231: How to Have Better Sex (Part 1)

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are cheating on your partner, or having an affair, or are engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  Let’s be honest: engaging in infidelity can be exciting and great.  And it can also be exhausting, and stressful, and it can eat up a lot of your precious time and energy.  So when you’re ready to start dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, let’s get to work.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach: we can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com. 

All right, everybody.  Today we are going to start talking about how to have better sex.  Although I do not promote myself as a sex therapist, or a sex coach, I have decades of experience talking to people about the intimate details of their sexual experiences, across a range of settings.  And what I see, over and over, is that often, when someone wants to have better sex, either in general, or with a specific person, they’re too focused on specific details of their sexual experiences, and not aware enough of the context in which these details are situated.  They’re very focused on the little picture, but they’re not focused at all on the bigger picture.  So for example, maybe you want to have better orgasms – or start having orgasms.  Or maybe you want your partner to have better orgasms – or start having orgasms.  And lot of people are very focused on orgasms.

And that’s fine, in a way – I like orgasms!  They’re great.  But what makes orgasms possible?  There are many answers to this question, but the answer is NOT just your sexual technique, or your sexual skills – or your partner’s.

So today we’re going to start to take a look at the bigger picture.  What sets the stage for better sex, however you may define that?  What creates the context in which the kind of sex you want to have can occur?

These are great questions to ask yourself even if you’re delighted with the way your sex life is going at the moment, by the way.  The more you understand what goes into your sex life being great, the greater your ability to continue to make it great.

Within my work with my coaching clients, the issue is often – not always, but often – that the client would like to have better sex with their spouse, or long-term partner, but isn’t sure if it’s possible for them to have better sex with that person.  Some people are a little more skeptical – some folks like the idea of having better sex with their committed partner, but really don’t think that’s likely.  And some folks are convinced that having better sex with their committee partner is truly impossible.  I often hear things like, “Well, it’s just a fact that sex is better in the beginning of a relationship, and then gets progressively worse over time.”  Or less exciting over time, or less frequent over time, or less satisfying over time.  In addition, some people are sure that affair sex is by definition more exciting than sex that doesn’t have an infidelity element to it, and therefore, they’ll never be able to have sex with a committed partner that’s as good as the sex they’re having with their affair partner.

So let’s debunk a few things right now.  Although it is true that some people DO experience sex to be better in the beginning of a relationship, or more exiting or more frequent at the beginning of a relationship, it is not a universal law of human relationships that sex gets worse or less exciting or less frequent over time.  When that happens, it’s a result of people’s specific thoughts, feelings, decisions and actions.  It is not an inevitability.

Similarly, some people DO experience affair sex to be especially exciting, or uniquely exciting, and there can be many reasons for that.  But even if you have experienced your affair sex to be way more exciting than you’ve found sex with your committed partner, that isn’t necessarily an indication that you can’t have more of the kind of sexual experiences you want to have with your committed partner. 

So, what I want to emphasize is that it is indeed possible that you might be able to have better sex with your committed partner.  You might be able to have sex with your committed partner that blows your mind and exceeds your wildest expectations.  I see this happening for my clients all the time.  I don’t mean that I literally see it, but I witness the unfolding of their experiences of having amazing sex with someone they didn’t think they could ever have amazing sex with, and when this happens, it’s pretty great.

It is also possible that you might not get to the point of having sex with your partner that blows your mind, but you DO find that your sex life with them improves to the point that it’s pretty good, or at least, good enough.  Sometimes good enough isn’t really good enough, but sometimes good enough is GREAT.

Having said this, I want to make it absolutely clear that although it is theoretically possible that you could have better sex with your committed partner, and possibly even amazing sex with your committed partner, there aren’t any guarantees that this will happen.  And you won’t know until you try!  So if you are interested in trying to have better sex with a specific person, your first order of business is to decide if trying is worth the effort.  We’ll talk about HOW you try to improve your sex life later, I promise.  But first, let’s see if it even makes sense to do this.

