What does it take to be a great lover?
People hold so many misconceptions about what they’d have to become or attain to be a really epic lover inside their long-term relationship. I am here to dispel those myths once and for all and share what I have found - over 25 years of coaching individuals and couples (and 25 years with the same lover, to boot!) - are the four qualities of a great lover.
Please note that nowhere on this list will you find things like “six-pack abs” or “the ability to tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue”. There's an old saying: “It's not how long your pencil is, but how large you sign your name” that really pertains here. These qualities of a great lover have nothing to do with your equipment, which is one of the big misconceptions I see all the time.
And although a degree of knowledge about sexual anatomy, and about your own and your partner's sexual response patterns is useful, I want to assure you, those things are pretty simple to acquire once you've got the other pieces in place.
My approach is about learning:
What it takes to feel comfortable initiating and talking about sex,
What makes you irresistible to your partner and turns them on to high heaven,
What makes you feel confident, playful, excited, and relaxed during sexual encounters with your spouse
What makes you resilient in the face of the goofy stuff that goes down in bed for everybody, so that you can roll with it and keep having fun rather than getting stuck in your head or completely losing the flow.
This is the approach that Kurt and I have used in our own relationship for more than 25 years and it's helped us to heal a whole lot of painful and frustrating patterns. This is the same approach that has helped hundreds and hundreds of long-term couples to create more confidence, ease, and passion in their sex lives.
It breaks my heart that so many couples who have been together for a while are living with this nagging sexual frustration, or sometimes an excruciating amount of distance and pain around sexuality because they just don't understand what it takes to be a great lover and how very close they actually already are to being their unique version of that. They keep trying sex tricks from magazines. They buy more lingerie or new sex toys. They go away for the weekend or they read yet another book. Or they give up entirely and say, "Well, we have a good life in general so it doesn’t really matter." Or they tell themselves "You know what, maybe long-term marriage just inevitably cools off to this kind of lukewarm love."
If you want to go from that kind of frustration and resignation and sexual boredom to having a truly nourishing body mind spirit connection, if you want to have more fun and ease in bed and feel like a sexual rockstar with your spouse, then you’re ready for the four qualities of a great lover.
Quality of a Great Lover #1: Body Fascination
Everybody who's a truly GREAT lover shares this common trait: they adore their own and their partner’s humanity. They embrace right where they are, and right where their partner is: their body shape and size, the way it smells, the way it tastes, the way it feels. They enjoy the heck out of their own body and they're unapologetic about it.
Understanding ability
We all have differences in our ability, whether it's the flexibility of your hamstrings, or how long it takes you to orgasm. Lots of people have judgments like, "it takes me too long" or "I orgasm too fast.” But truly great lovers refuse to do that; they just embrace how they are. If something happens in an unexpected way in the bedroom, they roll with it and sort of say "Eh, them's the breaks." It’s kind of like when you burn pancakes. You just say, "Okay, we're throwing out that batch, and I'm gonna throw more batter on the griddle and keep going."
I've had clients with a whole range of conditions brought on by age, or that they've had all their lives, that don’t match the mythical standard of what a “great lover” looks like. And yet through our work, they’ve learned to embrace the loss of a limb, diabetes, or physical tremors that make their touch a little different than you might expect. We can all learn to work with what we have. There may be things that prevent penile-vaginal penetration in your partnership. That's totally okay… IF you make it okay. You can both be great lovers if you both embrace that.
A partner who embraces body fascination honors their partner’s and their own response. They don't ever say, "You're taking too long.” Or “You're too fast.” They don’t look for or convey, “how you respond to me is wrong." They get curious about the ways that their body works and the ways their partner's body works. They love it. They have fun with it. They explore with deep curiosity.
Quality of a Great Lover #2: Identity
Great lovers see themselves as sexual beings and create a story about who they are that makes lots of room for eroticism. They have a positive narrative about their gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.
Gender identity and expression
A lot of my clients are cisgender, meaning they have always identified as male or female and their identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth. There are lots of people on Earth who are amazing lovers who are not cisgender and often the work that they've done to claim their identities gives them more of this exuberant, self-accepting quality than the average unexamined, cisgender person.
Sometimes my straight cisgender clients have to do some self-acceptance work in order to become great lovers in a way they never had to before, in order to be comfortable with their gender identity or their sexual orientation. For instance, they took for granted "Yeah, I'm a straight male.” But straight males who have never had a lot of challenge to their identity have almost always ALSO absorbed many messages from movies, TV, or the news and from parents and high school classmates that set them up to not be great lovers, and to not be very happy inside a healthy long term sexual relationship. We're taught a lot of stories about what men have to be, what a good lover is, or how a man proves his manhood sexually.
