Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett The Orgasm Expert: Women Don’t Like Penetrative Sex As Much As Men! This Is How Often You Should Be Having Sex! Stop Inviting Pets Into The Bedroom! - Doctor Karen Gurney About this episode Everyone has the desire to be desired, finally, in this episode, the mystery of desire is stripped back.
Dr Karen Gurney is a Clinical Psychologist, Psychosexologist and Couples Therapist, she has been helping couples tackle sex problems for over 20 years. She is the author of the bestselling book, ‘Mind The Gap: The truth about desire and how to future proof your sex life’.
In this conversation Karen and Steven discuss topics, such as the reasons for a dead sex life, why women prefer non-penetrative sex, how technology is killing your sex life, and why you should invest in your sexual currency.
You can buy Karen’s book, ‘How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life’, here: https://amzn.to/49VnduP
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Transcript 17,879 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Everyone wants more sex, better sex, and there is a huge amount that we can do that can guarantee great sex for the rest of your life. So the best place to start is Dr Karen Gurney. She is a clinical psychologist
0:13 Speaker 01 And psychosexologist. That has been helping individuals and couples overcome sexual problems for 20 years.
0:19 Speaker 02 She's lead psychologist in an award-winning NHS sex clinic.
0:23 Speaker 00 This might be surprising to some people. 52% of women and 42% of men are unhappy with the sex lives that they have. And that's because, as a society, we've got sex all wrong. For example, the way desire is represented to us is lust, passion, spontaneity. But it's not the norm. And the problem is, a lot of people are waiting to feel like that. And they're waiting a really long time. What we need to do instead is be aware that our desire can be triggered using what I call sexual currency. I'll go into that. We also know that penis and vagina sex is women's least favourite sexual act. But that's how we see how sex should be. So we see less pleasure and less reward for women. But also, if you ask most people how often they should be having sex, everyone says three times a week.
1:07 Speaker 00 It's actually drastically different than that, three times a month. And that shows the way we understand sex is all wrong.
1:14 Steven Bartlett? So I have questions. Do you think you should schedule sex?
1:18 Speaker 00 No, what you should do though is
1:20 Steven Bartlett? Fantasies, fetishes. What if your partner says, "I don't like it"?
1:23 Speaker 00 Well, I can talk you through that if you like.
1:25 Steven Bartlett? Parents who are struggling with sex, what should they do?
1:28 Speaker 00 We know that people start having sex again from when their kid is about six. And that's because
1:33 Steven Bartlett? What if you're in a relationship right now and you no longer found them attractive? What do I say?
1:37 Speaker 00 I would say
1:48 Steven Bartlett? Dr Karen Gurney.
1:50 Speaker 00 Hi.
1:51 Steven Bartlett? What you do and why do you do it?
1:54 Speaker 00 I spend my working week trying to change people's relationships with sex. And the reason I do that is because although we might think that sex is a kind of frivolous recreational pursuit, it actually isn't. It's super important for our psychological wellbeing, for our relationship wellbeing. We know that when people have great sex, their relationships last longer. We know that when people have great sex, they're even more productive in work the next day. There are so many reasons why sex is important. But unfortunately, as a society, we've kind of got it all wrong about how sex works, about what we should be doing.
2:32 Speaker 00 And because of that, we have hugely high rates of dissatisfaction with people's sex lives in the UK, but also worldwide.
2:40 Steven Bartlett? Why did sex take your fancy?
2:42 Speaker 00 There's so much about sex that's fascinating, I think. There's loads we don't know, there's loads we do know, but no one talks about. People find it so hard to talk about sex and it's so stigmatized that, you know, when people come into the room, you can really see the weight of it on their shoulders. It's hard for them to speak about, it's embarrassing for them. And to be the person that makes that feel comfortable and to be the person that can create change in a part of their life that matters so much, but is perhaps something they've never told their closest friend about, is hugely rewarding. You also get to work with people across all ages. So, you know, from their teens to their nineties.
3:24 Speaker 00 You get to work with couples, individuals, you get everything with sex therapy. I love it.
3:30 Steven Bartlett? Since you started your work, what was, almost what, 20 years ago, did you do?
3:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:33 Steven Bartlett? What have you seen in terms of changes in the problem set?
3:40 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
3:40 Steven Bartlett? That you're dealing with now, i.e. what are the new problems that you're confronted with in your clinical practice when couples or people come to you?
3:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a good one because lots of things have stayed the same, right? So we, we, we know that, for example, problems with desire remain the most common reason why people end up in my clinical room. But lots of things have also shifted. Data actually shows those shifts over the last few decades. So we have long-term data into the lives of people in the UK in terms of their sex lives. And we know that we're having less sex this decade than we were the decade before and the decade before that. So the amount of sex we're having, for example, is going down. From my clinical hunches, but also from what's been written about in the research, we have a good idea that that's about our pace of life, our work-life balance, our distractibility,
4:31 Speaker 00 our use of devices. It's become evident in the last kind of two decades that when it comes to sex, attention is a really key part of it. It's really key. So being able to pay attention to what's happening in your body or being able to pay attention to what's happening in your mind is crucial. But as a society, I think we're getting less and less able to pay attention. We're getting more and more in pursuit of distraction. And that shows itself all the time in sex therapy. You know, couples who come to see me because they feel that they're never having sex, but yet when you look at their week, they actually have very little time together. And the time together they do have, they're both busy scrolling, they're watching Netflix
5:16 Speaker 00 and scrolling, they're perhaps doing three things at once, they're checking their work emails, that's taking them to a whole new cognitive place of stress. And so it's no wonder that people don't have space for their desire to emerge. And that's definitely a newer phenomenon.
5:31 Steven Bartlett? It kind of made me think of some of the things I was reading about in your books, where you, you say that couples and individuals who do mindfulness practices are those that typically have the most desire. The, I think the quote is from your newest book, which is, the book is called How Not To Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life.
5:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful.
5:52 Steven Bartlett? It's a, it's a great, great title. Says, research tells us that women who find it easier to have orgasms are typically more mindful in everyday life and find it easier to be in the moment during sex.
6:04 Speaker 00 That's right. That's right. So there's an enormous amount of data about attention and sex. And obviously, one of the ways in which we can sharpen our attention is mindfulness. We know that mindfulness works across a range of challenges that we face, whether it's pain management, whether it's sleep, whether it's about appetite regulation, all kinds of things. But when it comes to sex, it's super powerful. So when you're distracted during sex, and we know that over 90% of people have non-sexual thoughts during sex. Okay. So everyone gets distracted. We know that from the research. But what happens when we start to get distracted most of the time, or when those distractions are what we call cognitively salient, which means they're worrying or they're particularly
6:47 Speaker 00 stressful, like, oh, I'm not going to come. Or what if I don't stay hard? Or is she enjoying this? Those types of distractions. What happens is our distraction is basically turning down our arousal, like turning down the volume on the TV. So it becomes harder for our bodies to respond. So to stay aroused, for example, it becomes harder for us to feel anything. So our pleasure is turned down. It becomes harder for us to come. And ultimately, over time, it gets in the way of our desire. On the contrary, if we work on that distraction, either by trying to remove them, or trying to tackle the worries at their root cause,
7:27 Speaker 00 or trying to promote our ability to pay attention where we want it to be. So that's sexual thoughts, sexual sensations, pleasure, then it's like turning up the volume. And we've seen plenty of research that demonstrates the enormously powerful impact of mindfulness on sexual response.
7:47 Steven Bartlett? I can think of times in my life where, because I was stressed or worried, when I got in bed, I was worrying about something or stressing about something at work.
7:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:56 Steven Bartlett? My partner tried to have sex with me and I had zero chance of getting aroused.
8:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:00 Steven Bartlett? I could not get an erection. And it's, I remember those moments and thinking, oh, she's going to think that it's about her, but really it's because of this thing I have on my to do list.
8:08 Speaker 00 That's exactly right.
8:09 Steven Bartlett? I had, I got in bed doing my to do list. So I like, I was holding my to do list and I was doing it on my phone.
8:14 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
8:15 Steven Bartlett? And I put the phone down. And then I lay back and I'm still thinking about my to do list. And then she tries to initiate and there's zero chance.
8:24 Speaker 00 That's it. And that's also exactly what we were talking about late, um, earlier on, right? Which is that our society has changed, the way we work has changed. So perhaps three decades ago, you wouldn't have been checking your emails just before bed, which means that wouldn't have started that cascade of thoughts about work, which would then perhaps peak your cortisol, your stress levels, and then cut off your ability to get turned on. So that is one of the major things that has shifted for all of us. And I think, you know, one of the myths that we, you know, would benefit from quashing about sex is this idea that particularly men are always up for it, are always ready to have sex. It's just not true.
9:06 Speaker 00 In fact, everybody needs their kind of conditions for good sex, as I call it, to be right. They need to be in the right kind of headspace. They need to be not distracted and they need to know that the environment is an environment that works for them. It's quite important. So, yeah, your experience is, it mirrors what a lot of people are probably sat at home thinking about just now.
9:31 Steven Bartlett? Do you think there's a bit of a paradox with sex in the sense that the more you think about it and worry about it, the harder it becomes?
9:40 Speaker 00 Yes, absolutely.
9:42 Steven Bartlett? So what do you do? Just not think about it and worry about it?
9:44 Speaker 00 So it's quite interesting because there's also something else that happens when we get turned on, which is that we get this attentional focus narrowing. So one of the features of physiological arousal, so when blood flows around the body, particularly to the genitals, is that we know it kind of sharpens our attention. It makes us basically want to block out the rest of the world. And I'm sure we've all had experiences when we've been completely in the moment during sex, when we've not thought about a single other thing that might be happening around us. So that attentional narrowing is great unless your attention has been hijacked by a worry, because then you get attentional narrowing on the worry.
10:27 Speaker 00 And what happens when we worry about something is that it interferes with sexual response in two main ways. The first is that it takes our attention away from what's erotic and that turns down the arousal and pleasure like we talked about earlier on the TV. And the second thing that happens is that when we worry about something, that activates our sympathetic nervous system, sending chemical messages around the body saying, don't have sex, there's something to worry about. You know, it can't tell the difference between a modern day worry like this email has come through that's ruined my day versus, you know, a saber-toothed tiger has just walked in. You know, our brains are still primitive in that regard. So what
11:07 Speaker 00 happens is that switches off our sexual response. It might mean that you struggle to get turned on. It might mean that you struggle to feel anything. It might mean that your body doesn't work in the way you want it to. And then, of course, the next time you go into it, what are you thinking? You're thinking, what if it doesn't work?
