to try everything. You’re the one with all the hangups and you’re calling me anxious. You’re the anxious one, because for the sexually higher desire person to be higher desire is a great way to mask their own anxiety about sex in it and they don’t know it.
But that anxiety, which is a little harder to see ’cause it’s below the surface, is actually fueling a lot of their sexual desire. It [00:09:00] is because anxiety always increases when we try to affect an outcome that we can’t directly control. Your husband wants more novel sexual experiences, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting novel sexual experiences.
By the way. It’s, it’s, it’s okay to want novel sexual experiences even though your frequency is high to him. It’s not gonna be enough, even though you try new things with him once in a while. To try to appease him and accommodate him. He still doesn’t feel like it’s enough, so he doubles down on spending more time thinking about sex, talking about it with you, trying to persuade you and convince you to try new things or complain that even though you’re trying new things once in a while .
It’s not good enough or it’s not enough for him. He kind of takes an egocentric view with their sex. Where in your marriage, if it’s no longer a marriage where there’s room for two people, he kind of crowds you out like his sexual desires. take precedence over what you want in the [00:10:00] relationship.
It’s kind of become blind to what you want, partially ’cause he’s anxious about, what he’s not getting in sex. And even when you do accommodate and, and given and try new things and you’re pushing yourself with your mindset and other things from his perspective, yeah, you do those things, but I think you’re just doing it to accommodate me.
Are you doing it ’cause you actually want it and ’cause you desire me. Are you doing it? ’cause you accommodate me. Because accommodation, even though it looks virtuous on the surface, it looks self-sacrificing. when it comes to sex. It, it leaves the higher desire spouse feeling very empty.
It is like one went through the motions to give the person what they thought they wanted, but what they really want is to feel accepted, welcomed, desired, enthusiastic about that. And you can’t hide that. You’re not enthusiastic about. Trying all these new things all the time. So, the natural response for him is to want [00:11:00] even more different things or frequency because underlying all this is a fear. It’s a fear that he’s failing somehow. or if he doesn’t experience everything he wants to experience with you, then somehow he feels a sense of loss in it. he is trying to fill a hole in there and he wants you to fill that.
Now, sometimes higher desired spouses are anxious because they’re trying to sort out the legitimacy of their own sexuality through another person. They feel unsure about something and feeling unsure by the way, isn’t a pleasant feeling, so an easy way to get away from that unpleasant feeling. It’s a push on someone else who’s even more unsure than we are about it,
so we don’t feel like the foolish one relative to someone else. This is very easy to do with sex, especially if you’re the higher desired spouse and you have some anxiety about sex. For example, if I was unsure about, let’s say, oral sex, and my wife was too, a strategy I could take is to keep asking for oral sex at the [00:12:00] most inopportune times in the most inconvenient locations, to almost guarantee a no response.
I can then declare that, hey, at least I’m not the one who’s anxious about it. Right. Although I’m the one that kind of set up the whole scenario, so I’m almost guaranteed a no. It’s almost like I’m more interested in not connecting sexually with my spouse, but like proving that I somehow have something figured out.
That my spouse doesn’t, in order for me to get away from the fact that I may not be fully on board with something anyway, because even at the most opportune time, if she did say yes, I might be nervous about that act too. So I kind of frame things to my advantage. And kind of make my spouse look a little foolish as a result.
Dan: Now it’s a strategy. It’s not a great strategy, but a lot of couples do it in one form or another. it’s [00:13:00] not good because, on the surface you might look stronger as a higher desire spouse doing that. But what you’re really doing is exploiting a weakness in the other to temporarily look like the stronger one in the
couple.
Sometimes it’s actually ego that artificially inflates sexual desire. It’s about wanting to be on top. It’s about wanting to be ahead or to look like they’re the more sexually evolved one, the one that’s, you know, overcome the challenges of. Purity culture and, and you don’t, therefore, I’m the more sexually superior one.
Now, I’m guilty of this in my own marriage in the past, and this is something I had to really wrap my mind around and here’s the, here’s the irony of it. As long as I framed the relationship such that I was, the more sexually advanced, the more open-minded one, the more untainted by purity culture or whatever the story is.
It gave me a sense of self. Now it was ego driven and it was counterproductive because as a higher desire spouse, in order for it [00:14:00] to feel good in that way, you need to complain that your spouse isn’t getting you the sex that you want. And then when your wife actually surprises you and does what you ask. You can’t be content in it because if you’re content in it, the whole framing of you being on top or ahead is threatened. So you go out and find something else to like.
