“When you’ve been together a long time or you’re in your 40s, 50s, or beyond, it’s nearly inevitable that your relationship will cool off to lukewarm… or less.”
“When you have kids, careers, and busy lives, your relationship naturally moves to the back burner.”
“Creating great, passionate sex - even in an otherwise good marriage - is difficult, if not impossible. And if you ask for something different, you might hurt your partner’s feelings and break what wasn’t really broken in the first place.”
With our complicated cultural messaging around relationships, men, women, marriage, and sex, it’s no wonder we wind up in Pretty Good Marriages that aren’t as intimate as we really want or deserve.
We’re trained in how to have sex by our first lovers, usually in their teens or 20s… and we don’t update our approach to match the busy, mature person who’s our lover now, as they navigate parenthood, career, a mortgage, aging parents, and a long relationship history. We have a lot of ego wrapped up in “performing” sexually, but we aren’t operating on an up-to-date guidance…. and our partner may well be shy about giving us feedback they fear will hurt our feelings.
Few people reach age 30, let alone age 50, without sexual trauma, pain, or shame of some sort, and those hurts show up like rocks in the pockets of our hoodies - both weighing us down and coming between us when we try to draw close. And they obscure our authentic sexual nature, freedom, and playfulness.
And when we’re committed to an enduring relationship, we navigate this ongoing tension between taking care of our partner emotionally and asking them to meet our desires and tolerate our shortcomings. That makes it hard to know what to ask for and how, even when we do know.
The Symptoms
As a result, a lot of couples have a Pretty Good Marriage that doesn’t really satisfy them sexually. You might relate to some of these symptoms:
You’ve got appetite for more frequent sex, but not really the sex that’s been on the menu lately
You don’t really talk to your partner about your actual desires, for fear it will hurt their feelings (or after difficult past conversations when you tried)
You’d like to feel more support, partnership, and connection, but are afraid you’re asking too much
You’re not even really sure what you actually want… just that the yearning is persistent, despite your efforts to try to be content with the Pretty Good Marriage you honestly are grateful for
But this whole approach married sex keeps you stuck in the Pretty Good Marriage Trap.
You don’t get clear on what you really want, and you don’t let your partner know. You tell yourself you’re protecting the relationship by not pressing for more. You don’t rock the boat. The marriage stays Pretty Good. But you stay vaguely - or acutely - dissatisfied.
My Pretty Good Marriage
I know. I lived in a Pretty Good Marriage for years. We got married in 2000 and over the years, there were long dry spells, 1,001 different strategies I tried to “spice up” our love life, and nothing really changed. But when I finally realized I WASN’T protecting my spouse’s feelings by not sharing that I desired more, and I was actually endangering our good marriage by letting my frustration slowly drain my enthusiasm and joy, I saw our Pretty Good Marriage differently.
The basic goodness of our union wasn’t the fragile treasure that needed protecting. Our Pretty Good Marriage is solid rock on which we learned to build a great marriage… full of passion and aliveness and growth.
The Pretty Good Marriage Trap
When even one partner - it doesn’t have to be both of you at first - recognizes the trap they’ve built out of their Pretty Good Marriage, everything changes. Once you see the pattern, you can’t un-see it! You recognize your cherished relationship has become a frustrating cul-de-sac of tamping down desire and trying to be nice, then feeling dissatisfied, only to go around the same loop again. Once you know that you’re creating the pattern, you can get out of that loop, and instead, allow your Pretty Good Marriage to become the path to more authenticity, intimacy, and ease. More sexual compatibility and passion. Easier communication. More satisfying resolution of those frustrating disagreements. Deeper friendship and feeling seen, known, and held. Fair and mutually supportive partnership in every area. All these are possible… Even inevitable, when we claim our marriage’s potential to go from Pretty Good to truly great.
It starts with a shift in your mindset.
A Pretty Good Marriage begins to become a great, passionate marriage when you decide your idea of passion matters.
That niggle inside you? That desire you have for MORE? That vague stirring (or resounding drumbeat?) telling you something’s missing? IT’S NOT A PROBLEM. It’s not selfishness, or a sign you’re incapable of being happy, or the product of taking in too many RomComs or romance novels or sexy magazines in junior high. You have a KNOWING, a wisdom inside you. That’s why it’s so insistent. And when you decide to listen to it - at first, to JUST LISTEN - everything changes.
