Moment 171: STOP DOING THIS! It's Ruining Your Sex Life

In this moment, world-renowned philosopher and thinker Alain De Botton discusses how communication can lead to a better sex life. Alain says sex is like a mirror to the relationship as a whole. If something is wrong with a couples sex life, it’s usually a symptom of a wider problem. He says that a first step towards a more fulfilling sex life is reflecting on how you are as a partner. Being open about yourself in a relationship is the best way to create mutual trust, which means that you can ‘tease’ out any issue in a relationship. This then leads to being open with one another sexually. Listen to the full episode here - Apple- https://g2ul0.app.link/v1foloy7kLb Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link/5NT1dmK7kLb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Alain: https://www.alaindebotton.comm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  I was looking through some statistics earlier on because I know that you've talked quite extensively on relationships and sex and sexless relationships. I found this stat that says a 2022 study by Relate to UK based counselling network found that 26% of people in relationships were having sex less than 10 times per year and 8% were having no sex at all. This is a stark rise from 2018 where the numbers were quite significantly lower than that. It seems like as a society, we're getting increasingly sexless.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the question is, where's the problem? Is the problem in the body or is the problem in the mind? Now, you know, being the kind of guy I am, I'm going to shift us to the mind. I'm sure sometimes there are bodily issues and they deserve attention too. But if I can talk about the mind, why is it that sex is easier at the beginning than in a long term relationship? One of the leading answers is anger. It's not very easy to have sex or want sex with someone that you're angry with. And in many relationships, there's a lot of stored anger that neither party knows is there. And that anger has come from micro incidents of disappointment. Someone didn't quite call when they said

• 1:23Speaker 01

  they would. Someone didn't laugh when they might have done. Someone didn't show generosity when it might have been required. And these things get stored up. And the result of too much of this is that you don't want someone going anywhere near you.

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  Contempt.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Because you're furious. You're essentially furious. But in the way of these things, you don't know you are. You don't know you're furious. Again, the mind is not obvious to itself. So, you know, if you want to have more sex, don't just invest in candles and fancy linen. A quite useful thing to do is to go and have dinner with your partner and say to them. We're both going to ask each other how we've annoyed each other. Because we have annoyed each other, not because we're evil people, but because we're human and we're in a relationship. And no relationship survives more than an hour without a buildup of frustration. And the more we can let out that frustration at the dinner table, the more it won't, you know, create a blockage in the bedroom.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  And so the chance to discharge frustration and, you know, often the reason why we don't tell our partners what our frustrations are is that they sound ridiculous. It's like, well, hang on, you're upset with me because I used the word really in what you thought placed too much emphasis on the why when I was speaking to your mother. Are you crazy, right? You are laying yourself open to your partner pointing to you going, are you crazy? But I think that we're all in love, very small children, at least a small part of us is. And as we know, small children get upset about really weird tiny things. You know, you'll move a button and they start wailing and you go, what's happened? And they go, you moved a button. And you go, I did? Why does that matter?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  But for them it matters. Or, you know, a pencil has slightly changed direction. So we should learn, we should remember what it felt like to be a child. And we should acknowledge that there remains, even an adult who's very competent in all sorts of areas, a small child who is liable to be getting very upset about small things.

• 3:19Steven Bartlett?

  Triggered.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Triggered. But because they're an adult, this is the problem. We, we think, well, an adult can't possibly be having such childish reactions. Again, we need to just cast aside our fears of shame and say, you know what? Yes, an adult can get very upset about tiny things. An adult probably is upset about tiny things and we're doing ourselves an honour when we can dare to reveal this to our partner and they can do likewise.

• 3:47Steven Bartlett?

