233: How to Have Better Sex (Part 3)

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 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.  Sadly, so much of the so-called advice that’s out there for people who are cheating is little more than thinly veiled judgment, but that is not what I provide.  I give you guidance and support that respects the fullness of your humanity, and the complexity of your situation – no matter what you’re doing.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach.  You can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One, or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Okay people, this episode is going to build off of the last two episodes, in which I’ve been talking about how you might set the stage for having better sex with someone who you haven’t had great sex with in a while, or haven’t had sex with at all in a while.  And the example that I’m going to continue working from is that you are in committed relationship, and you’ve also been engaging in some sort of infidelity.  And your infidelity sex has been pretty awesome.  But what you want is to try to have better sex with your committed partner.

In this episode, I’m going to assume you’ve already considered the things I urged you to consider in the previous two episodes, and done the things I recommended that you do, and I’m going to assume that things have been going well.  Meaning, you are clear in your motivations for wanting to have better sex with your committed partner.  You’ve been able to generate feelings of desire for them.  You’ve consistently practiced being present with them and engaged with them and curious about them, and it’s been going well.  You feel good about the efforts you’re making, and you feel good about intentionally enjoying your committed partner.

Now, there is of course the possibility that you’ve done all of the things I encouraged you to do, and it has not gone well.  If that’s the case, it may be time for you to reassess your efforts, or reassess your goals.  It may NOT be a good idea for you to forge ahead and try the things I’m going to talk about today. 

But assuming you’ve been setting the groundwork to have better sex with your partner and you think things are going in the right direction, it’s time to approach the actual matter of sex.  I told you I was finally going to talk about actually having sex in this episode, and I am.

To that effect, the next thing I want you to do is see if you can step into your partner’s shoes and imagine what they’re thinking about YOU these days.  I want you to try to imagine what their current perspectives on you look like.  Now this is tricky business, for a number of reasons.  For one thing, we can never know for sure what another person is thinking – although we unfortunately tend to assume otherwise!  Not only that, we often become so sure that we know what our partner is thinking that we let our assumptions about them and what they’re thinking calcify into immutable truths.  And this can cause us a whole lot of trouble. 

When I talk to people about this, they often say, “But I DO know what my partner is thinking.  I know them REALLY WELL.  I’ve known them really well for a long time!”  And here’s the thing.  I understand that you’ve spent a lot of time with them, and observed their behavior for a long time, and you may indeed have a very accurate read on them – at least to an extent.  But even if this is true for you, I also want you to consider that some of what you think you know about your partner may not be as true as you think it is.  Some of what you think you know about them may have more to do with your assumptions about them, or the stories you tell yourself about them, than about their experience of who they are.  And moreover, it may behoove you to assume that there could be more to then than you know or understand.  Even if you have a good sense of the partial picture, you might not know the whole picture.

So when I ask you to imagine what your partner is thinking about you these days, I want you think about what might be going on with them without relying on long-held beliefs.  If you were them, and you were experiencing your own behavior from their vantage point, what might you think?  How might you feel about you?  That’s one way to guess as to what they might be thinking about you.  Another way is to assess their current behavior towards you.  Are they engaged?  Withdrawn?  Assuming you’ve been more present with them lately, how have they responded?

The point of doing this is to try to read the room as best as you can.  Treat your guesses about what they’re thinking about you as just that, guesses, but also recognize that usually all we can do is operate from our best guesses.  Right?

So, with your best guesses about what your partner is thinking about you and feeling about you in mind, I want you to plan to have a conversation with them.  About sex.  And here are three important points this conversation probably needs to include.

First and foremost, you want to find out how interested they are in having sex with you.  I know this may sound like a terribly unsexy thing to talk about, but I want you to consider that you can make this conversation very sexy indeed, and I also want you to consider that you really need to know where your partner stands in terms of having a sexual relationship with you!  Right?!  If you want to have better sex with them, but they aren’t interested in having sex with you at all, or aren’t particularly interested in cultivating your sexual relationship, that’s probably where your efforts to have better sex with this particular person will come to an end.

Now of course, there’s the question of how you actually elicit this information from them.  How do you ask them if they’re interested in having sex with you?  How do you find out if they’re interested in reinvigorating your sex life?  You may be able to come up with an excellent – or totally adequate - way of doing this on your own.  But if you want my help, let’s work together one-on-one and I will coach you through all of the specifics of what you want to say to and ask of your specific partner.  To get started working with me one-on-one, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com and schedule an introductory coaching session.