11:24 Steven Bartlett? You talk a lot about expectations and the role that they play in sex. Expectation and pressure make sex worse. That's a quote from your new book, Chapter Three. I know, maybe that's not a quote, but that's basically the gist of what it said. But it's also the gist of my experience. I think it's always felt to me like the opposite of great sex is expectation and like rigidity.
11:47 Speaker 00 Yes.
11:47 Steven Bartlett? And great sex for me is sometimes spontaneous, but it's carefree.
11:53 Speaker 00 Yes.
11:53 Steven Bartlett? And it's worry-free.
11:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. I mean, pressure is a total passion killer.
11:58 Steven Bartlett? Pressure, it's like, that's again, the kind of compounding paradox, because the more there's a problem with our sex, the more it becomes a focal point in our relationship, the more pressure, the more expectation. Every night you go to bed, you're thinking, you know, I've had moments in past lives and past relationships where, because the sex wasn't great, I would feel nervous going to bed because it was going to be one of those moments where we kind of both are sat there thinking about it, but we're not saying anything to each other. And then if I fall asleep, I'm going to disappoint them. But if I try, it's going to go badly. So what the hell do I do?
12:30 Speaker 00 Yes, pressure is not good for our sex lives. And one of the challenges with pressure is that when you think about initiation, it's often very much bound up in pressure. And perhaps we'll talk about initiation in a second. But actually, the foundation of those problems with expectation and pressure is not being able to talk about it. Because if you think about it, what we really want to say is, I'm feeling quite stressed about the sex situation. And the fact that we don't talk about it means that those things are hanging between us. And we know with sex that one of the fascinating things about it is, like other ways in which we learn, we learn about sex by what we witness in
13:11 Speaker 00 the media and what we pick up from social learning, something psychologists call social learning theory. When it comes to sex, we don't witness how anyone else is doing it, really. We only see what happens on TV and what happens in porn and maybe hear from our friends, but we don't really know if they're telling the truth or not. So what that means is we've all got-
13:33 Steven Bartlett? My guy friends all lie about it.
13:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, everyone does.
13:36 Steven Bartlett? They're all stallions in that. No, I'm joking. They're all very honest.
13:38 Speaker 00 There's actually a fascinating sex research fact, which is one of my favorite facts, which is that men, when they say the number of sexual partners that they've had, are more likely to round it up to a zero or a five, a number ending in zero or five. I think that's a great sex fact. So what that means then is that we're all living our sex lives based on something we call sexual script theory. This is a concept that organically came out of the work of some sex researchers in the seventies called Gagnon and Simon. And they discovered that actually, in the absence of talking about sex, we all have quite set ideas about what our sex lives should look like. And we've picked this up from, from the media, from how people talk about sex in popular culture,
14:22 Speaker 00 and in how we've used language. What this means is that we have a set of ideas, and this includes things like penis and vagina is the main course of sex, and everything else isn't really sex. And language backs that up, doesn't it, with the use of the word foreplay, kind of relegating any other type of sex to less than, and the use of the word virginity, which we only really use to refer to penis and vagina sex. So all of these things tell us, well, that's what real sex is. And then you hear people talking about that and backing that up with things like, well, we did everything but, which is like, we didn't have sex. But you did have sex because you were sexual together.
15:04 Speaker 00 So what happens with these sexual scripts is that they benefit us to some degree because they reduce our anxiety. That's what sexual scripts are there for, to give us some idea of what's expected.
15:16 Speaker 00 But what they do to us in the absence of communication is they give us an idea about what we should be doing or what someone else wants to do without us having to talk about it, which often means that problems arise.
15:30 Steven Bartlett? For example, one of the examples you give in your book is about orgasms.
15:33 Speaker 00 Yes.
15:34 Steven Bartlett? And pornography giving us a sexual script that men are basically men in a heterosexual relationship, men are meant to orgasm. And that there was some crazy stat from some Pornhub research.
15:45 Speaker 00 Yes. Yeah, that's really interesting research. There was some research that talked about depictions of female pleasure and pleasure inducing acts for women from the hundred most popular videos on Pornhub. And they found that women's pleasure was shown in about 18% of those top 100 videos. And men's pleasure or acts that produce pleasure for men, mainly around penis and vagina sex, because that's men's most favorite sexual act. It's women's least favorite sexual act. That was depicted in about 78% of cases. So it's quite interesting then, when you think about the fact that we're learning from what we see, because what does
16:28 Speaker 00 that then tell us about what sex should look like, about when sex ends, about whose pleasure is prioritized. And it's one of the reasons that we have an orgasm gap when men and women have sex together, because that's how we learn about sex.
16:44 Steven Bartlett? On that, I just want to pick up on two things you said there that were really interesting to me. The first one was about us not talking, why we don't talk. It's very difficult to talk about sex with your partner.
16:55 Speaker 00 Very.
16:56 Steven Bartlett? Very difficult. I've been there. Very difficult, because the plethora of reasons why you might not be functioning well or enjoying it can often sound like you're blaming them.
17:07 Speaker 00 Mm hmm. Communication is so important. We know that being able to talk about sex is one of the most highly correlated factors with long term sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction and maintaining desire over time. It's more important than the amount you have sex, liking the same things sexually. It's so important, but it's so hard to do. And we know why it's hard, right? It's because we're not socialized to talk about it. We're not often given the words that feel comfortable. We are out of practice getting those words out of our mouth. So they feel kind of clumsy and awkward.
17:46 Speaker 00 There's a lot of worry and risk involved. What if I say this and they don't like it? And because of that, it's easier to avoid. But the most fascinating thing about sex, I think, is that it's constantly evolving for us. So you and I, we're not the same people sexually than we were when we were fifteen, sixteen. And we won't be the same sexual people in another ten, fifteen years than we are now. So we need to be able to have the ability for growth, right? Growth and flex in our sexual relationships. But how do you do that if you can't talk about it? It's a bit like going to the hairdressers, same hairdressers for the rest of your life. And every time you sit down, not saying anything and just hoping that they'll give you the haircut that you want.
18:31 Speaker 00 You wouldn't do it, right?
18:32 Steven Bartlett? And they continually give you the bad you want and you just keep coming back.
18:35 Speaker 00 And you say, thanks, and you tip them and you go. So we need to get better at talking about it. And it's not easy. It's easy for me. I talk about it all day, every day, but I know that that's not the norm. And part of the work that I do is try and help people, try and give people the scaffold to talk about it. And I can talk you through that if you like.
18:55 Steven Bartlett? Please.
18:55 Speaker 00 So it might be that the best place to start is to find out how people find talking about challenging topics anyway with their partner. So if you can't talk about other things outside of sex without it going into an argument, then it might be worth just looking at communication, full stop. Forget sex for the moment, just talk about that.
19:15 Steven Bartlett? Are you creating some like rules of engagement for how we communicate? You listen, I express myself.
19:19 Speaker 00 Absolutely, and I always recommend the Gottmans. I don't know if you know their work.
19:23 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I do, yeah.
19:23 Speaker 00 I recommend them because they have some great resources around general communication. It's important to have a good basis if you're going to talk about sex. But if people can talk about other things and they find it relatively easy to hear each other and to share their kind of hopes and fears, then it might be useful to start to create a culture where talking about sex becomes the norm. This is always the place you want to end up, right? We all want to end up with a relationship culture that supports easy communication about sex. That's the guaranteed route to sexual satisfaction. And to do that, we have to make it something that we do frequently without any pressure, without any expectation that something big has to change.
20:06 Speaker 00 So an early way to start that might be, for example, to bring in some novelty in your communications about sex. So people might be listening to this podcast and they might say, "Oh, how was your day today? Great. Oh, I heard this thing on Diary of a CEO podcast, and it was about depictions of pleasure in porn. And I thought it was really interesting. And it occurred to me, we don't talk about porn much, you know? Is that something you'd be open to talk about? Whether you watch it, whether you like it, what you like? That might feel too much for some people. And it might be, I heard a podcast about sex and it talked about the importance of talking. And I thought, we don't do that much. So there's ways of bringing it in, which are saying, look, this I think would be good for us.
20:50 Speaker 00 The key point is stating the impact that you think it will have. So I would like to talk more about this because I heard. It means you can guarantee great sex for the rest of your life. So I think that would be good for us. You know, I'm committed to this relationship. I want our sex to stay great. This might be awkward for us, but can we do it? So the starting point, if you're nervous, is always to talk about things outside of your sexual relationship. Things you've heard on podcasts, films you saw with good sex scenes in them. Bring things in rather than talking about the two of you. After that, if you get good at that, it might be worthwhile talking about your own sex when it goes well. So a good time to do this is after sex that's gone well, or at another time when you're feeling really emotionally connected.
21:35 Speaker 00 Maybe you're out for dinner, maybe you're having a weekend away. And talk about what you really liked and why.
21:43 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so don't talk about it when it's bad.
21:45 Speaker 00 No, no, not at this stage, not at this stage. If you feel confident with that and you get into a habit of talking about sex, talking about what's gone well, talking about sex as if it's any other topic of conversation, like business or exercise or diet, then you might want to start to talk about things you'd like to be different. And in an ideal world, I try and encourage couples to have a kind of regular practice of this. So if you think about your goals for your exercise, your work, your diet, often you'll set yourself goals, right? And you might tell your partner about them, you know, in six months from now, I want to do this, or this year I'm working on this. It's quite good to get into the habit of saying, where do we want our sex
22:28 Speaker 00 life to go? How would we like things to be? What do we want to continue? What do we want more of? And what do we want less of? And that's a really positive conversation. You don't need to talk about what you don't like. You're talking about what you want more of instead.
22:44 Steven Bartlett? What if the issue in your sexual relationship is one of attraction? And I've asked a few guests this because I think it's one of the hardest challenges to overcome. And I don't know in a clinical setting, what you would say if you're sat there with an individual and they're telling you that the reason they aren't having sex with Dave right now is because they're no longer attracted to them. What is their path forward there? Do they dump Dave? Or do they go tell Dave?
23:12 Speaker 00 It depends how important sex is to them.
23:15 Steven Bartlett? If it's important.
