For years, I asked my wife to initiate sex more often because I wanted to feel chosen and desired. Instead, my requests created pressure, scorekeeping, and a cycle that made genuine desire even harder.
In this episode, I explain why I stopped asking, what I misunderstood about responsive desire, and how shifting from initiating sex to initiating connection transformed our intimate relationship.
We’ll talk about desire discrepancies, obligation sex, sexual entitlement, emotional connection, and how to express what you want without treating your spouse’s body—or desire—as something you’re owed.
Resources:
Men’s and Women’s Only Coaching
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.
Dan: I’m a s*x and intimacy coach for married Christian couples, and I don’t ask my wife to initiate s*x, at least not anymore. Almost every piece of advice out there says to speak up and ask your spouse to want you more. It says express your needs and ask that your needs are met. I followed that advice for years and it made my marriage worse, not better.
And let me show you what I learned instead and what I coach my couples to do instead too.
First, let’s be clear. Wanting your spouse to want you is a good thing, and it’s really healthy. By the way, it feels [00:01:00] amazing when the person you love reaches for you first. Marriage should be filled with lots of the good things like that. So this isn’t me telling you that you should want s*x less or that you should want your spouse to initiate less.
What I learned is I was chasing that feeling but in the wrong way If you want s*x more than your spouse does, you are not broken and neither are they. This is one of the most common things couples face in marriage. One study found about 80% of couples regularly hit the moments where one spouse wants more s*x than the other, and it’s not always the husband.
In one study, the wife had the higher drive 60% of the time. But here’s the catch, whatever it is in your marriage, when the higher desire spouse tries to fix this by asking for more initiation on the other side, it usually makes things worse, and that was me.
For the first 13 years of our marriage, my wife and I were both really anxious about s*x and didn’t even know it, and this is typical for a [00:02:00] lot of couples that come from good conservative Christian homes. And it wasn’t until a friend and his wife opened up to us about their s*x life that something cracked in us.
We wanted what our friends had. They had this strong bond, this passion for each other that we felt was missing in our marriage, and we knew s*x was the answer. But we were so scared to learn about it, but we put our fears aside and started learning as much as we could together, and then our marriage went from good to great fast.
Then a new problem showed up in our marriage. The morning after great s*x, I’d think about it all day long, and I’d ask my wife if she thought about it, too, and she said, “No.” So I decided something was definitely wrong. How can I have such a good experience and then the next day think about it all the time, and it doesn’t cross her mind as much?
This pattern showed up in other ways too. For example, when she would step out of the shower, my body responded instantly. However, when I step out of the [00:03:00] shower, nothing happened to her the same way, and by the way, I’m pretty fit, and I’m not bad-looking. So I kept asking myself, “Why doesn’t she want me all the time like I want her?”
We were having good s*x, but here’s what made this hard to let go of. Sometimes she did initiate on her own terms, and honestly, it was the best s*x of our marriage, not because we did anything different, because I felt wanted. I f- was feeling her choose me thoroughly of her own accord. That feeling was so good, I wanted to press a button and get it whenever I wanted.
That was the trap. You cannot schedule the feeling of being desired and wanted by another person.
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So I asked, I asked her to initiate, and if I’d ask for s*x, she’d usually say yes, but sometimes it felt hollow. We had some heavy talks, and I told her I really wanted more balance when it comes to initiation in our marriage. I want it to be fair. In other words, I wanted her to initiate more often. And she would.
She would initiate more for about a week, and then it would fade back to our old patterns. And then a , little while would pass, I would get upset, she’d ramp up her s*xual initiation again, and then it’d fade again. And then I doubled down on romance. I sent love letters, flowers, cute notes hidden all around the house.
I went all in.
But [00:05:00] underlying all of my romance, there was a string attached, even if I couldn’t admit it at the time. The thought was, “If I can pour this much into the romance in our relationship, into you, then you owe that much back in what I want.” I wanted s*x. In other words, I felt entitled. Some people call this love languages.
I will do your love language, but I want you to do my love language in return. I need to be honest about the worst version of this. When time passed without s*x, the tension would build, and before I handled that in a healthier way, I used my wife as a stress ball. I’d get what I’d call horngry. You’ve heard of hangry when you haven’t eaten a meal, and then you start to get angry.