If your partner indicates that they are interested in having sex with you, and are interested in cultivating your shared sexual relationship, the second important order of business is to convey your enthusiasm for them and your enthusiasm for having a mutually satisfying sexual relationship with them.  This is where some people go off the rails.  I see clients who decide to recommit to their spouse after they’ve been having great sex with their affair partner, and they go to their spouse with a sexual wish list, or even a set of sexual must-haves.  They ask their spouse, “Hey, do you want to work on our sexual relationship?” and their spouse says “Yes.”  And then the person who has been cheating says, “Okay, well I want our sexual relationship to include this and this and this and this…”

It’s fine to have preferences and requests.  But I don’t recommend you lead with your preferences and requests.  Instead, I encourage you to stress to your partner that you want to create a mutually satisfying sexual relationship with them, and that you want to be attuned to what that entails for them.  Assuming, of course, that you truly WANT to do this, which hopefully you do if you’re trying to have better sex with this particular person.  There will be plenty of time for you to articulate your preferences and requests later.  If you find that you’re in a huge rush to have your sex life include certain things, that may be an indication that it’s time for you to reconsider what you’re doing.  If you want your sex life to include certain things, you can seek those things out!  You can make going after your specific sexual preferences your highest priority.  But if you want to improve your sex life with a specific person, you’ve got to remember that they have their own preferences and desires and priorities, and your objective is to figure out what the two of you can co-create.

The third thing I want you to do is find out if there’s anything your partner wants to talk about in relation to your sex life.  This is important, but this DOES have the potential to be a real can of worms.  For example, if your partner knows you have cheated, they may have ALL KINDS OF THINGS they want to talk to you about in regards to your sex life.  And they might be eager to verbalize the things they want to talk about!  Or they might be very reticent to talk about the things that are on their mind!  Either way, that can be a thing to deal with – but, either way, it can be dealt with.  It’s also possible that they have a few things they want to talk to you about regarding your sex life, but it’s a manageable few things that are easy to discuss.

Even though you don’t know what you’re getting into when you ask if there’s anything they want to talk about regarding your sex life, asking gives you the opportunity to deal with problems that have been festering for a long time, or to prevent new problems from forming.  It also shows your partner that you care about their experience of your sex life, and that you’re receptive to what they have to say and willing to talk about things that are important to them.

And arguably, these are essential ingredients in a long-running, mutually satisfying sexual relationship.   

So that’s three simple things: find out if your partner is interested in having sex with you and cultivating your sexual relationship.  Convey your enthusiasm for creating a MUTUALLY satisfying sexual relationship.  Ask your partner if there’s anything they want to talk about in regards to your sex life.

If you’re shaking your head and saying, “I don’t think it’s simple to talk about these things AT ALL,” I get it.  If you need help with this, schedule an introductory coaching session with me.  When I say it’s simple, I’m not saying that you should find it easy.  So many of us never learned how to communicate about sex, or relationship dynamics, or the intersection of sex and relationship dynamics, so having conversations like the one I’ve just suggested you have may not be something you have a great sense of how to navigate.  But, for one thing, I’m here for you if you need help, and for another thing, I want you to start to consider the possibility that even if talking about sex and relationship stuff is foreign to you, it doesn’t have to complicated.  You can just start doing it as best as you can.

Sometimes people say to me, “Well do I really HAVE to talk to my partner so much about sex?  Can’t we just start having sex again and kind of figure it out as we go along?”  My answer to that question is, maybe.  I am sure that in this great big world of ours, plenty of people do exactly that, and I would not be at all surprised if it works out pretty well for some people.  But what I see, over and over, is that explicit communication is so often really helpful, really important, and sometimes essential.  Sometimes the only way to get what we want in life is to use our power to speak to communicate about things that are important to us as honestly and precisely as we can.

On top of that, I am a firm believer in the power of explicit verbal communication to facilitate not just better sex, but excellent sex.  Can some communication about sex be non-verbal?  Absolutely.  But I see so many people who have very understandably but also very tragically gotten the idea that great sex should just happen, without any talk of any kind.  And on a closely related note, I’ve heard a lot of people say that if you have to talk about the actual mechanics of sex, the actual bodily movements that facilitate sexual pleasure, that something must be wrong.

I couldn’t disagree more. 

Although amazing sex seems to happen effortlessly, or without much communication sometimes, that does not mean that sex should be effortless, or effortlessly great.  And it doesn’t mean that great sex is possible only if it’s effortless.  And if you expect to have a long-term, mutually satisfying sexual relationship with someone, well, good verbal communication is probably going to be pretty important.