23:15 Speaker 00 Say it's important. And for them, a relationship, they're in a monogamous relationship, so they can't get sex elsewhere, or they've agreed to not get sex elsewhere. And sex is important, then it's quite important that attraction is part of it. We know that the sex science tells us that when attraction is high at the beginning, it's really easy to maintain desire over time. When attraction is low, it can be really challenging. It's not unusual for me to see couples who've been together decades with very low levels of attraction, but the work they need to do to maintain a sex life that works for them both is tough. So you need to kind of have your eyes open, I guess, about what
23:57 Speaker 00 you're signing up for. If sex is important to you, then attraction is fairly important. I think it's also maybe useful to say that attraction can work some way. And it might be worth examining what's going on there and whether, you know, there is a certain situation that you find yourselves in as a couple, or whether they're At the moment, going through some stuff that maybe makes it harder for you to see them in that light.
24:22 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
24:22 Speaker 00 Sometimes attraction can come back when those relationship contexts are worked on. But if it's never been there from the outset, if it's a very strong sense of a lack of attraction, if someone's eyes have already moved to someone else, then it may be useful to address it.
24:38 Steven Bartlett? And attraction's not just a physical thing. People think of attraction as being physical. It's a psychological thing as well.
24:43 Speaker 00 Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, attraction can vary in relationships depending on what's happening in the relationship dynamic. So a common thing that I've written about in the new book, it's a book for parents really, is around the dynamic of what it feels like to have a partner who feels like another child. So the idea that you might be having to care for them as well, you know, make their lunches, kind of buy their clothes, tidy up after them, that we know from sex research, that's a super unsexy dynamic. And that is something which often falls on women in straight relationships once kids arrive.
25:23 Speaker 00 And that kind of dynamic can shift attraction and may well shift back if that dynamic is addressed.
25:29 Steven Bartlett? So your new book is called How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life.
25:33 Speaker 00 That's right.
25:34 Steven Bartlett? Why did you title it that?
25:35 Speaker 00 I just thought, let's say what it is. And that is exactly what it is. It's a guide to not let having kids ruin your sex life.
25:42 Steven Bartlett? Does that tend to happen?
25:43 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. It's so, oh, yeah. So it's so common. Sexual dissatisfaction is at its lowest for couples in the period after having kids. So if you've got an under five-year-old at home, it's pretty likely that your sex life is suffering for it. It doesn't have to, but many of the kind of reasons why our sex life struggles when kids come along are amplifications of dynamics that we struggle with outside of kids. So for example, quite often, but of course not always, people are in a long-term relationship. Quite often, they're living together. Being in a long-term relationship and living together are two factors which reduce your desire over time. So you've already, you're already starting from that point.
26:27 Speaker 00 You may have also been trying to conceive. You might have had problems with fertility, with miscarriage. Sex might have got boring, but you might have had to do it anyway. You've then got pregnancy, which for some people is a golden time of sexual exploration. But for some people means for one reason or another, they don't have much sex. And then you're expecting to get back to your sexual life when you're getting no sleep, when you're stressed and when you've got another kind of thirty seven, forty hours of work a week to do, which is the parenting week. So there's so many reasons why it's challenging and that's why I wrote the book.
26:58 Steven Bartlett? Is there a certain demographic of person that you're most likely to see in your clinical practice? And is it, is it parents?
27:06 Speaker 00 I see people of all ages. I see, I probably see people mostly in long-term relationships. I think people know that desire is my specialist subject, so people tend to seek me out, particularly around desire. I see a lot of parents. I also see a lot of non-parents. But, you know, parenthood brings additional challenges for people to navigate. Even if you think about the time available to have sex, it's much more limited. It can be really difficult to initiate. When you initiate it, the other person might experience it as a really clumsy initiation when they've got a lot on their plate. These are all just, as I said, amplifications of what you might get in long-term relationships generally, but it tends to be the more challenging wedge of the pie.
27:50 Steven Bartlett? Desire. This idea of desire is really fascinating to me. I actually speak to one of my best friends about what we call desire management. And it was a theory that we developed based on just looking at both of our lives and how we had managed to maintain sexual desire in our respective relationships. He has an approach to dating, which we all laugh at him for, where he meets someone and he moves them in really, really quickly, like moves them in. It's a very like smothering approach to like finding love. And desire very quickly goes out the window. Whereas I'm probably the opposite of that, where in my current relationship, it was a long-distance relationship for two years. She lived on the other side of the world. Eventually, in maybe year three or something, we like moved in together. But we're still, we still both fly all over the world, so we don't see each other much,
28:34 Steven Bartlett? which I think has proven to be quite central to our desire management. We don't see each other much.
28:39 Speaker 00 And that's, that's the theory of desire management, kind of keeps some distance.
28:43 Steven Bartlett? Keep, keep the right amount of distance. There's probably.
28:45 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
28:46 Steven Bartlett? There's probably too, too far away and too infrequently seeing them. And then there's seeing them too much.
28:52 Speaker 00 Absolutely, it's a great theory. So desire is possibly one of the most fascinating aspects of sex that is grossly misunderstood by our kind of collective psyche. And it's quite interesting because if you ask most people on the street how desire works or what desire is, they'll tell you that we have such a thing as a sex drive or libido, which kind of comes into our mind and tells us it would be a good idea to have sex. That is an idea that came from sex science in the 50s and 60s when we believed that desire was the first part of the sexual response cycle. So you first had the idea to be sexual and then you acted on it.
29:35 Speaker 00 And that's kind of seeped down into our collective psyche and that's how we all operate our sex lives. We generally wait to feel like it and then we act on it. But actually, we now know that desire doesn't work like that. And that in the early stages of a relationship, or if we live apart, there's your desire management, we manage to maintain higher levels of that kind of desire. It's called spontaneous desire. And it happens when a partner is novel or less familiar to us. Or perhaps when our dynamic with them isn't diluted by other roles. So for your friend that moves someone in, that person then becomes a flatmate.
30:13 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
30:14 Speaker 00 So that the role of them as a sexual partner is diluted. For other people, it's diluted also by being a co-parent. So our brain starts to see that person less as a sexual object. This is an inevitable part of being with someone for a number of years. And we can pretty much guarantee that for most people, spontaneous desire will start to decline about a year or 18 months into a relationship. Obviously, it depends how often you see each other and it sounds like your desire management
30:43 Steven Bartlett? Was fantastic.
30:43 Speaker 00 might keep that going a bit longer. For most people, they have this experience. And we know that this happens for everyone, but that women struggle to maintain this more than men. So in the UK, we know that thirty four percent of women and fifteen percent of men are worried that they don't feel like sex enough. And that's because they've seen a drop in the spontaneous desire. We talked about sexual scripts earlier, and we talked about how we learn about sex from what we see. The way desire is represented to us in the media is lust, passion, spontaneity. That sexual urge that you absolutely have to act on. And yes, that is how it works for some of us, some of the time.
31:27 Speaker 00 Perhaps after we've not seen each other for a long time, perhaps at the start of a relationship. And for some people, you know, lifelong with the same person. But it's not the norm. Actually, what the norm is, is that that type of desire tends to diminish. And it's other motivations other than horniness that we're seeking out through sex. So we call these non-sexual motivations, and they may be things like wanting to feel close, stress relief, wanting to feel desired. Um, wanting to demonstrate love or affection, wanting to have fun um out of a sense of obligation because it's been a while. These are all non-sexual motivations which lead us to the behaviour of sex.
32:10 Speaker 00 The problem is, a lot of people are waiting to feel like it before they act on it. And for those people, they're waiting a really long time. We know that for women particularly, uh it should be considered normal to never feel like sex out of the blue with your long-term partner. Never.
32:29 Steven Bartlett? How do we know that?
32:30 Speaker 00 From sex research. So when we ask women, how often do you feel like sex with your partner? They say either never, or maybe once or twice a month. This is spontaneous desire. But we're asking the question about only one type of desire. Responsive desire is desire that emerges out of us beginning sexual activity. Or having what we call sexual stimuli in front of us. A passionate kiss, a flirtation, being naked together, um a text that suggests something that we might do later on.
33:07 Speaker 00 The later versions of sex research tell us that actually desire emerges out of being sexual. Okay, so it comes from doing something to trigger it. But if your understanding of desire is that you should wait until you feel like it, there's a large proportion of people in long-term relationships that are just never feeling like it and never doing anything about it. What we need to do instead is be aware that our desire can be triggered and find ways to trigger it and have a relationship context that supports triggering it. In that context, we know that people's desire works perfectly well. That means they can have desire feature as much as they want in their relationship just by knowing how desire works.
33:50 Speaker 00 So our brains code things as sexual, and this could be physical touch, it could be kiss, it could be being naked together, it could be the sight of someone's naked body, it could be a suggestive text. It's different for everybody, but essentially sexual content triggers our arousal, which triggers our desire. It's the reason why the most common thing people say to me in sex therapy is, I didn't really feel like it, but we had sex and it was great. And afterwards I said, why don't we do that more? That's responsive desire. It emerges out of sexual activity. The problem of long-term relationships is that we see a decline in what I call sexual currency. So how we relate to each other as sexual beings.
34:34 Speaker 00 We start to see sex a bit like an on-off switch. So we're either having sex or the rest of the time, we're not being sexual together. You know, we're not passionately kissing unless it's part of sex. We're not sending each other those flirty messages we used to at the beginning. We're not spending time lounging around in bed on a Sunday morning, being naked together in a way that might kickstart desire. So these low levels of sexual currency and these high levels of familiarity, seeing the same person every day, means our brains just don't code them as sexual stimuli in the same way.
35:08 Steven Bartlett? And then we go cheat or we go look for porn or something else.
35:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely, because we want to have that kind of frisson of excitement.
35:16 Steven Bartlett? Can I just clarify that sexual currency, this definition, basically means, if I think of this in a financial context. If you see someone as being highly sexually desirable, they have a high sexual currency in your mind.
35:30 Speaker 00 Not quite. So think currency more like charge.
35:34 Steven Bartlett? Oh, okay, like a energy.
35:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, so sexual currency, my definition of it would be it's everything that you do that marks you out as a sexual couple, apart from having sex. So this is the stuff that you wouldn't do with your friends, you wouldn't do with your family, you wouldn't do with your kids. So you're physically affectionate with all those people, right? But the sexual side of it, the passionate kissing, the bum grabs, the flirtation, the saying you look super hot in that top, these things are sexual currency. So if we think about our sex lives not as this on off switch of the, you know, eighteen minutes, that's the average for men and women, they have sex together, these eighteen minutes of having sex, however often you're doing it, if you think of your sexual relationship as something which is always happening,
36:20 Speaker 00 something which you're always nurturing, you can imagine the power that that can have on both triggering desire, but also meeting those sexual needs. I'll give you an example that I wrote about in the new book, actually. Because parents obviously have limited time available to have sex and raising sexual currency is one of the ways you can increase sexual satisfaction, even when you can't have any more sex. So if you think about an example of a straight couple whereby he is feeling that her lack of interest in sex means that she doesn't desire him as much as she used to, and he's worried about that because for him, that means their relationship is in crisis. She might look elsewhere. And also, he doesn't feel so good about himself. He wants to feel desired. We all do, right?
37:06 Speaker 00 He gave me an example of a time when they perhaps attended a function and they were in the lift. And as they went up in the lift to get to this function, she pushed him against the lift and kissed him really passionately for the ten seconds they were in the lift. And then they got out the lift and they carried on with the function. This is sexual currency and that made him feel more desired, more connected to her sexually than a week before, the sex they had that felt like going through the motions. So you've got something which meets your sexual needs, which makes you feel desired, attractive, close, like a sexual couple, like you've got some sexual secret between you that no one else can see. Sexual currency does all of that.
37:47 Speaker 00 But it also acts as scaffolding to help us move easily into sex. Because we talked about expectation and pressure earlier. And if you have high levels of sexual currency, there's low pressure for it to go anywhere. Because it is your sexual relationship for its own right. It's not someone initiating sex.
38:08 Steven Bartlett? The way to overcome this potential psychological barrier is to create a culture of low pressure between you. You say that sex should be trivial and often, not rare and crucial.
38:17 Speaker 00 Absolutely, yeah.
38:18 Steven Bartlett? Trivial and often.
38:19 Speaker 00 I always know that my work with couples is done when they find it really easy to invite each other into sex and really easy to turn each other down. Because what happens when we have low levels of sexual currency and when sex has become an issue is that everything's riding on initiation. So the person initiating waits. They ignore all the other times they want to initiate it because it's quite stressful. And they wait until the time it really matters. Maybe it's an anniversary or a weekend away or something where it feels like you should have sex. And they initiate it and there's so much riding on it that the other person knows there's so much riding on it. They feel pressure. Pressure's a desire killer. It doesn't happen and then the initiation will be even rarer moving forward.
39:03 Steven Bartlett? More pressure for them.
39:04 Speaker 00 More pressure, exactly. What we want instead is a kind of trivial and often way of sexually relating. High levels of sexual currency, high levels of initiation. So you find it easy to say to your partner, by the way, at work today, I was thinking about doing this to you when, when we get home. And your partner can say, that sounds really hot. If only I didn't have this meeting tomorrow on my mind. Let's come back to that on the weekend. So you can let somebody know that sex is on your mind. You can invite someone into something which might be a passionate kiss, might be, let's go to bed early and talk about our day, knowing that that is sexual stimuli which might trigger arousal and desire.
39:44 Speaker 00 But also it acts as a way of triggering that initiation. It makes it easy to initiate if you're doing it often and if there's low pressure.
39:54 Steven Bartlett? Do you think you should schedule sex?
39:56 Speaker 00 No, never ever schedule sex.
39:58 Steven Bartlett? Because you said let's come back to it on the weekend. I was thinking, fuck, that's just ruin the weekend. I'd like it to be spicy and spontaneous.
40:03 Speaker 00 So it's one of our sexual scripts that sex, spontaneous sex is better. And I don't necessarily agree with that, but I do agree with the idea that scheduling sex just creates pressure for everyone. How can you in advance agree to something that you don't know if you're going to feel like when you get there? And all that does is create pressure. What you should do, though, in today's day and age is schedule physical intimacy. Schedule some type of sexual currency because we're so busy. If you don't do that, when is it going to happen?
40:35 Steven Bartlett? The issue I have, though, is if I schedule physical intimacy, then, okay, and I keep doing that. Eventually, the expectation comes in that we have sex after the physical intimacy. It's also the same thing with like date night. If you're parents and you get one date night a week, we all know when we need to get this, we need to make this thing happen. So it becomes scheduling sex because you're scheduling date night once a week. You know what I mean?
41:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, so you've got two options, haven't you? One is that you wait until it's really high pressure and you don't initiate it very often. You wait for this date night, I don't know, once a week, once a month. And everyone knows there's all kinds of stuff riding on it. And that makes it possibly the worst set of circumstances for everyone to feel like sex. Lots of high pressure, sex that might feel formulaic. Everyone's distracted, that means they can't get into it, it's not great sex. The other option is that you keep high levels of sexual currency. And you try your best to schedule brief moments of physical intimacy, which could act as scaffolding to take it further. You're right in that you may start to build up an expectation that, oh, every time we say we'll have a bath together, we end up having sex.
41:46 Speaker 00 That might happen, but when you invite someone into the bath, you are inviting them into the bath, right? So you're not inviting them saying, let's have a bath and have sex afterwards. You're saying, do you fancy having a bath together? The fact that you both know where the bath might lead is fine because it allows you to get into that headspace. Oh, okay, I hadn't thought about sex tonight, but the bath might lead to sex. So let me get into a sexual headspace for a minute. So that's quite useful. The problem comes when you say to them afterwards, you said you wanted a bath and we've not had sex. Well, that wasn't what you invited them into. You invited them into the bath. So you have to be okay if it doesn't lead to that.
42:26 Speaker 00 But if you initiate these types of things more, if you think about it, scattergun approach, more of them are likely to go where you want them to go versus that one time of high pressure.
42:39 Steven Bartlett? If you were to give me a couple of pieces of simple advice on how to keep desire high in my relationship, what would you say?
42:46 Speaker 00 I would say kiss more, kiss for kissing's sake.
42:50 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
42:50 Speaker 00 Kiss, kissing often falls off the agenda in long-term relationships. The number of times I see that with couples I'm working with who've been together decades, they only kiss as part of sex or as initiation of sex. So kissing is a great way of triggering desire. It's also a great way of getting our sexual needs met. So that would be one. The second would be you have to make time to schedule physical intimacy of some type because remember that desire is triggered by that kind of sexual stimuli, whether it's getting naked on the couch and watching a film together that, you know, it's got good sex scenes in it, whether it's massage, whether it's the bath, whether it's some kind of date night that involves use of your bodies.
43:33 Speaker 00 Without that, there are no triggers to your desire. So you're just kind of waiting to feel it. The third is understand how desire works. It's drastically different than what you've been sold. And you're normal if you struggle to get in the headspace sometimes.
43:48 Steven Bartlett? What about distance? And you know, this idea of like, you talked about how they kind of, your partner can lose their sexual currency if they become a carer, or, you know, I've heard before, if they become like too much of a mum or a dad in your mind and they stop becoming
44:03 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
44:04 Steven Bartlett? A sort of sexual partner.
44:06 Speaker 00 Relationship dynamics are quite fascinating, as you say, because when we talk about them, we often hear things like, well, obviously, if you're experiencing great amount of relationship conflict, it's going to affect your sex life. I mean, that's of course, right? We all know that to be true. But actually, it's the subtle dynamics that are quite important. It's having distance from each other and being able to bring in novelty and newness. A bit like you do with kind of having that, that physical distance, but it's also an emotional separation, isn't it? Because you're having experiences separately and then coming back together to talk about them. It's also about what roles you might get typecast into in your relationship. So something I talk about often
44:51 Speaker 00 is the idea that when we have sex with the same person for a long time, we can start to feel as though there's only one way for us to be sexually, and that's the way they're kind of expecting us to be. So it can feel quite suffocating. And sometimes that's the reason that people go outside of a monogamous relationship. It's because they want to experience themselves differently. They want to be a different person sexually. And because they can't talk to their partner about that, and they feel typecast in that dynamic. You know, you're the dominant one, I'm not. Or the sex that we have is really kind of sensual and caring, and I want it to be passionate and animalistic. It's really difficult.
45:29 Steven Bartlett? You must come across so many couples in your clinical practice that have two different visions of what sex should look like.
45:36 Speaker 00 Yes.
45:36 Steven Bartlett? Fantasies, fetishes. You know, this one wants this person to do this to me, but this person thinks that's, you know, horrific.
45:43 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
45:44 Steven Bartlett? How does one bridge the gap? And how does one go about even communicating those things? Because I imagine so many people in so many relationships, it's kind of like what you said earlier, having really bad haircuts, having really bad sex, and I say nothing about it.
45:55 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
45:56 Steven Bartlett? I've been in relationships before where I've thought, you know what, I really want to do that. But I think she'll think that I'm a little bit, you know.
46:01 Speaker 00 Trust me, no one is talking about it. Everyone stays silent and just hopes that the other person will either get the hint or will accidentally stumble upon the thing they really want them to do. It is fascinating, really, when you think about it, because so much of our satisfaction, our life satisfaction, depends on how sex goes. But we just almost leave it to chance by not talking about it. One of the things we might do in sex therapy is by getting people separately to write down what their perfect sex looks like. I have an exercise, it's actually free. You can find it on my social media, on my website, which is called Conditions for Good Sex, which guides people through the process of doing that. And it looks at three main areas. One is psychological arousal, what turns you on in your head?
46:45 Speaker 00 What kind of dynamic between you and the person works for you? How do you need to feel about yourself and your optimum sexual experience? One is physical stimulation, and that could be anything from where you like to be touched, to the types of sex you like, to the type of positions you like to be in. The third is being able to be in the moment. So you might write there the kinds of things that go through your mind to distract you. And I would get people to do that separately. The way I guide people through that is by getting them to think about their three best sexual experiences and really replay those in their mind. What were the aspects of that sexual experience which you replay over and over again? What was it about how you felt about yourself, about how you could be with that person?
47:30 Speaker 00 What was it about what you were doing? What was it about the environment? And people are able to then develop their own perspective, their own list, if you like, of the things that really work for them.
47:43 Steven Bartlett? What if your partner says, I don't like it?
