The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance.
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What am I going to do? I think about sex all the time. Sex help. Four times five is 20, five times six is 30... naked girls, naked women. Oh, stop me, God!

Xander, is that all you think about? If you are in a sex-starved marriage, you have what they call a sexual desire discrepancy. Your wife doesn't want to have sex, or you don't want to have sex as much. But there's a difference—one of you wants it, one of you doesn’t. How do you melt the ice? How do you break through that?

With me today to discuss that is Michele Weiner Davis. She's the author of The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido, A Couple's Guide, a book I highly, highly recommend. Michele, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Michele, if you could briefly tell us what a sex-starved marriage is, and then let us know what are a few things we can do to get ourselves out of this mess, if we're in it.

That sounds great. A sex-starved marriage—and by the way, it's estimated that one out of every three couples struggles with this issue—is when one spouse is desperately longing for more touch and physical closeness and sexuality, and the other spouse, for a variety of reasons, isn't interested. Okay, so what's the big deal? It's just sex. But to the spouse yearning for more touch, it's a huge deal, because what I've heard from person after person who feels this way is that it is really about feeling wanted, about feeling appreciated and loved, and feeling connected.

And when two people have this misunderstanding between them, what tends to happen in many marriages is that all sorts of emotional intimacy drops out on every level. They stop doing things together, they stop laughing at each other's jokes, they stop connecting. They stop being friends, and in a sense, they lead parallel lives. And when this happens, it definitely puts the marriage at risk of infidelity and even divorce.

But as to your question, which I think is such a good one...

I just want to mention something first. I know you also use the term communication-starved—that when they're sex-starved, they’re also communication-starved.

Absolutely, absolutely, because so often in marriage, one person is really yearning for more personal kinds of communication, more meaningful talk, while the other one is yearning for more touch. And the person who's a talker is waiting for the talk before they're interested in touch, and the person who's a toucher is waiting for the touching before they're willing to invest themselves in talk. And that's a deadly waiting game.

So what can you do? Well, I'll start by talking about the person who has a smaller sexual appetite, and to that person, I often suggest that they adopt the Nike philosophy and "just do it." I wish I had a dollar, Ellen, for each time someone in my practice said to me, "Michele, I really wasn't in the mood when my spouse initiated sex, but once we got into it, I really enjoyed myself. And I noticed that I felt much closer to him or her, and I noticed that those good feelings lingered throughout the week."

Well, let me tell you what's going on here. There's some exciting new research that suggests that for about 50% of the population, sexual desire doesn't just happen. They're not going to be making dinner or riding the bus or writing out checks and all of a sudden have this random lusty thought like their more highly-sexed spouse might. Instead, what these folks need to do is to get their feet moving, so to speak, because they need to be physically aroused before they'll actually feel a sexual urge.

So the best thing you can do if you're someone who sort of fits this description is to allow yourself to be receptive to your spouse's advances, even if you're not 100% in the mood at the time. Because so often, in fact, I'd say more often than not, once you really get involved, you'll find that it's not only pleasurable to you, which is great, but it also triggers feelings of love in your spouse, which will make him or her much more likely to want to be kind, loving, and caring to you in return over time. So that's the Nike philosophy.

It’s really great advice to the person with lower sexual desire.

To the person with a bigger sexual appetite, I sometimes jokingly say—

Hey, I gotta interrupt this, because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that's it. A very quick ad, and then Ellen will be back. Romance. Oh,

I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Here it is!

The Selfish Path to Romance: A serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at SelfishRomance.com and buy it at Amazon.com. The Selfish Path to Romance. That is interesting.

To the person with a bigger sexual appetite, I sometimes jokingly say "use the F-word," and by that, I mean feelings. Talk about your feelings, because so often what happens in these marriages is that the person who has felt totally rejected, instead of really talking about feeling vulnerable, feeling disappointed, feeling disconnected, they get angry. They get angry at the tricycle that's left in the driveway, or the beer can that's left in the family room, or the dishes left undone.

So they displace it.

Exactly. And what happens is, when the person gets really angry—well, let's face it, anger is not exactly an aphrodisiac, and it pushes the other spouse even further away, which is just the opposite of what they're hoping will happen. It helps to really share with your spouse the kind of hurt, disappointment, and loneliness that you feel when you don't feel physically connected.

So often, a spouse is much more willing to want to take care of you and be kinder and more loving through physical touch if they know that this is the situation, rather than if you're just being angry.

So it's being honest about how you're feeling with either person.

You said something in your book—that many times the person who has a lower sex drive or sexual desire, it's not that they don't have any; it's that they've just let it drift away and it’s camouflaged. It can come back.

It's like they don't have the equipment or the capability to make it happen exactly.

You know, one of the things that has been pretty clear to me is that sometimes people with lower desire are waiting for these major urges to wash over them instead of noticing maybe the baby steps. For example, a lot of women have said to me in my practice, "You know, I did notice that he looked really great in his jeans, or that I felt a little bit more warmth or connection to him, and it made me want to reach out and touch his face. But I stopped myself."

So rather than wait for the fireworks to happen, I tell people to focus on the baby steps and to act on them, because for them, those will be the way to, you know, get the embers turning into fire, right?

That's what you call it, the embers versus the fires.

And this is from The Sex-Starved Marriage with Michele Weiner Davis. If you're interested in this book, it's a fabulous book. If you have even a slight hint of sexual problems, catch them before they get big.

Absolutely. What would be one other—we probably have time for one other tip that you could give us?

Just to balance things out, back to the person with higher desire, I say, tune into your spouse's turn-ons. And by that, I mean so often the person with more sexual desire tends to do the very things that would turn themselves on, but not the person—the spouse. So for example, this person might buy sexy underwear, X-rated videos, and plan little sexy evenings. But to the person with a lower sexual appetite, it can be a real turn-off because they feel pressured, and they think, "Enough already! Will you stop?"

Instead, so often, what turns on the person with a smaller sexual appetite are the things that happen outside the bedroom—the kind, loving acts, the offer to "Why don’t you sleep in on Saturday morning? I'll take care of the kids," or "I know that you're really stressed out lately. Why don’t you go on a fishing trip with your buddies?" It's that kind of concern and care that breeds the kind of feeling that makes the person with a smaller sexual appetite want to touch again.

That's wonderful. Just the Nike tip, the embers tip, and then just tuning into what your other partner really loves, sensually, sexually.

Right?

That's excellent.

Michele, you have a website where people can see all your books you've written—Divorce Busters. Do you want to say the books that you've written?

Well, there's a list of them. I think, you know, probably the most important ones—the website has all of them, and they can get there by going to DivorceBusting.com or, actually, they can even get there by going to SexStarvedMarriage.com

That's wonderful, either way. Okay. And thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

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Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Ellen Kenner.