You know, take things up a notch so you’re always be on top, in other words, you set up a marriage as a higher desire spouse, where your spouse will never be good enough because your ego is tied up in the sense that you’re ahead or you’re the more evolved one all the time.
I felt this in my own marriage. a story about this is years ago I wanted to go on this, uh, getaway with my wife. It was a marriage retreat hosted by someone else we both admire and follow. And I’ve asked my wife in the past and she said, no, I don’t want to go to that. I don’t want to go to that. I don’t want to go to that.
And so, um. Her No, I used is [00:15:00] justification for why. I know what’s good for the marriage. I know what’s good for our sex life and she doesn’t because she’s unwilling to push herself. She’s unwilling to learn, she’s unwilling to do those things. At least that was the story as I was telling myself. Right? So can you imagine my shock when, one year, a few years ago, I brought it up again fully expecting a no, and my wife said.
Yeah, I’d be open to that. I think we should go to that, retreat. And, all of a sudden my desire to go to that retreat evaporated. I didn’t wanna go anymore. well, in the moment I didn’t want to go anymore. And it was a surprise to me because as I reflected on it, it wasn’t so much that I wanted to go to the retreat, it was that I wanted.
To go and my wife to say no, because it fueled this story that I liked, that I was a more sexually evolved one in the marriage. So the moment she said yes, it was a threat, right? All, [00:16:00] all of a sudden I didn’t want to go anymore. Now, of course, I repented. We actually went and we had an absolutely wonderful time, and the instruction was top notch.
And it was really good for a marriage. But that was a moment when I realized I have a lot of ego wrapped up in my idea that I am the trisexual in my marriage, so to speak. So all this to say that. Just because you’re the higher desired spouse doesn’t mean you’re not anxious. In fact, because you’re anxious might mean you’re the higher desired spouse.
I’ve known many men that have really worked through and wrestled with their sexual nature, their sexuality, accepting it and coming to a lot of peace, and a lot of the anxiety they used to have about their sexuality is gone and they find themselves in a new strange position where. They don’t have as much sexual desire as they used to have.
Now it’s not a bad thing, it’s just that they realized their sexual desire in the past was artificially [00:17:00] inflated by their anxiety. Alright, so that’s enough about the higher desire spouse. And now let’s talk about how anxiety, affects the lower desire spouse to want sex less, right?
It’s the opposite side of that same coin. It is probably no surprise that if you feel anxious about sex as a lower desired spouse, it makes you want it even less. It artificially lowers your desire to have sex and in a marriage, this is a lot more overt. It’s a lot easier to see this half. First of all, if for the lower desired spouse being anxious about sex or your sexuality, it puts you in a position where it’s easy to avoid it.
Like if I was anxious about, I dunno, public speaking, which I am, it’s easy for me to avoid situations where I would be giving a public speech, right? So if we’re anxious about certain things. We tend to avoid them. So if you’re anxious about sex, you’re not gonna be [00:18:00] enthusiastic about jumping in bed all the time.
Now, in this dynamic, there’s a performance anxiety and a fear of displeasing one spouse. And I read it in your question because, you feel like you’re accommodating. You feel like you’ve come a long way. You don’t wanna disappoint your spouse, but you always wonder like, how much is enough? How much more do I need to give him?
In order for him to feel happy. And even in the frame of that question, I want you to see how the center, the center of gravity when it comes to sex in your relationship isn’t, is very lopsided in your husband. It seems sexuality or sex revolves around him in your marriage. And, so to kind of counterbalance that you, you kind of pull in your direction, and, kind of like to rebel against it, so to speak.
And now it’s becoming a power struggle. Who’s gonna prevail? Is it him and what he wants or me and what I want the higher his sexual desire gets. The lower [00:19:00] yours becomes an opposition to that. In other words, you’re fighting against each other in this instead of learning how to work together in it because it’s anxiety driven.
There’s that fear of displeasing one spouse. Now if I felt somewhat responsible for my spouse’s sense of himself or herself, or ego by how open I am to sexual novelty, of course I’m gonna feel a lot of pressure to be a certain way insects, right? For example, if I was kindhearted, like, I assume you are, and I really like my husband and we have a good marriage, yet, his sense of himself is.