47:45 Speaker 00 Well, that's what we come to next. Then we look for the overlap. So is there overlap? If there's not, then there's a little bit of work to do, right? Are you going to stay in a monogamous relationship? And if so, how are you going to make this work? Are you going to open it up so you can get your sexual needs met elsewhere? Plenty of people do that. Often there is enough overlap for people to say, okay, I didn't realise that that was a thing for you. I don't, I like that thing, but maybe not quite to that degree. Can we do this instead? So there's a little bit of negotiation that happens in the middle. But I think perhaps one of the myths around our sexuality is that it exists between us and our partner. And actually, our sexuality just exists within us alone.
48:26 Speaker 00 And we should be allowed to express that alone or in our minds, in whatever way that we want. And that could look quite different, what we do alone, perhaps with others, to what we do with another person. So we don't have to get all of our sexual needs met by that one person. There may be other ways of doing it.
48:44 Steven Bartlett? Should we remain open minded to the desires and requests of the other? I, I remember, you know, I like experimenting, you know? And I think I was once upon a time with someone who was less keen to experiment. And I remember thinking, oh, this is boring. This is going to be really boring. And then over time, I think I was able to introduce things slowly that opened their eyes to experimentation. And then they loved, they love experimentation. We had the best sex of our lives.
49:12 Speaker 00 Okay.
49:12 Steven Bartlett? Because we introduced things, we experimented more. But I, I remember reflecting in that moment that I could have easily walked away from the relationship when this person said, oh, that's weird. I don't want to do that.
49:21 Speaker 00 Yeah. And it may be that if this other person had done their conditions for good sex, they may have written down under the psychological arousal part, I really need to know someone or I really need to trust someone before I can do things that are outside of the normal sexual script, right? And experimentation could be part of that. I think it also comes down to how you want the kind of personality of your sex life together to be. So I think for some of us, experiencing kind of thrill or joy or pushing boundaries or experimentation in sex is a key part of what really ticks, ticks us along, what really keeps us going. For other people, it's just not.
50:03 Speaker 00 It's that they want sex to be predictable, intimate, fun, but close, without anything outside of the ordinary. So I think it can be quite useful to think about, what do we see as the sexual personality of our relationship? How do we want it to be? What would make us feel most alive? And that's where creating a culture of talking about sex is helpful, because without that, how do you know?
50:29 Steven Bartlett? Earlier you used a phrase, you said it's, when we were talking about vaginal penetration, you said it's women's least favourite act.
50:35 Speaker 00 Yes, it is. Yeah, so we talked about sexual scripts. Penis and vagina sex being the main course of sex is very much a dominant sexual script. And there are many reasons that's dominant. And it's something that we know from sex research that if you ask people, and they have done many times in sex research, to recount what sex looks like, people will recount a set menu of sex that is, you start with this, then you do a bit of that, then you go to the main course of penis and vagina sex. The kind of American audience will know that as a kind of baseball analogy. And I think worldwide, we know that analogy too, right? That's how we see how sex should be. But what's most fascinating about that is that suits men's anatomy more than women's.
51:20 Speaker 00 We know that the majority of women, about 80%, don't orgasm from penetrative sex, because obviously it's all about the clitoris. And so that's why for women, their most favourite sexual acts are things like people using their hands to simulate their clitoris or receiving oral sex, not penis and vagina sex. They rate that the least pleasure inducing sexual act.
51:45 Speaker 00 For men, it's different. It's the highest pleasure inducing sexual act, right alongside masturbation, actually. What's fascinating is we talk a lot about desire, particularly between men and women when they have sex together. But we don't always talk about the fact that to move towards sex, we have to be motivated to feel that there's going to be a reward. And so when we're having sex that perhaps doesn't suit our anatomy as much as we'd like it to, or when there's a big orgasm gap and someone else is reliably experiencing more pleasure than we are, of course, our desire suffers.
52:18 Steven Bartlett? Does it, we've used the word initiate a lot, does it matter who initiates?
52:23 Speaker 00 It doesn't matter, but we know that the person initiating often experiences higher levels of sexual satisfaction in the encounter than the person who's following. There are some really interesting things with initiation, and I actually think that when it comes to sex with long-term partners, when it comes to many of the couples I see, people often walk through the door saying there's a problem with desire. Sometimes there is, it's usually in their understanding of desire, not desire itself, but often it's in initiation actually, because if you think about it, initiation is a communication. You're basically saying, I'd like to have sex now, would you?
53:05 Speaker 00 And there are a variety of ways that people initiate, and in my experience, they can be wildly off the mark. So, one scenario is that the person initiates, and it's so subtle that the other person just doesn't pick up on it at all. And it's quite difficult to put yourself out there with initiation, right? So people test the waters with this coded, subtle, I'll put my hands there, and they'll know what that means, and often that is completely missed by the other person, and so the opportunity for sex is lost. The other side of the coin is when people initiate in a really direct way. So, we know that women having sex with men initiate much more directly, and when men
53:50 Speaker 00 are initiating with women, or when women are initiating with women, they initiate much more indirectly. So this direct initiation from women to men often looks like, shall we have sex then?
54:03 Speaker 00 Do you fancy a shag? That kind of thing, which although it's direct, and you could give it points for being direct communication.
54:10 Steven Bartlett? People say that.
54:10 Speaker 00 People say that all the time.
54:12 Steven Bartlett? Really?
54:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, all the time, all the time. They say it, it's direct, it's getting a point across, but it's inherently unsexy.
54:20 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
54:21 Speaker 00 And it's quite interesting because the social script of men are always up for sex means that in women's minds, often they can just say that and that will do it for their partner.
54:34 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
54:34 Speaker 00 And actually, that's not the case. And what we know from research is that most men actually say, I need a bit more than that. I need to feel intimacy. I need to feel desired. I need to feel as though she's initiating it because she's enthusiastic about doing it, not because she's doing it for me. We also know that people fall into styles of initiation. And just in the same way that I mentioned getting typecast around how you are sexually with a partner, you can get typecast in terms of how you initiate. So there might be one way that you do it.
55:08 Steven Bartlett? Always the same.
55:09 Speaker 00 And maybe it was cute for the first six months, but in month sixty, it starts to become quite irritating. It starts to become not a sexual trigger, but oh, here we go again.
55:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, unsexy. It's kind of like, yeah.
55:21 Speaker 00 Predictable pressure. So it can be a really useful thing to have a conversation with somebody else, somebody you're having sex with, around how you actually like sex to be initiated and whether that matches with how each other does it.
55:38 Steven Bartlett? You know, it's interesting. When we think about sex and what we assume it must be like, we all have a bit of an idea in our head, maybe from pornography or something else or movies, that it should just flow.
55:48 Speaker 00 Yes.
55:49 Steven Bartlett? That it should just, you know, and so when our sex doesn't flow, we think something is broken and wrong with it.
55:53 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
55:54 Steven Bartlett? We should, we just walk in, hi babe, how was work? Da da da. Oh, off we go. We're off to the way, it's like every day. And it should happen every, every other night.
56:03 Steven Bartlett? Um, and if it's not flowing and happening every other night, we think we need to go and like,
56:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
56:08 Steven Bartlett? you know, fix this. Someone's to blame. Something's wrong with me or him or.
56:12 Speaker 00 So let's come back to frequency because that's a big one. But before we get on to that. Occupying the space in between willingness. So that's a nice idea that I've had or you've had, but I'm not there yet. And desire, when your desire kicks in, is actually quite an uncomfortable space to occupy. And one of the things I like to do in in my work with people is to try and help them get comfortable in that space. Because, as you say, we have this idea that we should be feeling it before we start. That's wrong, we know that now. But also that it should be easy for us just to slip into that sexual headspace. To lose that awkwardness, to lose that sense of, I actually know if I'm going to feel like it. I might do, can we just continue what we're doing and I'll see.
56:56 Speaker 00 Occupying that space in between willingness and desire is really a key part of initiation. Because if you initiate with, shall we have sex? It doesn't really give you a chance to see if you can occupy that space, does it? You have either have to say yes or no.
57:12 Steven Bartlett? Do you not think it's harder for men as well in some regards? Because like, we got to get, you know, the Eiffel Tower up in in a heterosexual relationship. There's like, it's very easy to see if the man is aroused, whereas it's less obvious. I mean, it is, there's ways to tell obviously.
57:27 Speaker 00 Yes.
57:28 Steven Bartlett? Without getting too detailed, but it's it's so clear if the man is aroused. There's no hiding it.
57:33 Speaker 00 For all of us, our bodies arousal response and the degree with which we're turned on in our minds. So desire don't actually always match as much as we'd like them to. So I don't know if you've ever had this experience or any of your listeners have, but it can be quite common for men to want to be getting in a sexual headspace or actually be feeling desire, but not be hard. And because it's a visual sign, sometimes their partners, whether they're male or female partners, can take that really personally. What does that mean about me?
58:06 Steven Bartlett? I've had, I'm going to be honest, because that's the whole point of this podcast, was I've had multiple times in my life where I've not been able to get an erection. And it's so awkward. And it's the minute they realise that you're you're not going to be able to get an erection. What do I say?
58:23 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
58:24 Steven Bartlett? You know, what do I say?
58:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned it because it's so common. And it's common because this is called arousal non concordance. So an idea that our bodies don't always do what our brains are thinking. So you might think you want to have sex, but your body doesn't always respond. And that happens for people of all genders. It's just more challenging for people with penises, right? Because you can see it.
58:46 Steven Bartlett? That's what I'm saying.
58:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, so it brings with it that extra level of pressure. As soon as you've got that pressure, then, as we know, your attention goes elsewhere. Your worry increases, that turns down arousal like turning down the TV, less chance of an erection.
58:59 Steven Bartlett? So can I ask then, what do I do in that moment? And what should they do?
59:03 Speaker 00 Yes.
59:03 Steven Bartlett? As in, like, how do they help me in that very embarrassing moment? And what do I say?
59:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, so they first need to understand that no erection doesn't mean that you don't want to have sex. It might sometimes, of course, but if you're saying, look, I'm, I'm really keen for this. I'm just not there yet. Then they need to take that at face value. Okay, that's really important. Otherwise, you end up feeling as though it's a judgment on your attraction or your desire for them, which it's not. The second thing is there needs to be less focus on the need for the penis to be hard. And that comes from delineating this idea of this set menu of sex, which means a hard penis has to be part of it. There's plenty of other things that you could do sexually. If you're feeling like you want to be sexual, which will move your attention back to sexual things,
59:52 Speaker 00 things that might really turn you on. So for example, giving oral sex is often something that a lot of men say really turn them on. Obviously, it's not for everyone.