Well, it’s like that, but it’s the horny version, horny and angry at the same time. And then I’d pursue her relentlessly until she could finally give in. By the way, that’s not desire. That’s kind of like manipulation or pressure. [00:06:00] And what it was is it was me trying to manage my own s*xual tension and calling it desire because she was my only legitimate s*xual outlet, and I’d pursue her for that.
And here’s what I finally saw. I was treating my wife as if I was the s*xually superior one in our marriage. I had more s*xual interests. I had a lower disgust threshold. Desire for me just showed up easily and on its own spontaneously. So in my head, she was the one that had to be coaxed up to my level.
Now, sit with this for a moment from her side. She could try hard as she wanted and never quite catch up to my level because the whole game is rigged. The moment she catches up to my level, guess what? I would up it again. Now, if you’re my wife in this situation, why would you want to be s*xual with a man who thinks he’s better than you?
That ranking and that scorekeeping in my head was the thing that [00:07:00] was killing our s*x life, not her drive or my drive. The second shift was dropping the entitlement completely. None of this is owed to me was my new frame.
The new frame is it’s all a gift. I’m the lucky one. I’m the lucky man that gets to wake up next to her every day. Every breath I have is a gift from God.
The mere fact that she wants to connect with me even s*xually, it’s all a gift. It’s not a payment. She doesn’t owe me anything. It’s not something I earn from her. It’s all a gift. Around this time, I started handling my own s*xual tension more responsibly, so I’d stop turning into an ogre and get hangry all the time.
Now, that constant pressure of, you know, that anxiety of, “When are we gonna have s*x next?” tend to fade away. My wife didn’t like that change, by the way, so she offered at this time to have s*x with me every day to make sure I had a release when I wanted it. Now, [00:08:00] for a second, I was thrilled, right? This was a dream, s*x every day and my wife is offering it.
Then I saw it for what it really was. This wasn’t about desire or affection. It was about managing a behavior in me that she didn’t like. That poisoned the whole thing. So, surprise, I said, “No.” She was really hurt. She felt rejected. She didn’t expect me to turn her down. And I’ll be honest about what happened in my head at the time.
A voice said, “Yeah, now you know what it’s like to get s*xually rejected. Now you know what it’s like to be told no.” And by the way, that was my old score-keeping brain coming back. But here’s where my growth and work showed up. I was able to notice the thought, and I knew it wasn’t right, and I just let it pass on like a cloud, and I didn’t feel the urge to get mean or to feed it.
Here’s the part that explains all of it. There are two ways s*xual desire shows up, and most of us only understand our own pattern of s*xual desire. [00:09:00] For a spontaneous desire person like me, desire tends to come first. A thought shows up out of nowhere, maybe while I’m folding laundry or driving, and then arousal, boom.
Then I reach for s*x. Desire, then arousal, then s*x. It’s that sequence. It feels almost automatic, boom, boom, boom. So I couldn’t understand why my wife’s desire didn’t work this way, ’cause that’s the way it’s depicted in a lot of movies, and it’s the Hollywood model after all.
I didn’t get responsive desire until I found some responsive desire in my own life in a place that had nothing to do with s*x.
I love long distance running, and it’s my favorite form of exercise. But I needed more muscle, so three years ago, I bought a home gym, and I’ve been faithful this whole time using that home gym.
But here’s the secret. I actually don’t like working out with the home gym even though I’m faithful at it. I still wake up and go and do it, but I don’t wake up feeling excited to go lift weights, [00:10:00] not once in the last three years.
And it isn’t until I’m in the middle of my workout, you know, when I’m sweaty, the blood is pumping, it feels good after my body gets warmed up and I’m going at it. In other words, desire shows up in the middle.
Now, if someone told me, “I want you to want to work out,” at the very start, I don’t think I could. The wanting of wanting to work out only shows up once I’m already moving. Now that for me is responsive desire.
S*x works the same way for a responsive desire spouse. Desire isn’t waiting in the background. The right context has to come first. Something warm starts, arousal builds, and then desire shows up after that. In other words, context, then arousal, then desire, and then s*x. Researcher Rosemary Basson showed that it’s normal that in long-term marriages that this pattern happens.
It’s [00:11:00] not a deficit.
Her research shows that context is everything. You have to feel safe, actually like the person, and not be wrung out from the day.
So when I asked my wife to initiate more often, what I was really doing is asking her to step into step three without going through step one and two first.