  So if I'm, if I'm someone listening to this now and I'm in a relationship where I don't think, because it's interesting, even when I say I don't think I'm having enough sex, the idea of how much sex is enough sex has probably come from movies, which is a bit of a trap as well, right? But if I'm in a relationship and we are in a sexless relationship by whatever definition. Solution one you presented there is try and resolve the anger, the underlying contempt. Are there anything else that you think is effective ways of solving for that?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Look, I think we, I think one useful thing to do is to go, why does sex matter? What is this thing called sex? Why, why does it matter? And when people get very upset, I think the answer tends to be that sex is a symbol of something very poignant and very delicate, which is my partner loves me. And they can, the reason why it becomes such an acute issue is that they cannot hold on to the idea that the partner might love them and might not want sex. This is psychologically impossible. Now, it is important to say it is possible. It is possible that your partner both loves you and doesn't want to have sex. There could be other reasons, they're feeling unwell, da da da. So, and then we can ask ourselves, what does sex really aim at?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Sex aims at intimacy, you know, even we'll say they, you know, in, in, in people's polite language, they say they became intimate, which means they had sex. So what, what we know about sex is that the really exciting thing about sex is not the sex bit, it's the intimate bit. It's the idea that someone is without their guard. You know, most of the time we approach other people with our guards on. And in this very rare and unusual thing we do, we meet another human being in a vulnerable state. And this is such a relief from the normal limitations of life. And there are other ways of doing this, you know, sex is not the only way of doing it.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  So by understanding better what sex is, we can also have a chance to get some of what we get in sex in things that are not sex, if that makes sense.

• 5:51Steven Bartlett?

  I had Tracy Cox on the podcast and she said something to me which really stuck with me because I hadn't noticed it until she said it, which is this idea, I believe she called otherness, which is when your partner almost becomes like a family member or you start seeing them as like a sibling because they are in their sweatpants around you. And she made the claim, which I think I've read in your books as well, that in many respects, that's the very opposite of the

• 6:21Steven Bartlett?

  The spice that makes sex so appealing in those early days, when it's new and novel and risky, you know, and so she kind of alluded to the fact that love and sex were actually set on two different ends of a pole.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Right, and again, to come back to my theme, what does a romantic say? A romantic, romanticism tells us sex and love belong entirely together. But I think what you're saying, and you know, what many of your viewers will know, is that the relationship is is trickier. And again, let's not torture ourselves about this. Let's, let's get curious and then let's communicate about this. And I think that, look, a growing child has a paradox to deal with. And this is what Freud famously, doesn't matter what you think of Freud, very useful observation, really, that the child experiences love in the first instance, at the beginning

• 7:18Speaker 01

  of life, we all experience love. At the hands of people who, if everything's gone right, we will have no sexual connection with, right? So, given the debt that adult love owes to childhood, that sets us up with a problem when we as adults start to fall in love with people and start to build up relationships, which is that the more we get cozy with someone, the more we feel like we did a little bit with our parents when things were really cozy. Which is oddly why people like going to hotels. Why do people like going to hotels? To revive a relationship. It's because the furniture doesn't remember you. The curtains don't remember you.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  You are, you're allowed to be, for a chosen moment, somebody without the history. And it's the history that is making intimacy hard, because that history, while it's knitting you together and making you emotionally close, is also rendering.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Sexual freedom problematic. And I think it's just, we need to go very easy on ourselves for the fact that this happens. And. What do we do about it, though? Do I need to book a lot of hotel rooms? Do I need to spend a lot of time away from my partner? I noticed even that you're laughing, you're smiling as you say that. And I think that's partly the clue. You know, when we come up against the hardest conundrums in in life, having the tolerance of a sense of humour, a shared sense of humour. You know, if a couple can turn the sexual challenges from a tragedy into something, you know, closer to a comedy, it's an enormous achievement. Think of, you know, think of teasing, right? There are sides of couples that they find really, really hard.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Isn't it wonderful when a couple learns with affection to tease one another? They go, ah, Stephen, yeah, there's that thing that you do. It gives you a little nickname, calls you whatever it is, you know, a little affectionate nickname. That's a wonderful moment because it means that irritation has been sublimated into tender, compassionate understanding for why someone is as difficult as they are. So the best thing we can do with our irritations with our partners is to be able to tease our way out of them. And we may need to do this in troublesome areas like like sex. It's an enormous achievement if your partner can call you, you know, can go from thinking that you are an idiot to smiling at you and thinking you're a lovable idiot.