59:58 Steven Bartlett? Vibrate her out.
59:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, all kinds of things.
1:00:00 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:00:01 Speaker 00 Watching someone else's sexual pleasure can really turn us on. For some people, it's really hard for them to get used to enjoying sensation when their penis is soft. They, they kind of want to avoid it. It'd be great if they didn't and they could be comfortable with enjoying that touch even then. But it might mean moving. Moving your attention to another person, what usually happens then is that at some point it comes back. But it only comes back if you don't worry about it and if you don't put pressure on it. That has to be not just about you, it has to be about the person you're with as well. Because, you know, if they're like, oh, never mind then, we'll just do it another time.
1:00:38 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so that's really interesting. So the foundation of all of that, though, is communication.
1:00:42 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
1:00:43 Steven Bartlett? Because without that, if I go flattered and then I don't say anything about it and I just lay there like dormant, and then she's laying there dormant, and then we try and go to sleep, and then we, you know, we never address it, we never get to communicate, because maybe I did want to have sex, but maybe for some reason my to-do list was still on my mind.
1:00:59 Speaker 00 Exactly. And notice that the assumption behind it is that the sex that you're going to have is penis and vagina penetration. Is that even what she wants? And if we could initiate sex in a way that was clearer, if we could say to our partners easily, I'm really horny, what I'd really like to do is X and it all be about me. Are you up for that? That's quite different. If we're able to be clear about that, what would that do to your confidence with erections? Does that make sense?
1:01:29 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah.
1:01:30 Speaker 00 If she'd actually gone into that sexual encounter saying, you know what, all I want you to do is make me come. I'm not, I don't feel like penetrative sex tonight. If she'd felt confident to say that, I can guarantee there would have been no problem with the erection. The erection would have come as part of it, because the whole process would have been arousing.
1:01:48 Steven Bartlett? This is a bit of a left field one, but I just remembered a debate me and my friends had in our little like mates chat. Is it better to have sex before or after you eat? Because he was like, oh, no, I, I thought this was weird. He was like, I have sex before we go on the date. I'm like, what? You have sex before the date? He was like, yeah, no sex after, no sex after food.
1:02:12 Speaker 00 That is a good idea, to be fair. A lot of people say they struggle.
1:02:15 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:02:16 Speaker 00 When they're full, they feel quite unsexy. They feel a bit lethargic.
1:02:20 Steven Bartlett? Bloated and stuff.
1:02:20 Speaker 00 They feel a bit bloated. They don't feel great about their body, perhaps. A lot of people do that. If they're gonna have a date night, I mean, I never liked date nights because I think by the time you get home from a date night, you've maybe had a bit to drink, you've maybe had a bit to eat, it's maybe quite late. It's not the best conditions for having sex, actually. I'd rather, if you had a date night, you kept it on fun, emotional connection, relationship satisfaction, and then you plan an in-at-home date night that's more about physical intimacy.
1:02:48 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:02:49 Speaker 00 Do you know what I mean?
1:02:49 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah.
1:02:50 Speaker 00 Because it's not, it's not that easy to do the two. So your friend's probably right, probably before food is better. But you wanna come back to frequency?
1:02:57 Steven Bartlett? Sure, yeah.
1:02:58 Speaker 00 Because we talked about that earlier, and this is one of the big myths that people talk about around sex life, which is that the amount of sex that you have matters, and it really doesn't. So what I mean by that is that if you ask most people how often they should be having sex a week, I mean, what do you think they'd say? Your friends or people on the street?
1:03:18 Steven Bartlett? How much they should be having sex?
1:03:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, a week, a month. How much do you think they'd say?
1:03:23 Steven Bartlett? Three times a week.
1:03:24 Speaker 00 Everyone says three times a week.
1:03:26 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:03:27 Speaker 00 It's this kind of urban myth that, again, forms part of our sexual script. If we're not having sex three times a week, there's a problem. It's actually drastically different than that. The average times people in the, in the UK, and actually it's kind of replicated around the world. But what's fascinating is that we're using frequency as a yardstick of a good sex life, and there is no correlation between the frequency of sex and sexual satisfaction, none whatsoever.
1:03:56 Steven Bartlett? So you're saying it's quality over quantity?
1:03:57 Speaker 00 Absolutely. You could be having sex, you know, once a year. That completely blows your socks off, makes you feel alive, makes you feel super connected, that's really exploratory, where you lose yourself in it, and that is better than having sex once a day where you're not enjoying it, your mind's not in it, it's not pleasurable, you're feeling disconnected, you're feeling awkward. So it's so interesting that we get so hung up on frequency. In fact, the average amount of times people are having sex in the UK, if people are interested, is around about three times a month. But there is huge amount of variation there. So plenty of people in relationships that haven't had sex for months and are quite happy with that, and plenty of people having sex more.
1:04:41 Speaker 00 But I think having that average is quite useful to talk about because actually it's quite surprisingly different to how most people perceive it should be.
1:04:52 Steven Bartlett? Over forty percent of women want to be having more sex than they are currently having, which is in chapter two of this book in front of me, Mind the Gap. What about men? So women are, women want to be having, over forty percent of them want to be having more sex than they're currently having.
1:05:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's, there's huge levels of sexual dissatisfaction for people of all genders. Everyone wants to be having more sex, better sex than they're currently having. We know that for women, it's around about, what, just over half of women, fifty-two percent? And for men, it's about forty-two percent are unhappy with the sex lives that they have. Enormous numbers, that's UK data, fifteen thousand adults between the ages of-
1:05:29 Steven Bartlett? So men are typically more satisfied.
1:05:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I suggest that the reason for that is that although men experience challenges with desire as well, men find it easier on average to maintain desire for the same person. And as we've already talked about, women struggle to access their spontaneous desire and label that as a problem when it's not. You know, I'm aware we're talking very much about straight couples because that's where we see the majority of sexual problems. But when we talk about men and women having sex together, we also see that orgasm gap. So we see less pleasure and less reward for women, which I think accounts for that slightly higher number.
1:06:05 Steven Bartlett? So you said something in between there that was curious to me. Just to confirm, over long-term relationships? The man is more likely to maintain their desire for the woman in a heterosexual relationship.
1:06:15 Speaker 00 That's right.
1:06:16 Steven Bartlett? The woman is more likely to lose desire for her partner.
1:06:20 Speaker 00 That's right. And we're talking here, remember, about spontaneous desire.
1:06:23 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:06:24 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:06:24 Steven Bartlett? Is that?
1:06:25 Speaker 00 Remember, there's the responsive desire we talked about earlier, and we know that, and this is the interesting bit, when it comes to women's desire, it's actually much more easier to trigger with a wide range of sexual stimuli than men's. So women's responsive desire works brilliantly. You could say it works even better than men's. So spontaneous desire is only one type of desire. It's that feeling of out of the blue lust, horniness, want to rip your clothes off. It's partly attributable to higher levels of androgens like testosterone, but certainly not exclusively. There's a massive social component to it as well. So yes, men find it easier to maintain that. But I think it's really important to say, because there will be men listening to this that will be worried about their desire. As we've said earlier, fifteen percent is actually quite a large number.
1:07:09 Speaker 00 It's not all men. Some men really struggle to keep hold of that spontaneous desire in a long-term relationship.
1:07:15 Steven Bartlett? And just to clarify, the reactive desire is the desire that kicks in once you've begun.
1:07:20 Speaker 00 Basically, yeah.
1:07:21 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:07:21 Speaker 00 Some kind of sexual stimuli, some kind of sexual currency. It comes after arousal.
1:07:28 Steven Bartlett? I want to close off on the subject of parents. I'm not a parent yet, but my brother has three kids and they're under the age of six. They're six and under.
1:07:39 Speaker 00 Wow.
1:07:39 Steven Bartlett? And he's got three of them.
1:07:40 Speaker 00 I'm going to send him my book.
1:07:41 Steven Bartlett? Yes, I'm gonna. I'm sure he's gonna listen anyway. And from that, I've been able to understand on a surface level the plight of a parent. Sleep, kids waking up in the middle of the night, work pressures. A lot of people are working at home now as well, so that has impacts on sleep and how you're feeling and your mental health and all those things. And to think that. Couples irrespective of children are struggling with sex. You've you've said at the start of this conversation, but it says in your book as well that we're having less and less sex when you compare one decade to the previous decade. And there was another study that I saw that said there's been general declines in sexual frequency in other countries around the world as well, like Japan, Australia, Finland and the USA.
1:08:25 Steven Bartlett? So we know that like we're we're having less sex with each other anyway. And then you throw kids into the mix, which I just, I don't know. I've not been there yet, so I've not crossed that bridge. But I'm trying to figure out when I do come to that bridge, how on earth I'm going to be able to have sexual desire when I'm a very busy CEO, running multiple businesses, traveling all over the world, seeing my partner currently not very much, you know, and trying to make those moments where we do spend time together special. Then you throw in little Timmy, who's gonna, and he's not gonna care about my schedule.
1:08:58 Speaker 00 No.
1:08:59 Steven Bartlett? And
1:08:59 Speaker 00 Timmy won't care.
1:09:00 Steven Bartlett? Is gonna become my priority, rightfully so, if he behaves himself. And then where sex gonna go, where, you know?
1:09:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is why it's it's a real challenge for parents. And I think one of the key things, one of the reasons I wrote the book actually, is because the first thing that we can do for parents is talk about the fact that it's normal. Okay, it's not you, it's not your relationship, it's nothing about the two of you together that means you shouldn't be together. It's challenging to have a good sex life when you've got young kids at home. It's challenging for everyone. I think the second thing that we can do is explain to people what the factors are that tend to make a difference. So people know about pregnancy, people know about trying to conceive, they understand that these things will impact on their sex life. But I think the things that they don't acknowledge or don't realize as much is the trajectory
1:09:51 Speaker 00 that that sets them on in the early stages and the trajectory that that first year of having a newborn baby will set you on in terms of that reduction in sexual currency, in terms of resentments that might start to breed and how your relationship dynamic becomes, in terms of how equal the mental load is. And we know that the mental load, so that's kind of the unequal division of labor, which often falls on women in heterosexual relationships, particularly when kids come along. We know that there's a direct correlation between couples who divide that household labour in a kind of equitable and transparent way and sexual satisfaction. So it seems quite hard to believe, but actually it doesn't have to be completely equal.
