If you’d rather listen to the audio version of this content, check out my podcast episode, “Are you not asking for more for fear you’ll hurt his feelings?”
Can you imagine that things could be hotter in your bedroom?
Is there a fantasy you’d like to live out, or some new position or erotic adventure you’d like to try?
If you’re not talking about it -- or if you’re going so far as to NOT THINK ABOUT what might make things juicier for you -- why is that?
I often see women tamping down their dreams and ambitions for their relationship because they’re concerned those desires will feel like an insult to the relationship that they have. “I don’t want to hurt his feelings,” they tell me. A lot of my clients initially don't want to talk to their husbands about things that would make their love deeper or their sex better, because of concerns about how he’ll feel.
Why am I bringing this up?
There is tremendous potential for claiming more joy, more lightness, and more pleasure in your life and in your relationship if you can get past this mistaken belief that we have to reel in our desires in order to protect men's feelings about the relationship.
The other side of that “taking care of the relationship through silence” coin is that we are actively putting a lid on our relationship’s potential. Given that the divorce rate hovers around 50%, I don't think it’s exaggerating to say that some of us are ultimately killing our marriages in this attempt to protect them from hurt we fear will be caused by our authentic desires.
Many women get fed up with pushing down what they really want and leave because their love is dead before their partners ever get a real chance to meet them in the kind of relationship they actually want. Other women become so resentful and negative after silencing their desires that their partners are the ones who step out and have affairs or leave them for someone with whom they can feel successful in love. So the consequences of our silence, our apparent “caution” are a big deal, right?
That’s why we need to talk about this.
Note: As always, I desire to serve couples of all flavors and have no interest in marginalizing anyone. That said, in this post, I’m talking very specifically about cisgender men in committed relationships with women, so that’s why my language is pointedly specific rather than inclusive.
How do you know whether you're not talking about the things that you desire with your partner because you're trying to take care of his feelings?
See which of these sounds like you:
I don't want to tell him that something turns me off because he might feel hurt.
I don't want to ask him to adjust his approach because I don't want him to think that he's not doing a good job.
I don't want to bring this up because he might think I'm not happy, or that I'm saying we have a bad relationship.
I don't want to ask to experiment with something different, because I think he'll think I think he's bad in bed.
I don't want to tell him about this desire I have or this turn-on I felt because I'm afraid he'll think that I want to be with someone else.
I’m predicting that talking about what I want will make him mad and I’ll get LESS than I get now.
Any of those sound like you?
This is what we do. It’s kind, to be sure: we’re sensitive to our husband’s feelings and try not to say things we already know will upset him. But really, if we’re honest, there are other things you DO bring up, right? Things that actually DO upset him, that he doesn’t like?
You tell him what to do with his laundry or his dishes or his parenting or even his job… But sex and love? That’s really touchy!
Why you’re pushing down your feelings (spoiler: it’s the patriarchy)
This might or might not be news to you, but we live in a patriarchal society.
This means, in essence, two important things about this topic of discussing sexual desires with men.
1. In a patriarchy masculinity is privilege, but how masculine someone is - how much privilege one’s masculinity can confer on them - is measured in the eyes of the other privileged folks. So every man experiences pressure to live up to the unspoken but clearly, ubiquitously conveyed standards of masculinity. Masculinity becomes PERFORMATIVE. And sex - in a patriarchal, Puritanical society like ours, is labeled as essentially masculine and essentially dirty. Doing sex “right” means you’re a Real Man. Not being good enough at it means you’re not. Not only is your wife less satisfied than you want her to be, your VERY PRIVILEGE as a MAN is what’s threatened.
These are such high stakes… Not consciously, of course, but always there below the surface. So it’s not the individual frail ego of your man that’s causing you to walk on eggshells… It’s the whole system of mutually conferred male privilege that sets him up for fragility and sets you up to feel like you have to protect that fragility.
2. Inside patriarchy, male feeling, male security, male privilege is protected at the cost of all else. So, when we take out the scale and stack a woman’s satisfaction and desire on one side, and even stack the well-being of the marriage and the closeness between them alongside that… and on the other side, we weigh her husband’s comfort, then to the extent that we subscribe to patriarchal ideals, her satisfaction and desire and the relationship will never outweigh the priority of maintaining his comfort.
Protecting the “master” is the name of the game inside a hierarchy. The master’s right to comfort, to not being confronted, to not feeling vulnerable is paramount. Patriarchy taught us to keep him comfortable, no matter what it costs her, and therefore no matter what it costs them both in terms of intimacy.
How to start changing things
We aren't built strictly of the stuff of patriarchal womanhood. But that's part of why these ideas are so insidious. Because we don't see them, we don't think of ourselves as Victorian maidens fluttering our fans and kowtowing to our men's fragile egos. But patriarchy hides out in shadowy corners of our culture. And sexuality, with all of its taboos, is a stronghold of these old notions.
So to be truly liberated in our sexuality, to have room to build our erotic dreams as freely as we build our dreams around our fitness, our finances, our careers… we have to break the silence. We have to name the fictitious fragility that we have manufactured for men. And we have to begin to dismantle that fiction.
It all starts inside our homes. For each woman, it starts with two things:
ONE: enough devotion to the vision of passion and closeness that you’ve been gifted with.
And TWO: enough skillfulness to be able to talk to your husband in a kind and visionary way.
When you see that more is possible for your living room, for instance… A cozier, more welcoming space.…Or when you see that more is possible for the dinners that you'll eat together, you don't hold that back. You make it happen, right? You redecorate, you grocery shop, you plan your meals. Those are arenas that are sanctioned by patriarchy as clearly the feminine domain.