See, the Pretty Good Marriage becomes a trap only when we think that we have to excise part of ourselves - that desiring part - to maintain it. We’re forever in a tug-o-war between “me” and “us” if we think taking care of “us” means smooshing “me” into a smaller space.
“You just want too much.”
“You’re never satisfied.”
“At some age, isn’t sex supposed to just fade?”
“Is passion really so important you want to risk your very nice marriage for it?”
“You have your kids, your career, your friends, a very nice partner. Why do you insist on more?”
All these internal messages are epidemic among the brilliant, passionate people who find themselves trapped in their Pretty Good Marriages. Beginning to see that this “you’re too much” mindset - not the relationship itself! - is the trap is the first step to freedom and the intimacy you really crave and deserve.
Once you claim that persistent longing as a source of wisdom, and stop thinking of it as a risk and a liability, you tap into its power to transform your life and your marriage.
You will stop rejecting yourself for wanting what you want, and you will begin to glimpse the truth: that you have been blessed with a vision for what’s possible.
Imagine being in a couple where one of you knew about applying for a mortgage, while the other had been imagining that to own a house, you’d have to save hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy it outright. Wouldn’t it be so, so helpful for the one who knew to help the other understand? “We just have to save the down payment. Then, we can borrow the rest, buy the house, and make payments for 15 or 30 years WHILE we live in the house.” BOTH of you could align around that dream, but not until you both understood it. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if the person who knew about mortgages told themselves they were greedy or selfish for thinking you could apply together for one? If they hid that information, for fear of hurting their partner’s feelings? If they decided their partner couldn’t handle the information, because they were so fragile they needed to cling to their previously held notions about home ownership? It wouldn’t at all be of service, and it would be condescending to boot.
If you will begin to examine the assumptions underneath your conviction that you have to tamp down your desires, that there is no way to get the love and sex you really want with the partner you have, you’ll see how you’ve been selling both of you short. Is your partner really fragile? Are you really impossible to satisfy?
Why you need to break out of the trap
Your very first forays into questioning your assumptions will begin to break the Pretty Good Marriage Trap. And as you do, you will begin to show up differently in your marriage. You will playfully initiate new conversations, new activities, new kinds of interactions. You will carry yourself differently, trust yourself more. You will make different choices in familiar situations. There will be less pressure on you and less pressure on your marriage. That’s because the false dichotomy between your desires and the union’s well-being - “we can keep our Pretty Good Marriage secure OR I can listen to my desire for more passion and aliveness” will fall away.
Your vibrancy and your vision of a more passionate connection will begin to ENHANCE your Pretty Good Marriage. You will begin to see your partner in a new light, holding them as resilient and invested in loving you well and capable of growth. And you will feel less trapped and begin to imagine a future that unfolds rather than cycling through familiar, frustrating loops.
You’ll touch more. Kiss more. Initiate activities you’ll enjoy.
You’ll invite your partner to watch scenes or movies that turn you on or depict scintillating conversations. You’ll dress and carry yourself in ways that delight you. You’ll grow a belief that you have the power to author a life that feels electrically alive to you. You’ll stop seeing the years ahead of you as an inevitable, slow disintegration into numbness and resignation. Instead, you’ll envision and create a lifelong, gradual integration, as you and your partner both deepen your wisdom, self-awareness, confidence, peacefulness, familiarity with one another, honesty, and passion.
All this starts, as I shared before, with YOU trusting and prizing that insistent KNOWING inside you.
“There’s more for you than what you’re currently having in this Pretty Good Marriage. You are meant for more passion, deeper love, more vibrant pleasure.”
Your inner knowing is not the problem. It’s the wisdom calling you onto your path.
Ignoring this wisdom hasn’t worked, and it won’t. If it were going to go away, it would’ve. Its insistent message recurs time and again. Why? Because it’s the deepest part of you, lovingly returning with a message of vital importance.
“Don’t die with your music still in you,” it has been said. The reason so many songs, stories, and other art forms center on true, passionate love is that love is one of the highest achievements and most central purposes of human life. If you feel that call, it is no less noble or important than someone else’s call to paint a gorgeous painting or design a great cathedral or feed the hungry.