1:10:35 Speaker 00 But if you feel as though your partner is pulling their weight, if you feel as though it's not all automatically falling to you, we know that people generally tend to have better sex. So there's all kinds of things which parents need to know about their sex life that they don't.
1:10:49 Steven Bartlett? Is that about resentment, though?
1:10:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's resentment and it's about what I mentioned earlier, about seeing your partner almost as a third child.
1:10:56 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:10:57 Speaker 00 You're the captain of the house, right? You're the boss of the house and you have to hold in your mind everything. You're the CEO of the house. You have to hold in your mind everything that needs doing, even for your partner. Yeah, they're not holding anything. They're not remembering the kids' birthdays. They're not thinking they need to buy a present. You're having to do that. That takes your attention away from sex and it also raises your resentment and sexual satisfaction can really suffer. But there are a few other things that I like to talk about in the book that I think are really important for parents. And one of them is I compare the journey of parenthood a little bit like a kind of navigation across the seas, right? So parenthood is the storm and it's a storm for everyone.
1:11:39 Speaker 00 And there are different phases of the storm and some of it, you just need to batten down the hatches and get through it as unscathed as you can and not worry about sex so much. That might be like the newborn phase. But then there are also parts of the journey where you might have found yourself knocked off course a little bit. And what you actually need to do is take stock of the boat and say, hold on, what's going on here? What are we doing? If we continue on this trajectory, 10, 15 years down the line, we're likely to be in a place where sex is unrecoverable. Versus if we make a small change, a degree or two to the left or right, very small changes, over the long term, we might end up in an entirely different destination.
1:12:21 Speaker 00 And so the book is all about what are those small changes? And this might be surprising to some people, it's not having more sex. It's other ways of increasing sexual satisfaction. So for example, we know that when we turn each other down gently for sex, it increases sexual satisfaction. We know that when we increase sexual currency, which doesn't have to take much time, we increase sexual satisfaction. So there are many things that people can do, even if they don't feel they have time or headspace for sex, or until they have the time and headspace for sex, that can just keep that boat kind of heading in the right direction.
1:13:00 Steven Bartlett? What about, what's the relationship there with sleep and sex then? Because obviously if I've got little Timmy crying at night time at 3am, I'm going to be poorly slept the next day, which means will that have an impact on how horny I am?
1:13:12 Speaker 00 Yes, yeah, big relationship between sleep and sex for all of us. We know that if you get a good night's sleep, your chances of having sex the next day increase by 14%. So that's for all of us. When it comes to parents, there is some quite interesting data about the impact of nighttime waking on your sex life. We know that the number of times you get up in the night to tend to a child, like to go to the cot or the bed to see to a crying child, the number of times you get up has an impact on what's happening in your sex life and for your desire. So we tend to see the more times you get up, the less happy you are with your sex life. And the reason for that is because not getting a good night's sleep disrupts how the body responds to sexual response.
1:13:55 Speaker 00 So the chemicals in the body that help us be prepared for arousal to build. But also, it's the cognitive distraction of being woken up by something quite upsetting, someone else crying and having to deal with it, which we know disrupts the part of our sleep, the REM sleep, which actually we need for our sexual functioning. So even just knowing that as a parent and knowing that, look, if you're getting up many times a night, don't worry about your sex life for the time being. What you can do as a couple is focus on sharing that more equally. Because if one of you is getting a good night's sleep and feeling horny all the time, and another one's getting up three times and sex is the last thing on their mind, probably the best thing that you can do is try and share it.
1:14:40 Steven Bartlett? Is there a certain age where sex comes back? In terms of your children's age, is there like when you get to, I don't know, 10 years old, then sex comes back in typically?
1:14:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, so we know that people start getting sleep from when their kid is about six. But obviously, if you've got another one that's a bit younger, then you might be starting the process all over again. So giving it sleep so important, the older they get, the better that is for people's sex lives. I mean, it's hugely variable. So there are plenty of people that start having sex again, you know, within three months of their baby being born. And yes, it may be less frequent than before, but it doesn't disrupt their sex lives as much. And then there's plenty of people whereby it might take them a year to even start having sex again. And then the frequency of having sex might stay quite infrequent for some time.
1:15:31 Speaker 00 What's interesting, though, in how quickly people get back to it is that how quickly people get back to it is often about the habits that they've then fallen into as a sexual couple. So low levels of sexual currency, high levels of awkwardness, not prioritising time together. You know, parenthood is basically a juggle of priorities, right? All the time, there's always something else you should be doing. And so. The sex that you have has to be enticing enough for your brain to say, yeah, I'm going to sacrifice that for sex. Because there's always something else that you should be doing with your time. So it's those habits that we fall into around our sex lives that dictate how quickly people get back into it.
1:16:13 Steven Bartlett? At what point does someone, should they reach out to a person like you for help?
1:16:17 Speaker 00 I wish people would do it sooner. They always wait until it's got really bad. And by that time, it's fine, we can still reverse it. There's a lot we can do. But all these habits have kind of settled in, all of this awkwardness, pressure, resentment. People have moved to quite polarized positions. It would be great if people came earlier. I'd like people to think of someone like me, a bit like a personal trainer for your sex life. But you don't necessarily go to a personal trainer just when, I don't know, things are terrible. You go because you want to improve something.
1:16:51 Steven Bartlett? Maintain.
1:16:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, or maintain. I'd love people to see it that way.
1:16:55 Steven Bartlett? You used the word, we can always reverse it. But then a couple of moments before you use the word unrecoverable. Now, I wanted to know, is there ever a situation? Have you ever seen patients in your practice where you knew intuitively this is unrecoverable?
1:17:10 Speaker 00 Oh, of course, of course.
1:17:12 Steven Bartlett? What were the hallmarks of unrecoverability?
1:17:15 Speaker 00 So the Gottmans talk about the four horsemen and they talk about resentment as being an aspect of a relationship dynamic that often means that it can be quite hard for people to recover from that and for the relationship to survive. Sometimes when you're talking about sex, if resentment comes across quite strongly in the way that people talk to each other, it gives you a good indication that this is going to be quite challenging. I would say though, that sometimes unrecoverable is a good outcome. Because we're not necessarily destined to be monogamous. We're not necessarily destined to be with one person. Yes, social convention makes us feel that that should be the case. But for some people, a good outcome is having a split and a good sexual relationship with someone else.
1:18:00 Speaker 00 So sometimes identifying that it's unrecoverable. Because it's gone so far, it's been so long. Perhaps they were never that sexually compatible in the first place. Decades later, there's tons of resentment. Maybe it is the best thing at that point. And perhaps that is a good outcome for some people.
1:18:18 Steven Bartlett? Point of curiosity, what are the the types of problems that people come to you with, the types of challenges they come to you with? What is, you know, you see a couple sit down. The first sentence out of their mouth. What are those sort of five most popular sentences that come out of their mouth?
1:18:36 Speaker 00 It would be the first one, and by far the most popular is, we have a great relationship, but and it's a problem with sex, usually a problem with initiation or desire. That is by far the most common presentation. We love each other immensely, you know, we have so much respect for each other, we have a great partnership, but sex just doesn't happen, or it doesn't happen in the way that we want. The second is probably specific problems that people have with their bodies and sex. So people that are experiencing pain, particularly painful penetration, people who are worrying about erections, worrying about orgasms, these things are all quite common. The third is probably navigating change.
1:19:18 Speaker 00 So we talked earlier about how sexual relationships need to be able to flex and allow growth for us as individuals. And quite often, because we can't talk about it, growth happens for one person and then they're suddenly not getting their sexual needs met. So for example, they might suddenly decide that there's something that they're into or want to explore that they do not feel able to talk about with their partner. And without it, the sexual relationship is at crisis point. And so we need to be able to allow space for that sexual relationship to see whether it can withstand that change and growth and create that culture of growth.
1:19:58 Steven Bartlett? I'm just playing in my mind all the, all the really incredible things you must have heard from people about like their fantasies and stuff like that and.
1:20:11 Steven Bartlett? I'm trying not to break your client patient confidentiality.
1:20:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, I won't do that.
1:20:15 Steven Bartlett? Just thinking about the other, like, the unexpected things that people come to you and ask you about.
1:20:20 Speaker 00 You know what's one of the most unexpected things after 20 years of doing my job? One of the things that has come up a lot recently that has surprised me, and it may not surprise you. I don't know if you've got any, but the impact of pets on people's sex lives.
1:20:36 Steven Bartlett? Oh.
1:20:36 Speaker 00 Have you got any pets?
1:20:37 Steven Bartlett? I've got a dog and he loves to watch.
1:20:38 Speaker 00 There you go.
1:20:39 Steven Bartlett? And, you know.
1:20:40 Speaker 00 This was a massive surprise to me. I've been doing this job decades and only recently I've, something came up on my Insta and it blew up with people saying, yeah, my pet's constantly ruining the mood. They're either trying to get involved or they're watching or they're in the room or it puts the other person off. This was one of the biggest surprises to me, honestly.
1:20:59 Steven Bartlett? So what's the, so people are saying that what the pet is jumping in or my pet, my, my dog. I think he was concerned about my partner.
1:21:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:21:09 Steven Bartlett? I think he thinks that she's being attacked.
1:21:10 Speaker 00 Right. So he's being protective.
1:21:12 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, he's very, very protective. So sometimes I think he thinks, he looks really upset. And then when he was younger, he used to like wee himself.
1:21:19 Speaker 00 Oh.
1:21:19 Steven Bartlett? When he was watching, which is like a nervous wee.
1:21:21 Speaker 00 I hope that's what it was.
1:21:22 Steven Bartlett? Money and daddy are fighting. It's like, yeah, well, I think it was wee.
1:21:26 Speaker 00 I mean, it's, it's a big deal when you think about what we talked earlier about attention and distraction. Because nobody really wants to have to take account of a third person in, well, unless you want a third person in the room. But, you know, a pet in the room, basically, it's quite distracting, right?
1:21:43 Steven Bartlett? It is, yeah.
1:21:44 Speaker 00 And if you put them outside, my understanding, because I've heard this is cats as well. My understanding is that they will bark and scratch at the door. It's not like you can keep them away very easily. This is a massive challenge. Pets should come with a warning label for your sex life.
1:21:57 Steven Bartlett? So you think pets should not be invited into the.
