Moment 128: How To Fix Your Sexless Relationship: Tracey Cox

Discover the keys to reigniting intimacy in your relationship with renowned relationship expert Tracey Cox. This insightful guide offers practical advice and proven strategies to help you and your partner reconnect, rekindle desire, and build a fulfilling, passionate love life. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/7lsnhHGsUCb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Tracey: https://www.instagram.com/traceycoxsexauthor/?hl=en Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  My friends, they're in their 30s.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Sexless.

• 0:06Steven Bartlett?

  Sexless relationships. They are increasingly frustrated about it, it seems.

• 0:13Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, I've got like, you know, I've got this collection of my best friends. We're very talkative and communicative around our sex lives and stuff. And I just noticed that in various ways, they're in situations where they're not, they don't feel like they're getting enough sex from their partner. And they see it as a critical problem, which, which might result in them, for example, being cheating or ending the relationship.

• 0:37Steven Bartlett?

  Even in my own sort of sexual experience, what got me really engaged with this subject matter was I was in a relationship where the partner turned around to me one day after six months and said, like, I don't like having sex. And as a young man.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  With you or just I don't like having sex?

• 0:51Steven Bartlett?

  With me.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 0:52Steven Bartlett?

  And as a, yeah, as a young man, I, I think with, you know, with an ego, I thought, well, what does that mean? That's super emasculating. Does that mean that I'm not hitting it right? Or like, do I, maybe it's her problem, you know, whatever. And so I went on that journey.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  What did she mean?

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  So it's interesting because we separated.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09Steven Bartlett?

  My reaction was very like, and also I turned to her and said, like, why? And she said, the next sentence was, I'm not comfortable talking about that with you.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So for me, that was like the door had closed.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Of course it did, because where do you go with that?

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, exactly. So I broke up with her.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  And a year passes, we both go to different places. We both kind of, you know, figure ourselves out a little bit. And on her journey, she really got to understand that at the heart of her relationship with sex was this fear that had derived from previous relationships where the partner was very forceful, you know, apparent cheating, all of those things that we kind of discussed earlier. So it wasn't that she necessarily didn't like having sex. There was a lot of psychological work to be done on removing that fear of like abandonment. And really, if I made her feel safe, really, really safe, then the sexual appetite would return. That's what happened.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:02Steven Bartlett?

  So a year later, we get back together. We end up having the best sex of our lives on an ongoing basis. And it was because she was able to understand, I was, okay, so first she was able to understand what was really going on. I was able to like, be patient enough to like, listen and, you know, go from weeks and weeks and months with not having sexual intimacy and just be there. Which allowed her to feel safe and then beyond that, we're able to kind of like rebuild it.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 2:31Steven Bartlett?

  And we're still together today.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. So this is your girlfriend?

• 2:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. I'll have to ask her for permission to say this, so I'll show her the clip and make sure she's comfortable with it.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39Steven Bartlett?

  But that's my current girlfriend.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  That's an extraordinary story.

• 2:41Steven Bartlett?

  So we went from a point of, I don't like having sex, I don't like having sex, really, really bad situation, to the best situation I think one can imagine in that department. Obviously, communication was at the heart of it, letting my ego down.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Of course, always, yeah.

• 2:54Steven Bartlett?

  And giving her space to, you know, and I give the credit to her because she figured that out. But that's what got me really into the subject matter because I've now got loads of friends that are in that situation.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  What I would say to your friends is if your partner doesn't want to have sex with you, I wonder whether, how good the sex is because a lot of women say no, I'm presuming these are straight couples, a lot of women say no to sex because the sex that's on offer is not that interesting to them. So for this, we need to talk about sex drives, spontaneous desire versus responsive desire. Have you heard of that?

• 3:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28Steven Bartlett?

  From reading your book.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  So spontaneous desire is two thirds of men have spontaneous desire and it's the desire that everybody has at the beginning. And by the way, if you want to know somebody's resting libido, you've got to wait about a year, you have to wait about a year to find out what their real libido is because it's always so artificially inflated at the start, right? But so spontaneous desire, two thirds of men have this, it's the, you know, want to see, want to see, you know, seek sex, want sex, seek sex. They can go from, people with spontaneous desire could be like scrolling through Instagram, somebody sexy walks past and it's like, wow, I'm instantly aroused for sex. They go from zero to a hundred very quickly. They seek out their mate, want sex and they're off, right?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Responsive desire means that you have no desire for sex or very little desire for sex until somebody is actually doing something to you sexually. So this is somebody who, you know, maybe is with their partner, their partner wants to have sex, they're not even slightly interested but goes, okay, look, I'll give it a go. Then once things start happening, if their partner is very good at stimulating them and they enjoy the stimulation, all of a sudden they're like, yeah, actually, yeah, I'm enjoying this.

• 4:38Steven Bartlett?