There are some pretty reliably good indications that having better sex with your committed partner – or any other specific person - is not all that likely to happen.  And the first and most important of those indicators is this: you don’t WANT to have better sex with them.  Not truly.  I talk to people who want to want to have better sex with their spouses, or their committed partners, but that’s not the same thing as actually wanting to have better sex with them!  Often, people say, “Well, if the sex with my spouse was better, I’d be okay with staying married to them,” so they try – or “try” in quotation marks – to have better sex with their spouse because they think that if they do that, they won’t have to deal with getting divorced.  And sometimes people do that when they know they aren’t even remotely attracted to their spouse anymore.  Not in a sexual way.  They may care about their spouse, they may love them deeply!  But their sexual desire for them is nonexistent, and thus – surprise surprise – their attempts to have better sex with their spouse don’t work.

So if you’ve been thinking that you’d like to have better sex with your committed partner, I want you to be really honest with yourself.  Do you want to have better sex with them because you really want to have better sex with them, as an end goal in and of itself?  Or are you hoping that somehow you might magically be able to have better sex with them, as a means to some other end?

If you aren’t pretty good and sure that you want to have better sex with your committed partner as an end in and of itself, I would suggest you don’t even bother trying.  Go solve for the thing that it actually makes sense for you to solve for instead.  And if you need help figuring out what that is, schedule yourself an introductory coaching session with me and let’s talk about it.

I know that it might sound really obvious to say that if you don’t truly want to have better sex with your spouse or committed partner you shouldn’t bother trying.  But believe me, a lot of people try really hard to convince themselves to want to have better sex with their spouse.  And if that’s where you’re stuck, let’s talk.  Being honest with yourself about what you desire and what you don’t desire is essential to steering your sex life in the direction you want it to go.

Another important indication that you and your committed partner might not be able to have better sex is if you’ve talked about your sexual desires and preferences and you’ve repeatedly concluded that you want very different things out of your sex lives.  And again, it might seem like this would obviously be a conclusion that indicates that it doesn’t make much sense to try to have better sex with your spouse.  But again, sometimes people really don’t want to call a duck a duck, often because doing so would require them to disrupt the status quo. 

Some differences in sexual preferences within relationships can be dealt with in a way that works fine for all parties involved.  For sure.  But that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about you and your partner having come to the conclusion, through sufficient discussion, that you’re too far apart in what you want.

The third important indication that better sex with your partner might not be possible is if your partner has indicated, explicitly and recently, that they aren’t interested in sex, or aren’t interested in sex with you.  Now, it’s one thing for you to assume that this is what’s going on with them.  If you’re working off of assumptions, there’s a chance you could be wrong, and a conversation with your partner might be your next step.  However, if your partner has actually said this to you, and said it recently, this is important to take seriously.  You might want to have another conversation with your partner to check in and make sure you understand where they’re at, but if they aren’t interested in sex, or sex with you, having a more satisfying sex life with this person probably isn’t an option that’s on the table. 

If you don’t know what’s going on with your partner, that’s okay.  We’ll talk about that later.  Not knowing what’s going on with your partner is different from being reasonably sure that your partner’s ideas about what makes for a good sex life are very different from yours.

So assuming you are as sure as you can be that you do want to have better sex with your partner as an end goal in and of itself, and assuming you don’t know for sure that your partner is uninterested in this, you’re in a good position to start exploring the possibility of having better sex with your partner.

And the starting place that I’m going to offer you doesn’t have anything to do with your partner.  We’ll get to talking about things you can do with and for your partner.  But our starting point is YOU.

Sex and sexuality are funny things.  For one thing, they are notoriously hard to define – and I know this well, because I used to be a sociologist of sexuality.  And sociologists of sexuality love to explore people’s understandings – or lack of understandings - about what sex is or isn’t, what makes something sexual as opposed to un-sexual, and so on.  If you ask 100 people what sex is, you may well get 100 different answers.  Or 100 different attempts to come up with answers!  Sex may be omnipresent, it may seem to be everywhere we look, but our understandings of what it is may not be terribly robust or nuanced.  There are a lot of messages out there about sex and sexuality, and some of them, in my humble opinion, are a lot more useful than others.

So I want you to take a brief inventory of the origins of your understandings about sex.  What were some of the first messages you received about sex, and where or who did they come from?  Did the early messages you received about sex stay with you, or have they evolved over time?  Have you had access to information or guidance about sex that you have considered helpful?  Have you received messages about sex that you have considered unhelpful?  If so, how did you deal with them?  Did you reject unhelpful messages, or challenge them, or believe you were stuck with them?