You know, his ego is tied up to sexual novelty and these experiences, and if I say no, it hurts his feelings and I don’t like hurting my spouse’s feelings. So I, I put myself in situations where I feel a lot of pressure to not, disappoint my spouse sexually. But having [00:20:00] sex for the reason of, not disappointing my spouse is not a very sexy meaning, right?
It’s, it’s not a meaning that would get me excited to try new things or jump up and down, be enthusiastic about his novel ideas. In fact, when you do feel anxious sexually, it’s harder for your body to get sexually aroused because your nervous system is in a fight or flight response.
It’s not in a relaxed and digest state, which you need in order for arousal to begin. It’s also really hard for you to relax and get into your body when you’re distracted by how your spouse feels about you or what you feel about certain sex acts and so on. So it turns out to be really bad sex, or at least sex are not excited and eager about sex then becomes about managing your husband’s emotions and meeting expectations rather than about genuine connection and pleasure.
And having fun together and sharing a part of yourself [00:21:00] that’s reserved only for your spouse to see, right? It’s no longer about those things. It’s about, you know, making sure he is happy and content with you. that becomes a defining reality.
It then makes sex feel more like a duty rather than something fun and inspiring in a way to engage with your lover. So many lower desired spouses, who are married to the Trisexual feel like they’re in a damned if I do, damned if I don’t situation, if they say yes and give to what their spouses want to try from their perspective.
Again, your yes doesn’t feel authentic and sometimes you feel resentful afterwards. And then if you say no, then you risk dealing with the spouse’s disapproval judgment or pouty behavior. And this anxiety makes you want to avoid this situation completely. And this is something we go into in episode number 101.
If you want to go into archives and, uh, listen to that episode, we go in deeper in this particular cycle. Now, for the record, research has shown over and [00:22:00] over again that generally speaking. Women are just as much, if not more so sexual than men. So I believe fundamentally, men and women have equal footing, equal standing when it comes to, their sexuality and the validity of their sexuality.
One famous study connected a vaginal photo plasmo graph that’s a probe used a lot in sexual research to measure physiological sexual arousal. And they, they put this probe in heterosexual female test subjects, and they also gave them a clicker in their hand. and they’re gonna show them some images on a screen.
And they said, okay, what I want you to do is when you feel aroused. Click the button. If you don’t feel aroused, don’t click the button. So they go through a slideshow of images. So again, they’re measuring what their body says is arousing and the person is clicking what they say they think is arousing.
And uh, so they show them a whole bunch of images like, you know. Children playing, an old [00:23:00] couple walking through the park, holding hands, waterfalls, mountain scenes, and even more explicit sexual imagery, right naked men, naked women’s sexual scenes. What they found in women’s bodies compared to men who did the same kind of a study is that women’s bodies found a lot more variety of context and images to be sexually arousing.
In other words, compared to men, the bell curve of what their body says is sexually arousing is much wider. However, when it came to measuring clicks with a clicker, their women’s bell curve was a lot narrower. Compared to men’s, I interpret this finding to mean that women are just as capable as sexual desire as men are.
It’s just that they’re pickier about who or what, or how they go about, you know, inviting someone else into that erotic part of themselves, probably for a good reason. In other words. I bet you, my dear listener, that you can trust [00:24:00] that you’re just as capable sexually, if not more than your husband, and that you’re good enough and can be as equal in some ways and you just probably are exercising good judgment that maybe these particular sex acts aren’t the kind of erotic fuel that are meanings for me that get me excited in marriage.
Alright. So far, we’ve covered a lot of ground. We talked about different forms of desire. We did a deep dive on how anxiety artificially inflates higher sexual desire in the higher desire spouse, and how anxiety artificially deflates sexual desire in the lower desire spouse. Now I wanna talk about what to do about it, how to go about navigating this in your relationship.
So I say this off and on my podcast. It’s this idea, this frame that I call. Calm the heck down. Think about it this way. In a room of people who has the most power? Who’s the most [00:25:00] powerful person? It’s the calmest person in the room. What I want you to do in your relationship is see if you can be the most calm person when it comes to, sexual.
tension in your relationship. And what that means is, first you wanna bring your thinking online. This might mean deep breathing, this might be going for a walk, whatever it might be. You know, doing things that kind of gets you into a calmer state so you can really bring your deeper self, your higher self.
That thinking part of your brain online, what you wanna do is separate out what you think. Versus what your spouse thinks. And that’s vital because in long-term relationships, especially like this one, where we end and where our spouse begins, often gets muddled. And we wrap a lot of who we are into what our spouse thinks we are or thinks we should be.