  That's the warming up.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  That's the warming up, right? Now, 30% of women have responsive desire. The rest of them are a mix between spontaneous and responsive. Most men, so you've got this situation where most men have spontaneous desire, most women are responsive. Most men are very happy to go straight to genital sex. They don't need warming up, the way their anatomy works. For women, foreplay isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. Because in order for sex to be comfortable, you need the vagina to tent. So it literally puffs up so that it can, you know, take a penis comfortably. So if you don't wait for that to happen and you go male style sex, go straight for penetration.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  She's not even off the starting blocks and suddenly you're penetrating, sex isn't great and then it's all over. So for men, you could have like, not even thinking about sex to having finished within 10 minutes. For women, they need time to warm up because their sex drive is responsive. So they're almost like blinking, it's over and they haven't even got to 5% desire. And this is the problem with couples. And that's, that's with, I'm talking about a very basic couple who probably don't talk about sex and who aren't terribly sexually savvy. So I think, because I think people have an understanding, vague understanding that women need more foreplay. I mean, that's been drummed into men, hasn't it? But I think that what women don't understand is that women think, you know, at the beginning it was great, it was all spontaneous. Desire was there.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  You know, when you get into a long-term relationship, desire doesn't tap you on the shoulder anymore, you have to create it. And women, I think, think because that spontaneous desire is gone and they don't feel like sex. It just doesn't come out of the blue unless they start having sex. They think, oh, that just must mean I don't want sex anymore. Wow, something's wrong with me, I don't want sex anymore. You do want sex, it's just that you've got to be, have sexy things happening to you before you feel the desire for sex. And if people understood that, if women understood it better and stopped saying, oh, well, it's obviously means my sex drive's gone. No, it hasn't, it's there. You've just got to have great stimulation and great sex to get it back.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  And the other thing about women is that women, we have this thing about that women want tame and they want romance and stuff. That's not true. So much research now shows that women like erotic, wild sex. I mean, they've done these experiments with women where. They'll show them erotic videos and they'll wire up the genitals to measure genital response. So when you're aroused as a woman, blood flows to the genitals same as men and you lubricate. So they're watching all these videos, various sexy videos, and they have to say, you know, fully anything is disarousing you, no, because society says no, we're not supposed to be. And the genitals are like, are you kidding? What are you thinking? This is fantastic. I'm absolutely, say yes to this, say yes to this.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  So the, you know, there's such a big difference between what we're taught and what we would like. So if your girlfriend's saying no to sex and you're in a long-term relationship, it's because you're not giving her interesting enough sex. Give her exciting erotic sex. Give her something like, actually, this is what we're going to do. I mean, look at Fifty Shades of Grey, that got middle-aged women wanting sex, women who hadn't wanted sex for 20 years. I remember being on a holiday with my husband and we started talking to this couple. It was around the time when Fifty Shades came out and she knew what I did. And she said, she said, God, I hadn't really had great sex with my partner, wasn't interested in sex, you know, for like 10 years. She said, I read the book. I'm sitting there, two o'clock in the morning.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  I'm looking down at my partner, I'm thinking, I really just want to wake him up and have sex with him. And she said, and I've never, and then she said, and I read the books. And suddenly I was back into this erotic sex with my husband that I'd just forgotten, I'd forgotten about. Like you think of sex, it's like, oh God, here we go, kissing, a bit fumbling, you know, and then the routine sex, but give people something interesting, like all your friends. Give her really interesting scenarios. Take her somewhere sexy, push her out of her comfort zones. Don't give her romance, don't give her, you know, give her sexy sex and then they'll be interested.

• 8:47Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm. I'm thinking of my friends, like posing that and how uncomfortable they'd feel.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Really?

• 8:54Steven Bartlett?

  Like, babe, I want to drive to the countryside and da, da, da, da, da. Because you know, when you've been with someone and you've become that kind of sibling thing that you described earlier. They might almost look at you with a bit of.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Horror.

• 9:05Steven Bartlett?

  Horror, yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you wouldn't go straight from not talking about sex to like, and we're gonna go to a lactose club tonight. And no, you have to, you have to have the conversation. You have to bite the bullet and have the conversation. Because the thing about sexist relationships, if you haven't had sex for a year with your partner, it is very unlikely you're gonna have sex again with your partner unless you confront it head on. If you just think, yeah, this will pass, this will pass, it will never pass. You're not gonna suddenly go, oh my God, look at that. We haven't had sex for five years. Let's go to bed now. No, it's got to the awkward, awkward, awkward stage. So, I mean, thirty percent of couples who have been together for two years or more don't have sex.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Two years, not ten years, two years, thirty percent. It is very easy to get out of the habit of sex. And once you're out of the habit of sex, the less often you do it. And then couples get into this thing where it's like, God, we haven't had sex for ages. But you know what? Next weekend, we'll have this marathon sex session and that'll make up for it all. And then the marathon sex session is like, God, how am I gonna find time for that? Or, you know, that's a bit daunting. And then, of course, you'd have to have sex for like six weeks to make up for the session. So it just becomes more and more insurmountable. So I always say to people, just have little bite sized bits of sex. You know, don't have, sex doesn't have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Like, have a big snogging session. Have a thing where he gives you oral, you don't do any, you know, give nothing back. Or you give him oral, or, you know,

• 10:33Speaker 01

  you just do something sensual together. You have a bath together. That's counts as sex. You know, people think sex has to have intercourse in there. It doesn't. It's the least favourite bit for women. Take the intercourse out. Start doing little bite sized stuff to reconnect sexually.