Remember, as I talked about in the first of these three episodes, sex may be omnipresent, but it’s also something that is understood and experienced in a vast range of different ways.  Your partner’s understandings of what sex is or could be may be very different from yours.  Their relationship to giving and receiving sexual pleasure may be very different from yours.  I could go on and on about the ways in which people can potentially bring very different orientations to sex to a relationship, but the key general point here is, your partner may have a very different orientation to sex than you do.  And even if you’ve known them for years or decades, it’s possible that you’ve never talked all that much about your understandings of sex, or your orientations to sex, or your sexual likes and dislikes.  It’s possible that you muddled along as best you could without talking about the myriad things about sex in general and your sexual relationship more specifically that you theoretically could talk about.

So as you move forward, I want you to consider that you are encountering your partner as a sexual being anew.  I want you to think and act as if you have much to learn about them as a sexual being.  I want you to assume that you may not know as much about their orientation to, or relationship with sex as you think you do, and I want you to be curious about learning more.  I want you to assume that you might not know as much about their likes and dislikes as you think you do, and I want you to be curious about learning more.

This doesn’t mean that you have to sit down and interview them, or interrogate them – unless you both like that sort of thing!  For some people, being peppered with questions like, “What do you want to do sexually?” seems really abrupt and kind of threatening.  Or very threatening.  But for other people, asking that question, even without much preamble, could work out great. 

Going back to what I said earlier, your job at this point is to read the room.  Where is your partner at?  And where can you go from there?  If the goal is to try to have better sex with your partner, what are the next few, small steps you can take in that direction WITH your partner?

My general recommendation at this point is for you to start creating dedicated time and space for you and your partner to be able to connect with each other in a sexual or sensual way.  You may want this to happen spontaneously and without planning, but that might be pretty close to impossible.  Maybe you both have demanding jobs.  Maybe you both travel for work.  Maybe one of you goes to bed late and gets up late, and the other is on the opposite schedule.  Maybe you have small kids who need to be supervised.  Maybe one or both of you have health issues that add a few layers of effort to engaging in sexual activity. 

Whatever your logistical hurdles look like, find a way to deal with them.  Find a way to create dedicated time and space for sensual connection with your partner.  If you think you cannot find a way to create dedicated time and space for this, I want you to consider the possibility that you’re giving up too soon, or making excuses.  If it’s important to you to have better sex with your partner, find a way to create the time and space in which that can happen.  I understand that this may take some effort on your part.  But is there a problem with that?

Then, I want you to take the lead for making use of this time you’ve created to spend with your partner in a way that steers you in the direction of having better sex.  If you’re currently having sex with them and it’s going pretty well, maybe your next step is to be more present with and attentive to them when you have sex.  Maybe it’s asking them questions – or more questions – about what would feel good to them… and then being receptive to their answers.  Let’s say your partner says, “You know, I’d really like it if you touched me in this way, not that way,” your inclination might be to check out, or get defensive.  That’s not unreasonable, but if you stay with that – if you feel checked out or defensive and there’s where everything stops, then, well, you’re not going to get very far.  It’s possible that you’ve been very confident in your sexual prowess, or your sexual technique for a long time, but you’ve never been attuned to your partner’s experience of your ministrations.  I want to suggest that the sexual technique that trumps all others is being interested in your partner’s experience and willing to adjust what you’re doing based on their feedback.  I get people who say to me, “Well, everyone else I’ve ever been with thought I gave the best blowjobs ever,” or something along those lines.  But, for the purposes of trying to have better sex with the specific person you’re trying to have better sex with, it doesn’t really matter how everyone else you’ve ever been with experienced your blowjobs.  What matters is being attuned to the particular person you are with.  And them to you, of course. 

If you and your partner aren’t currently having sex, I want you to focus on connecting with them in a way that could get you closer to having sex.  When is the last time you and your partner sat down, close enough together so that you’re touching, and talked for a while, without any distractions?  That could be your next step.  When is the last time you and your partner lay with each other, clothed or unclothed, just for the sake of enjoying each other’s physical presence?  That could be your next step.

Now, if this doesn’t sound like sex, you’re right – or at least, this doesn’t fit some people’s definitions of what sex is.  But hopefully, doing all of the things with your partner that can help you warm up to having enjoyable sex is pretty darn enjoyable in its own right.