And this is, explained in your question, right, because in your question, a lot of it is framed relative to what your husband thinks now. [00:26:00] Of course what your husband thinks absolutely matters, and you take that into account. But what you don’t wanna do is give up your own thinking about what you think.
’cause that is just as valid. Also, you need to hold that too. So it’s a skill to learn how to separate what you think versus what your spouse thinks so that you can make a better, clearer judgment there. Another thing you need to do is separate where you find yourself when you’re in reaction to your spouse’s emotional state versus acting from, a more principled place.
What I mean by that is, if your pouty or upset or complaining that you’re not sexual enough or he wants to try all these things and you’re not open to that and. You find yourself in a place where you’re kind of in response to that you’re behaving in an outside in approach, whereas you can listen to his concerns and they might be valid and they [00:27:00] actually might be true, and you can actually think it through and, and decide what you think is right for you and what, it means for you.
You know, taking everything in consideration, but being a chooser in it, like, okay, this is what I decide. To do in light of this. That’s an inside out approach, and here’s some more principles that I think can guide you. By the way, Aeros Energy, which is also something I talk a lot about on this podcast.
It’s that life giving vital energy that fuels your marriage with optimism and joy. That aeros energy, it shows up when you’re living at the edge of your development. In other words, anytime you push yourself, even just a little bit to step outside of your comfort zone. Because it’s the right thing to do.
You’ll find this abundant life-giving energy in your life. by the way, this always comes from living your higher self, the the best in you, letting that lead the way in your life.
Secondly, stepping outside your comfort zone might look different from one person to the next. And I’m [00:28:00] not saying you should try, every sexual thing your husband wants. That’s, that’s not it. What I’m trying to say is sometimes that is the thing that is the right thing to do because. You courageously get to the bottom of what your struggles are or hangups around a particular sex act, and you’re gonna try it.
But for others, the more courageous act actually might be to say no. And don’t give in to the pressure just to appease or accommodate your spouse because you don’t wanna be the kind of wife that resents her husband, and that takes more courage. So it’s not about the sex act, it’s about what you do. Now, a lot of people mistake the idea that having a more broad interest in sexual novelty equals be more mature.
And that’s a mistake because there are a lot of immature people doing wild sexual acts all the time. The mature person isn’t the one giving in to outside pressure and making that [00:29:00] drive their behavior all the time.
It’s someone who, from love, from kindness, from courage, is the one that’s going to, you know, make the right choices because it’s coming from something inside that takes far more maturity. Than, uh, just always in reaction. So the more mature person in the couple. By the way, I don’t believe one is far more mature than the other.
In a relationship, maybe you’re a quarter step or a half step ahead at most. I don’t think you’re a full leap ahead of your spouse maturity speaking. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten married or stay married. But the mature thing to do, even if it’s a half, half step forward, isn’t about adding more novelty, adding more.
Variety to the bedroom. It’s about, bringing more of a self and you know how to bring a more self because you’ve thought about what is myself, what is my self going to be in this situation? [00:30:00] I hope this is helpful. I love that you’re asking these questions. I hope the next steps for you are, leading you to more joy, more fulfillment, inspiring conversation with your spouse.
More personal growth and development and maturity in yourself as you and your spouse work together through these things to create a sex life that you’re both enthusiastically happy about because it infuses your marriage with inspiration and life. This life giving energy. If you’d like to go deeper on this in May, we are starting our next cohort of our men’s and women’s cohorts.
These are limited to six to 10 men, or six to 10 women, and we do a deep dive on these sorts of topics over 14 weeks. It’s a small group, so you become fast friends with the other members in the group. We follow the Get Your Marriage on course for the first six modules, and it’s led by our team of talented and [00:31:00] professional marriage counselors who not just talk the talk, but they walk the walk.
Also, if you wanna get a seat in that, you get in that position. Or if you wanna sign up as a husband and wife in these cohorts, you’ll find those details at Get your Marriage on.com. Click events, scroll to the bottom, that’s where you’ll find it. So that’s something you’ll definitely want to be a part of.
Thank you for listening. It’s your turn to go get your marriage on. And while you’re at it, please share this podcast with your married friends. I promise they’ll thank you for life. And if you haven’t yet, check out our mobile apps intimately, us just between us and our new one that we just launched called Sparked.
These are all designed to help improve intimacy in and outta the bedroom in your relationship. Talk to you next week. Okay.