You don’t have to make answering these questions into a life’s work.  But it is really useful to start to get a sense of how your own ideas about sex have been shaped, and how they may have evolved – or not – over time.  And, later, we’ll talk about how it’s also useful to be aware of the possibility that your partner may have been exposed to a very different set of messages about sex, and why that may matter.

Now I want you to start to think about what sex is for you now, or what you want sex to be or include or entail for you now, at this point in your life.  Often we assume that sex is something we do with our bodies, and that certainly can be an important part of what you want sex to include!  But get specific – what exactly are the bodily things that you want sex to include?  What do you want to do with what parts of your body?  What do you want to do with another person’s body?  What do you want them to do with your body?  How do you want to feel in various parts of your body as you are engaging in all of these actions?  What else might you want to go into the physical experience of having sex?  The physical experience of sex might include more than just body parts for you – maybe you have a cherished line up of sex toys that are an important part of your repertoire.  Maybe you like to employ other objects in your physical experiences of sex.  Or whatever.  The possibilities are not limited by the examples I’m offering! 

The point is simply to get more clear on what you want your physical experiences of sex to be like now, at this point in your life.  Maybe you already know this pretty well, and if so, that’s great.  Take this opportunity to affirm what you know to yourself!  And if you aren’t all that clear on what you want the physical experience of sex to be like at this point in your life, give it some thought!  It’s pretty hard to have better sex if you don’t know what you want out of your sexual experiences!

To continue examining what you want sex to be like for you at this point in your life, ask yourself what you want the mental experience of having sex to be like.  This can mean a lot of different things.  For some people, it means having a very specific fantasy scenario in place, which could exist entirely in your own mind, or could be something that you act out with your partner.  For other people, it means being in a relatively undisturbed mental state.  You might not want to have sex when you’re thinking about the 15,000 things you need to get done by the end of the day, or the next day, or the next day.  So what do you want your general mental state to be when you’re having sex?  What specific thoughts do you want to be thinking when you’re having sex?  I’m going to suggest that there is probably something that you absolutely want to be thinking when you’re having sex, but I’ll tell you what that is in a minute. 

Now I want you to ask yourself what you want your emotional experience of sex to be like.  You get to answer in any way you want!  Some people want to feel safe.  Some people want to feel comfortable.  Some people want to feel uncomfortable!  Some people want to feel like they’re doing something risky, or perhaps, like they’re in danger!  Some people want to feel really intimately connected to their partner.  Some people want to feel like they’re an apex predator mating with primal animal energy, without much sense of what we might consider “connection.” 

You get to choose!  Again, the point is just to start to clarify what you want your experience of sex to be like, at this point in your life.  Because here’s the thing: even though you and your partner have whatever sexual history together that you have, you get to usher the two of you into new territory.  Assuming that they’re interested in embarking on this journey with you, you can essentially start your sex life over from scratch.

Now, I will say that one of the things that a lot of people want when they’re having sex is the feeling of sexual desire.  And sexual desire is a great example of the relationship between our bodies and our emotions.  Emotions, or feelings, are sensations that we experience in our bodies.  We often think that emotions are cognitive experiences, and they are generated by our cognitive experiences, but emotions, or feelings, are the sensations that we actually FEEL.  So my guess is that one of the things you want to feel when you are having sex is desire that you consider sexual.  There are many flavors of desire, after all – you might desire a glass of cold water.  You might desire a strong cup of coffee, or maybe a line of cocaine.  You might desire a long bike ride.  You may already know very well what sexual desire feels like to you, and how it differs from your experiences of other desires, and if you do, great – recognize that you have a sense of what this is for you.  But you might not have a clear sense of what sexual desire feels like to you, and if you don’t, you may want to explore this.  What would it feel like to want to have sex, however you define sex?