Our confused, objectifying culture is obsessed with sexualization of just about everything. At the same time, the culture frames long-term committed relationship as a “ball and chain,” not a passionate, pleasure-filled supportive partnership. That confusion causes huge problems for us overall. It contributes to infidelity, divorce, rape culture, and ongoing stereotyping and denigration of both women and men. The solution to all this can only be created one relationship at a time. It can start with you. It can start with you LISTENING to your own desire and trusting its wisdom. Every time you wonder “can I really have what I want?” or “Is this too much to ask for?” Remember: the reason you don’t see many examples of the kind of relationship you’re working toward is that you’re a pioneer, a revolutionary, a visionary for love. It WILL be more common, but not until enough of us commit to creating deeper love from the raw materials we were given by our culture and our own families.
The very rarity of relationships that demonstrate deep passion and partnership simply points out the visionary quality of your own desires. It also underscores the vital importance of honoring your yearning. Being the change we want to see in the world includes being that change erotically. How will future generations break out of outdated ways of thinking of women, men, marriage, and sex if WE don’t start today, with our own assumptions about ourselves and our partners?
But if we DO start today, to honor what we KNOW in our bodies is possible and to gently live into that vision, we can transform our own lives. We can know the pleasure we yearn for. We can feel held, seen, ravished, adored and adoring. We can crown our partners as the sovereign powerful lovers and leaders THEY are capable of being. We can nourish one another with pleasure, adoration, and true seeing. We can challenge and thrill one another daily.
The energy you gain from this fully alive partnership will then fuel everything else… Your work, your health and fitness, your family and community engagement. You will come to see it as an expression of your spiritual journey. And that fountain of passion and energy will overflow abundantly to empower your philanthropy and activism. When you’re no longer circling in your own Pretty Good Marriage frustration, you can raise your sights to serving the world and being medicine to its hurts. In that way, you’ll come to know that, at the deepest level, the call to more pleasure and more passion was never selfish or shallow at all… It was wisdom pointing you toward the deepest fountain of human aliveness and power to contribute.
This secret lay within you the entire time. I’m so glad you’re finding the courage to heed its call.
What to do now
Here’s an exercise to help you stand in your power as a relationship visionary:
Ask yourself: What do I feel deep desire for inside? How do I deeply want to feel in love and sex?
Those desires are marching orders from Central Command, your Divine guidance… They tell you what is possible and show you what to go for, even if it’s never been seen in the material world before. Ask yourself: If I rewrite my desires as promises from the universe, what do those promises look like?
Write your desires out as promises, as a vision along with an affirmation of what they really mean, using the example below as a starting place.
Here’s an example:
DESIRES: I long to feel held, handled, cherished, desired, ravished, thought of… And to feel besotted, adoring, tender, fierce, passionate, ecstatic, and electrically alive.
AFFIRMATION: These desires are Life’s (or God’s or the Universe’s or the Divine’s or The Goddess’) way of showing me a vision of what’s possible, of giving me my marching orders.
VISION: (rewrite your desires as promises)
I was born to experience…. feeling held, handled, and cherished.
It is well and good for all concerned for me to feel… desired, ravished, thought of…
As I expand my receiving capacity and invite my partner into my vision, more and more I will experience… feeling besotted, adoring, and tender.
I am building the capacity to live inside… being fierce, passionate, ecstatic, and electrically alive.
REMINDER TO YOURSELF: The HOW is not my department. Mine is to continue to discern the desires which contain the vision. Mine is to cultivate my belief that it is possible. And mine is to refine my own consciousness, skillset, and presence so that my ways of being contribute directly to this vision in each way possible, to the best of my ability each day. The rest is up to You (God/Goddess/Life/The Universe) and the details will reveal themselves in due time.
What fears or limiting beliefs have arisen about what your desires might mean about you or your relationship?
For example: “I’m greedy. I want too much. These desires will lead me to hurt our relationship. My partner is never going to get on board with having a relationship like this. My partner’s not capable of this. What we have is pretty good; I should just work to be content with it.”
Add to your vision statement some reminders that counter those fears and limiting beliefs.
For example: “My desires are evidence not that I am greedy or selfish or insatiable, but that I am a visionary of love and passion, that I have been blessed with an inner sight for what may one day be commonplace in relationships, rare as it is now. My partnership, human and imperfect as it is, is the perfect place to work toward this vision. I am willing to learn new skills, grow capacities, and release old ways of being that stop me from experiencing what I yearn for. I am willing to believe in my partner and their magnificence and call them forward, seeing the nobility and huge capacity they possess, regardless of what they’ve demonstrated in the past.”
Put your whole message together onto one sheet, perhaps handwritten beautifully or typed in a font that inspires you. Read it to yourself daily for 30 days and notice what changes in your thinking and your felt experience of yourself, your partner, and your relationship.