As you are doing this, as you are working on creating consistent opportunities for you and your partner to connect in a sensual way, or in a way that helps the two of your build the kind of connection that could lead to sex, I want you to remember that your job is to stay really present and engaged.  Some people give their partner two massages and then they have a tantrum because the second massage didn’t lead to mind-blowing sex, or any sex at all.  You do not have to exercise infinite patience here, you do not have to diligently work on being present with your partner and fostering your sensual connection for months upon months.  But if you’ve been disconnected from your partner for any length of time, it’s probably going to take more than two massages to get you from no sex to great sex.  If you’re going to bother making this effort at all, I encourage you to commit to it for a particular time frame that seems reasonable to you.  And within that time frame, you don’t allow yourself to wonder if what you’re doing is “working” or not.  You give the project a little time before you assess the progress.  How long should you commit to trying to foster sensual connection with your partner before you assess the progress?  There’s no one-size-fits-all “right answer” to this question, but if you just need a starting point, I’ll say, give it a month.  But how you use that month, what you do in that month, matters more than the month itself.

So, whether you are currently having sex with your partner or are trying to work up to that, your job is essentially the same.  Be really present with them in your interactions.  Be attuned to their experiences.  Solicit their feedback, and respond to it as best you can!  Be curious about them and their experience of your connection with them – physical or otherwise. 

At this point you may be thinking, “Well what about ME?  Doesn’t my partner also need to attend to me?”  And the answer to that question is, sure.  But as strange as this might sound, I don’t encourage you to focus on that just yet.   In the initial stages of trying to have better sex with your partner, I encourage you to focus on taking responsibility for what YOU have the power to control, and that is, what you put into your engagement with your partner. 

Remember, we are presuming that you are doing all of this because you have decided that you really want to have better sex with this specific person.  You’re not doing any of this because you should, or you have to.  And if at any point you start to realize, hey, maybe I’m not enjoying this process.  Maybe I am doing this because I think I should, you can pivot.  You always, always, always have the right to change your mind.  Even if you’ve had a big talk with your partner about reconnecting with them and trying to start a new sexual chapter with them, you have every right to say, “You know what, this just isn’t working out like I’d hoped it would for me.  I need to change course.”

When I work on this stuff with one-on-one clients, they often want to know how things are going to turn out.  They want to know whether or not it’s possible for them and their partner to have a better sex life.  And my answer is always the same: you won’t know until you try!  You CAN’T know until you try.  What I see amongst my clients is that some people try to do this and they end up having better sex with their spouse, or their long-term committed partner than they ever thought possible.  That does happen, and believe me, people are very excited about it when it does happen, and very glad that they put in whatever effort it took to make it happen.

And it is also true that some people endeavor to improve their sex life with their committed partner and it just doesn’t work out the way they’d hoped it would.  But often, people are really glad to have tried anyway.  Upon deciding that their sex life with their committed partner is not sufficiently satisfying for them, some people choose to end that relationship – but people often feel a lot better about making that decision after having done their very best to improve that sexual relationship first.  And, some folks say that what they learned through trying to improve their sex life with their committed partner is priceless to them, even if the particular relationship didn’t work out.

So, the fact is, you don’t know how your efforts are going to turn out before you actually put in the effort to try to have better sex with your person.  But you can contribute to bettering your sexual relationship in a way that you feel great about.  You can be the change you wish to see in the relationship.  You can take a leadership role.  And then you can see what happens.

If you put in what you consider to be sufficient, sincere effort, and your partner doesn’t respond in a way that you like, you can say, okay, I tried, and you can decide what comes next.  But you may find that your partner starts to respond to your attention in a way that you find very favorable, and from there, you can start to ask them for more.  Once you’ve established a good beginning, you can share more about your desires and preferences and requests, and explore those together to the extent that you both want to.  But establishing a baseline of consistent rapport first may go a long way towards helping you get more of what you want.

And, with a strong foundation of sexual rapport – which includes things I’ve talked about in this episode and the previous two – exploring the specifics of particular sexual acts or techniques or expressions of sex gets a whole lot easier. 

Okay folks, if you want the best general guidance on how to navigate your infidelity situation that’s out there, I encourage you to enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  You get powerful teachings and assignments that will help you deal with your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you.  This course contains my most essential teachings, which apply to everybody’s infidelity situations.  However, this course does not contain personalized guidance on how to go about improving your sex life with someone!  So if you want my help with that, if you want my help working through the specifics of your unique situation, let’s work together one-on-one.  The way to get started with that is to schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

All right everyone.  Thank you all so much for listening.  Bye for now.