And by the way, asking her to initiate and have desire for me when it comes later for her, that isn’t just impossible ask. It quietly drains her in a way I never saw. When I ask my wife to initiate, she’s stuck between two things she can’t do. First option is to fake it and start something she doesn’t really feel, which makes s*x feel like a chore, or force real desire on the spot, which never works.
So her mind goes to war. She loves me and doesn’t want to let me down, just doesn’t want obligation s*x, and can’t flip that switch. Kind of like a dog that’s chasing two balls at once, her brain just really wears out fast. [00:12:00] I never saw it, so her quiet, “Sure, maybe later,” wasn’t actually rejection. She was asking for a break from the emotional labor that goes into trying to answer this problem that she really can’t solve.
So I stopped asking her to initiate s*x. In fact, I stopped initiating s*x altogether. I started initiating connection because remember, connection is step one for a responsive spouse. Connection in your marriage can show up in a lot of ways. It can be a walk, it can be being affectionate, it can be playing, it can be a real conversation.
The key is it has to be freely given and freely received with no hidden bill or strings attached. One wife I know likes to send her husband flirty texts throughout the day through our Just Between Us app, which also lets you send naked pictures too and videos without any risk of someone else seeing them.
And she trusts that by sending these things to her husband, it won’t automatically mean [00:13:00] that they’ll have to have s*x later that day. In other words, trust is the whole point. She’s free to play in that area without any strings attached.
So I want you to plan time to play together as a couple, a weekly date that doesn’t have to end up in penetrative intercourse or s*x.
I believe in this principle so much that I’ve built a new app all around this principle. It’s called Sparked. It helps you find date ideas that fit into your life. A guest on my upcoming podcast, Hannah, also shared another tip. She and her husband had built a menu of s*xy options. It could be a shower together, a massage, a make-out session, or moving on to more specific er0tic acts in the bedroom.
Now, the menu allows them both to pick and choose what they’re up for in the moment, and it takes the pressure off of things having to just be one thing. It takes the either/or option out of s*x for them
And I encourage couples to build a [00:14:00] ritual around emotional connection. This is sharing your day on an emotional level. What did you actually feel and experience? And for the other person to really learn how to listen. This skill is so vital we teach it in our next level program to all couples, and it gets amazing results fast.
Now, you might be thinking, “So should I just never bring up s*x and turn into a doormat?” No, and if that’s the message you got, then you’ve completely missed the point. What you want to do is drop entitlement. Dropping entitlement is not the same thing as pretending you don’t want your spouse. You still get to desire them.
I want you to desire them, and you still get a say in what you want. It’s just that you drop the scorecard and the demand. You stop keeping a ledger of who initiated s*x last. You stop treating their body like something owed to you.
So no, I don’t ask my wife to initiate s*x because the day I stopped asking her to initiate [00:15:00] s*x, I stopped seeing her as someone I had to drag up to my level, and I started seeing everything that she is. That her very presence in my life, the very fact that she wants to have s*x with me when she does, that is a gift.
And here’s what nobody tells you. The moment I quit keeping score, the pressure came off her, and the connection came back a little easier. And guess what? S*xual desire followed on its own so much easier. In other words, we’re having a lot more s*x, high-quality s*x that she freely initiates because the demand to initiate is no longer there.
Just to be clear, my wife loves s*x, and our s*x life is deeply satisfying now, not because I got better at asking or I memorized some lines or I’m really good at sending her flowers. It’s none of that. It’s because I stopped asking for her to start initiating, and I just started focusing on connecting with her.
If your old [00:16:00] brain still wants to keep score, that’s okay. Mine does that still sometimes, and it’s a practice to keep trying. But the work is noticing it and letting it pass.
By the way, it’s not a life sentence if you have a big desire gap in your marriage today. This is completely workable, and this is something I help couples with all the time. It is not a life sentence. If you wanna dig deeper on this topic, there’s a specific episode, number 265. It’s called Planning a Bedroom Party Worth Going To.
I recommend you check it out. And if you want more hands-on coaching, this is where you get to work with me and my team, check out the Next Level program. If you want some ideas to up your game with emotional connection out of the bedroom and dates, check out the Sparked app. It’s free to download. And please subscribe to this podcast,
Or if you already do subscribe, share this with your married friends. I promise they will thank you for life. And now, my friends, it’s your turn to take this information and go get your marriage [00:17:00] on!