1:22:00 Speaker 00 I would say not, but I mean, some people are obviously fine with it. But the, the reaction I got from people on my social media was this is a major problem. And I'd never heard of it before. I've never seen it written in research. It's a new thing. Maybe it's lockdown. Everyone got pets.
1:22:16 Steven Bartlett? Are you hopeful for the trajectory of sex in this world?
1:22:20 Speaker 00 I really am, actually. There is, I think there's been a boost of sex positivity in the media, on social media, on TV, shows like Sex Education. I think what I've noticed is that's not yet trickled down to the therapy room. So, you know, what I see and think is happening, I guess because I'm plugged into those things and the types of people I follow on social media, I really feel like it's changing. And people are understanding more about sex, feeling more assertive about sex, understanding that it doesn't have to look one way, looking at different relationship structures, not just assuming monogamy, not just assuming heterosexuality. But actually, what I see in the therapy room is that's not trickled down yet.
1:23:05 Speaker 00 And so my hope is that in the decade that follows, we'll be in quite a different place. And, you know, for me, as a parent of two boys, that's quite an exciting place to be because we know that our first sexual experience is actually quite influential in dictating our sexual satisfaction lifelong. So to be able to go into sex with more knowledge, to be able to have an experience that is good rather than bad, which is most people's first experience, I think that's a great gift that we can give younger people.
1:23:38 Steven Bartlett? You use the word change there, talking about how we have to sort of grow and adapt through our sexual journey with a long-term partner. One of the changes that I've come to learn that takes place from doing this podcast is menopause. And how that can have impacts on someone's sexual desires, which has an impact on our hormones and how we're feeling. I'm learning more and more about menopause, but I imagine some of the people that come to you and talk about their sexual desire are referencing the impact that menopause has had or perimenopause.
1:24:03 Speaker 00 Absolutely. The symptoms of menopause can be really unpleasant for a lot of people, not for everyone, of course, but things like hot flushes and aches and pains and mood changes. They obviously can really disrupt your interest in sex. There's also other things going on in menopause that are more kind of psychosocial as well, often around stage of life, long-term relationships, all the things we've talked about around desire. And sometimes the work is figuring out how much of it is to do with menopause, which some of it might be, how much of it was there before and is exacerbated by the symptoms of menopause. But it's really important. In fact, hormonal fluctuations for all people with Menstrual cycles actually are quite important when it comes to sex.
1:24:45 Speaker 00 And we do see changes across the monthly cycle in people's receptiveness to sex and also the types of sex that they're interested in.
1:24:56 Steven Bartlett? Changes. One of the changes that happens when we have kids is our bodies change.
1:25:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, hugely.
1:25:01 Steven Bartlett? And that can have a big impact, I imagine, on self-confidence.
1:25:05 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:25:05 Steven Bartlett? But also potentially attraction.
1:25:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think there's often a big worry that those body changes will influence attraction. And again, because we don't talk about it, people never get to find out. So a lot of people tell me that they're worried that their partner won't find them as attractive because they've got stretch marks or because their body looks different. And actually, they've never voiced that. Part of the success of therapy is people speak the things that they don't speak elsewhere. And sometimes just having a conversation about those things means that the problem is removed instantly by someone saying, well, actually, no, I can see your bodies change. But, you know, the way your belly looks isn't the sole attraction that I have for you. So yes, it's changed, but no, it's not shifted my attraction for you.
1:25:51 Speaker 00 So, so yeah, changes to body image and how that affects you during sex. But also what you worry a partner might think can be a huge thing for parents.
1:26:01 Steven Bartlett? Are we, are we meant to be monogamous?
1:26:03 Speaker 00 No.
1:26:04 Steven Bartlett? Is that a shitty question? Are we meant to be anything?
1:26:06 Speaker 00 No, you know, it's not a very popular answer, this. And actually, when I post about this on my socials, people hate it because it really disrupts what a lot of us are doing. I'm monogamous myself, right? But we are not destined to be monogamous. There isn't anything about humans that means that we're designed to maintain a sexual interest in the same person for a long amount of time. That's why if we have sex with the same person forever, if you don't work at it, if you don't nurture it, if you don't allow growth, it's going to be challenging because we're not designed to do it. Our brains, they get bored, they need novelty, they don't like predictability. So we're not designed to be monogamous.
1:26:48 Speaker 00 And I think what's fascinating is that we all just kind of fall into it because it's a social construct that is kind of politically and economically and historically present. We just think that's what we should do. It's fine if people choose it, of course it is. But I think if you choose monogamy, I think you have to have your eyes open to the fact that you can't expect that that means you'll maintain sexual interest for that person without any effort. That's what we know about long term monogamy. Spontaneous desire will drop, sexual currency will drop, person will become very familiar. You'll need to find ways to keep sex novel. You'll need to not order the set menu. You'll need to go for the buffet. You need to bring different versions of yourself into sex.
1:27:33 Speaker 00 There's so many things that you need to be conscious of if you choose monogamy, if you want a good sex life. And I think monogamy tends to bring with it an idea that that person will just always remain sexually interested in you because you've married them. Or perhaps you don't need to work at it. And I think those things can be quite harmful, those ideas.
1:27:55 Steven Bartlett? I've read like only four or five percent of people identify as being polygamous. Is that the right word, polygamy?
1:28:03 Speaker 00 So, I mean, there are many different words, but in terms of open relationship structures, of which there are many, I think, I think they're on the rise. And I think that's a good thing because I think all of us, a bit like, as I said earlier, that idea of compulsory heterosexuality, you're kind of monogamous and straight unless you prove otherwise or choose otherwise, right? It'd be great if we all had an idea that, well, you could be any of those things and there is not a one that's best or right. But why don't you look at all the options before you make your mind up?
1:28:34 Steven Bartlett? Do you have people come and see you that are in those polygamous relationships?
1:28:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. And I have plenty of people come and see me that are moving from monogamy into opening up and want to think about how they can do that in a way that privileges their kind of primary relationship. So that, that's actually a really wonderful thing to work with. I love working with those couples because actually they're really able to think outside the box and they can separate their love from each other and their commitment to each other from their sexual interests and they can not be threatened by the idea of sex elsewhere. It's, yeah, it's, it's really fun to work with.
1:29:15 Steven Bartlett? A new set of problems? And does it work?
1:29:17 Speaker 00 I would say a new set of solutions.
1:29:19 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. Does it, does it work?
1:29:21 Speaker 00 Yes, but like monogamy, it only works if you work at it. Because there are another set of things that you might need to work at that are, you know, you might not need to work on novelty. You might not need to work on predictability. Because you're getting that with different partners. But you do need to work on boundaries, communication, how you manage it together and the constant flux of that. So it all requires work.
1:29:44 Steven Bartlett? What if you're in a relationship right now and you want an open relationship? What is the best way to broker that conversation with your partner? Is it just a, hey babe, let's sit down and have dinner. I'd like to have an open relationship.
1:29:57 Speaker 00 I think, you know, direct is good, but also if you want to test the waters, you might say, like we talked about earlier with communication, I was listening to this podcast. Turns out that, you know, a lot of us choose monogamy without even thinking it through. Did you do that? Did you choose monogamy? Did you know that was right for you? I've been thinking about this for myself recently. I don't know why I chose it, you know?
1:30:19 Steven Bartlett? My partner said that to me, it would be like a dagger in the heart. I'd be, oh gosh, got nervous even hearing that. Because, because you know what they're implying? They're implying that they want to go shag someone else.
1:30:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, and we, you know, one of our ideas about sex and sexual relationships is that the attraction and desire we have for our partner or the romantic love we have for our partner is finite. And that if it moves to someone else, it's lost from us. And it's a really interesting concept that we only really have with romantic love. Like, we don't have it with love for our children. We don't think if we have another one, we'll stop loving the first one. And we don't have it for our friends, right? We can have multiple friends and love them all equally or love them all differently.
1:31:03 Steven Bartlett? So you think we can love multiple people?
1:31:04 Speaker 00 Absolutely, yeah. But I think we are, we feel fear about the concept of it, simply because in our mind, that is a threat to our connection. I think, you know, it's a really, it's a really interesting concept. And it'd be, it'll be fascinating to see where we go with different relationship structures in the, in the decades that follow.
1:31:24 Steven Bartlett? Dr Karen Gurney.
1:31:27 Steven Bartlett? We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And there's two questions that have been left for you. The first one is, what's the worst advice you've ever received?
1:31:39 Speaker 00 The worst advice I've ever received was to not become a psychologist because I wasn't cut out for it.
1:31:46 Steven Bartlett? Who gave you that advice?
1:31:47 Speaker 00 My first supervisor. I hope she's listening.
1:31:52 Steven Bartlett? When she said you're not cut out for it, what did she mean?
1:31:56 Speaker 00 She said to me, there are many qualities required to be a good clinical psychologist. Unfortunately, you don't have any of them.
1:32:03 Steven Bartlett? What a thing to say to somebody.
1:32:04 Speaker 00 I know. It was very early on in my career. I must have been, you know, 19, 20. So yeah, I'm glad to have proved her wrong.
1:32:11 Steven Bartlett? And the second question is, what's the best advice you can offer Steven Bartlett on how he can improve?
1:32:20 Speaker 00 Well, I'll obviously have to focus it on sex. And it's going to be create a culture of talking about sex often, initiate freely and be really comfortable with being turned down.
1:32:32 Steven Bartlett? Thank you so much. It's been an absolute honour to go on this journey of sex with you. I mean, that sounds a little bit strange, but you know what I mean.
1:32:39 Speaker 00 It does, but we'll go with it.
1:32:39 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. To learn about your perspective on sex. It's really refreshing. I've spoken to a few people that are experts on the subject matter of sex and orgasms and everything in between. But your perspective is really refreshing because it focuses on first reframing what sex is and some of the like underlying psychological barriers that we create about our perceptions of what sex is. And if we start there, then we probably won't have a lot of these other upstream symptoms of that, like misunderstanding.
1:33:09 Speaker 00 That's exactly it.
1:33:10 Steven Bartlett? Of what sex is. And also, I've, from doing this podcast, had tons of parents that have contacted me, asking about when you become a parent, what happens in your sex life. So your book has come at a fantastic time in culture. I recommend people go and get both books, both of which are available now. And both are incredible reads. They're really inclusive and easy to read. And your new book, How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life, is essential reading for all parents that might be struggling with this. So, thank you. Really appreciate it.
1:33:37 Speaker 00 Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
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