Or in other areas like money or vacation plans, I’m guessing you feel free to share your ideas. You don't walk on eggshells around your husband.
But when it comes to naming what you desire sexually, you may have had some experiences that were painful for you or him, or another boy or man in your past, or both. And since then, it could be that you've backed off and clammed up and stopped dreaming so big and stopped sharing what you yearn for... maybe stopped even paying attention to what you're hungry for.
If so, what effect has that had on your erotic connection together? And on your own erotic intelligence? Your own capacity for pleasure and aliveness?
If you've been tamping it down, it may begin to feel like you've got a tourniquet around the brightest, most alive spark in you.
When women talk about wanting to feel that spark again, wanting to feel the butterflies with their partner, wanting to be able to tap into what they really enjoy, what turns them on, what makes them feel most alive…
This is one of the keys that unlocks those butterflies for a lifetime.
And what we're talking about here is the first step to tapping in: Lifting the edict against asking your husband for something he's not already doing in the erotic realm.
So now let's talk about how we can do that. Let's talk about language.
Here are the keys to talking to your husband about what you'd like more of:
KEY 1: TIMING: Bring it up at a good time. Don't bring it up when you're in the middle of an erotic situation and you don't like what he’s doing. You're likely to be highly reactive and he's likely to feel deeply vulnerable. Instead, choose a time when you're both totally relaxed and frame it up well.
KEY 2: CONSENT: Say “there's something I'd like to talk to you about. And it's a little sensitive. But, if we talked about this I think we could have even more fun together in bed. Is now a good time?” If he says, Okay, yeah, let's talk about it. Then he's agreed to it, and he’s likely to be more open than if you’d sprung it on him… And you have to accept if he says, “No, I'm not up for that right now.” In that case, you know it wouldn't have gone well anyway. And quite likely, his curiosity will get the best of him, if he's not willing immediately and he'll come circling back to you and want to talk about it later. So just be patient if that happens.
KEY 3: INTENTION: Show him what it will provide for the two of you. Point to a positive intention you have for the conversation, a promise that lies on the other side… “I want to talk about something that I think will help us share even more pleasure and feel closer.” This lets him know you’re trying to go for something good - and if he’s like the vast majority of husbands, he’s deeply motivated to please you, when he sees a clear path to succeeding at that.
KEY #4: RECIPROCITY: Start the conversation by creating a two-way street. Say “You know I love making love with you” or say “I really like when we ____,” whatever you want to name. Then say “And I wonder if we can talk about what each of us would desire to make it even better.” So go from strength to strength as the frame and keep the conversation two-way, so he's got an invitation to share with you something that would turn him on. Perhaps he will share something he has fantasized about but never told you. Listen to his idea first, then ask if he’ll listen to yours.
KEY #5: POSITIVE FOCUS: When it’s your turn to invite, maintain your focus on what your request will provide. Some of the kinds of phrases that you want to use will include,
“I think it might really turn me on if…”
“ It might be really fun for us, if….”
“I'm wondering if it might feel really good for you to…”
“Something I remember really enjoying with you was that time when….”
“I notice I'm feeling hungry to feel this certain way… I think that would really make me weak in the knees.”
Paint a picture for him of a really smitten, satisfied wife. He wants that.
KEY #6: CURIOSITY: Frame all of this as an experiment. Rather than setting it up as “there’s a right way to do this” or “I want you to do X”, which might make your partner feel like you have a new standard that they have to live up to… Say “I wonder if we could experiment with….” so that they know that you don't know how this goes, they don't know how this goes, and you don't expect them to. This is going to be fun, it's going to be playful and you're just seeing what happens, seeing whether the result is fun or pleasurable in some way.
KEY #7: RESILIENCE: Be prepared for and have resilience in the face of any reactivity or pushback you may get. When we're presented with something that is a little bit new or possibly threatening, something that might push some of our insecurities, our immediate response is often one of reactivity.
We want to defend against it, we want to get away from it, we want to fight. So, know that that might come up for your husband, and just be relaxed and strong. When you bring up this thing that may be somewhat provocative for your partner, be resilient, so that his initial reaction can blow through, just like an aikido master will let an attacker’s energy flow past them. Without counter-reacting, just let yourself just contain. If you had to deliver the news to a young child that a party was canceled, you would know that they were going to be upset about it. And you wouldn't get upset with them for being upset about it, you wouldn't try to argue with them, you would just say, “I know, honey. Ouch.”
So, not exactly those words but similarly - we want to hold our partners in whatever reaction they need to have in the immediate term, knowing that their true response to us, their actual engagement with the invitation we’re making, will come AFTER they've had the opportunity to flush out that initial reaction.
If you turn on a faucet that hasn’t been used in months, you’re going to want to run the water a little bit to let the water that’s been standing in the pipes flow through before you drink a glass. The response you're really looking for will come after you've let his initial reaction flow through. Just disregard any initial pushback. That’s natural and it’s nothing personal or heartfelt.
Final thoughts
As you can see, these are all more than language tips. They’re attitudes. They represent an entire approach that will serve you very well ANY time you're talking in any way about sex or love with your partner.
I hope this little crash course on what happens when we’re in bed with the patriarchy and what we can do to ACTUALLY get talking about what we desire will give you some great food for thought and some clear steps you can take action on this week. And I really hope this is just the beginning of our conversation about this topic. I want you to be inspired to open up some new conversations and some new bedroom experiments with your sweetheart, and I want you to feel a mountain of support and solidarity from me and the secret society of turned-on women who are part of this conversation.
To get started, just pick one little desire you have, and follow the seven keys in setting up a conversation with your beloved to discover a desire he has and share your invitation to experiment with him. Deal? Let’s make more & better love, here, sweetness! You deserve it, but nothing moves until you do!