When we’re talking about sexual desire, one of the most important things for us to recognize is that our feelings are generated by our thinking.  If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about this before, but if you haven’t heard me talk about the relationship between your thoughts and your feelings before, I encourage you to quit whatever you’re doing and enroll in my online course right now.  My course is called You’re Not the Only One, and it explains the relationship between our thoughts and our feelings and our actions, and why it’s so important to understand this relationship if you want to deal with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about.  And, it’s really important to understand the relationship between your thoughts and your feelings and your actions if you are specifically trying to have better sex with someone you haven’t been having great sex with.  So immerse yourself in my simple yet powerful teachings on this topic by enrolling in You’re Not the Only One, which you can do through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Now, many of us experience sexual desire through UNINTENTIONAL thinking.  We meet someone, and we start to think thoughts about them: they’re amazing.  They’re intriguing.  They’re attractive.  They’re sexy.  They’re so fucking hot.  I like the way they look.  I like the way they smell.  I want to get closer to them.  I want to touch them.  I want them to touch me.  I want to take their clothes off.  I want to be naked with them.  It feels so good to be naked with them!  It feels so good to touch them and kiss them and lick them and bite them! 

These are the kinds of thoughts that generate the feeling we often recognize as sexual desire.  It may seem like your experience of desire is just happening to you, or is CAUSED by how hot your partner is, or how adept they are at interacting with you in a sexual way.  But that isn’t quite it.  The only thing that makes your partner hot is you thinking that they are hot.  Nobody is objectively hot!  Sorry, not sorry!  Even if you didn’t intentionally decide to think, “Oh, this person is really hot,” you thinking that your partner is hot is what gets you excited about them!    

Now, even if it’s really NICE when sexual desire is created through our unintentional thinking, and delightful when it seems like sexual desire just happens to us, it’s really important for you to understand that you can create sexual desire through intentional thinking, too.

Before I go any further, let me be really clear about something: just because you can, or could, create sexual desire through your intentional thinking, that doesn’t mean you have to.  You have the power to choose how you want to think on purpose, and when you do this, you will gain the power to intentionally generate the feelings you want to feel.  And if this sounds like magic, it kind of is, and this is what I can teach you how to do if you enroll in my course or choose to work with me one-on-one.  But just because we have the power to intentionally choose our thinking doesn’t mean we have to change our thinking.

What I mean by that will become clear momentarily.  Here’s your next assignment. 

I want you to think about the person you want to have better sex with.  Can you imagine having amazing sex with them right now – or, if not, like, right this minute, then, like, later today?  If you can, what’s great about?  What’s enjoyable about the experience?  Answer those questions as specifically as you can. 

And then, ask yourself, what are you specifically enjoying about your partner in your imagined sexual experience with them?  What’s amazing about THEM?  Again, be specific!

If you’re able to do this, if you’re able to imagine having great sex with your partner right now, you may notice that your thoughts are creating some feelings.  If that’s happening, great.

And if you can’t imagine having amazing sex with your person, can you imagine having pretty good sex with them?  If so, same thing: what’s pretty good about the experience?  What specifically do you like about it?  What’s pretty good about being with your partner in this way?

Your current assignment is to see if you can create some feelings of sexual desire for your partner.  These feelings don’t have to be off-the-charts intense.  Feeling even the stirrings of desire is a great start.  And the way that you create those feelings is by thinking about what you find desirable about your partner, or what you would enjoy about being sexual with them.

Now, if you imagined having sex with your partner and you either could not imagine it happening at all, or you imagined it and you were repulsed or disgusted or even indifferent, I want you to take that seriously.  Earlier I asked you if you truly wanted to have better sex with the person you say you want to have better sex with.  If your answer was yes, but now you’re thinking about actually having sex with them and you are either completely uninterested or feeling some yuck, I want you to seriously consider the possibility that going any further with trying to have better sex with this person is not a good idea.

Because it’s okay for us to like what we like, and dislike what we dislike!  Yes, we have the power to intentionally choose our thinking, but the point of doing that is not to try to convince ourselves to disavow our deepest, truest desires! 

But, after having thought carefully about it, if you want to try to have better sex with your partner, you can think thoughts that are conducive to creating desire for them.  Do this, and do it regularly.  The point isn’t to do anything with your partner just yet.  The point is to start to shift your orientation to them.

This episode is titled How to have Better Sex, part 1, and there will be subsequent installments on this topic!  I WILL go on to talk about what you can actually do with your partner.  But it’s so essential to start by addressing what is exclusively within your power to control.  So get to work, and do the things I’ve talked about in this episode!

And of course, if you want my help with this, or anything related to navigating your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, there are two ways you can have me as your coach.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Bye for now.