Seeing yourself as a sexual being
One of the aspects of a positive sexual identity is creating a positive narrative about yourself and your gender, about your partner's gender, and about the role of sex inside a relationship for people your age, and in your stage of life. A lot of people's stories about sex include ideas like, "After you're parents, you're not supposed to be sexual. That's not wholesome. Parents are supposed to be these neutered asexual beings.”
Where did we get that idea? Well, your parents may have hidden sexuality from you so thoroughly that you never had an image of parents as sexual beings. And how much has that cost you? Is that really what you want to give your kids?
This sense of ourselves as sexual beings, and the rewriting of our narratives includes how we show up with people outside our couple as well. People who see themselves as sexual beings, and are great lovers as a consequence, free themselves of rigid roles, or “shoulds.” We don't tell ourselves, “we're supposed to have sex this often,” or “we're supposed to last this long.” We let go of those kinds of rules and expectations.
Great lovers know that consensual sexuality is normal and healthy.
I know that should go without saying, but it doesn't. One of the shadow beliefs that stop so many people who want to have more sex or better sex inside their marriages, is that at some level, they think they shouldn't want that, that sex is kind of bad.
It's worth cleaning out those old stories. Our culture is both hyper-sexed and puritanical, and still carries a lot of negative stories that hamper us from being great lovers if we don't dismantle those stories and kick them out of our heads.
Being an “artist”
And then finally, this identity of seeing yourself as a sexual being is seeing yourself as an artist. A lot of people stop drawing or painting or dancing or singing somewhere in childhood. Then they tell themselves, "I'm not creative," or "I'm not artistic." If you tell yourself that, you get to be right about it. If you stop practicing, you wind up not being any more well-informed or skillful than you were on the day you stopped.
Maybe you got taught how to play with another body by someone who was 16, 17, 18, 22 years old, and had the sexual responses of a person that age and the physiology of a person that age so that's the information you're working with. My husband's 56 and I'm 49. For us to be great lovers for each other, he has to understand my 49-year-old, perimenopausal, mother of two, been through three pregnancies body.
He also needs to be skillful with his 56-year-old male body, and where he is right now body, mind, and spirit. For me to be a great lover for him, I have to know how to work with the body I've got today and the body, mind, and spirit he's got today.
That's what well-informed and skillful means. It doesn't mean you've learned the best “tips and tricks.” It means you understand physiological response and how that changes through time so you can have a good explanation for the ways in which your bodies might deviate from what you think of as normal, proper, or healthy. It's about really getting and endorsing each other.
Quality of a Great Lover #3: Presence
Great lovers stay present; they're right there in the moment. This is really rooted in the capacity to self-soothe. Great lovers are skillful at regulating their nervous system in the face of strong sensation or emotion.
Self-regulation
Intimacy is both high sensation and high emotion. If you can't swim in a fast-flowing river, then you're going to get carried away by it. That's going to be upsetting and you're going to want to not go there again. A lot of the sexual avoidance that I see is rooted in this: a limited capacity for self-regulation. When we develop the ability to walk right up to that whitewater river and hold steady as we walk into it, then we can stay present, and develop this quality. That kind of self-regulation gives us the flexibility to respond dynamically, to have more than one option in the face of something.
Maybe during intercourse, you slip out and jam something and there's discomfort or pain at some level. What do you do? If you don't have a lot of flexibility, and can't respond dynamically, that might be the end of it. You’ll say, "Oh, somebody got hurt," and just roll away from each other. You’ll both remember that as an “unsuccessful” sexual interaction. But maybe after something like that, there are other options. Maybe there's a different kind of touch, a different way of being together, one that can actually draw you closer than you would have been, had things kept going according to the script.
Taking risks and revealing
This capacity to self-regulate also gives us the capacity to take risks and reveal ourselves. That's really essential to being a great lover, because from the initial kind of wink that says, "I'd love to get closer to you, at some point in the next 24 hours," to every move, we make erotically, we're always revealing something about ourselves, or declining to. We're always taking a risk, or playing it safe.
Playing it safe and declining to reveal ourselves is the perfect recipe for boring sex. But when you can take risks, you set yourself up for the kind of sex where you surprise yourself and your partner. The kind of sex that keeps you both coming back, that allows you to call up the energy at the end of the day, when you're both tired to go, "Yeah, let's have a little adventure together. Because I never know what's gonna happen. And I like that."
Being a great lover, in essence, requires us to take those risks and reveal ourselves, but we can't do that unless we've got the insurance of a capacity to self-regulate. It's too much exposure, it's too vulnerable if we can't self-regulate.
Quality of a Great Lover #4: Energy
Great lovers bring life force to their lovemaking and to the relationship. You don't have to be young or thin or have the most energy on the planet to be a great lover. You do have to be awake and alive, bringing a degree of vitality and aliveness, and spirit to your lovemaking.
I've had the privilege of walking with people through intense illness and right up to the end of their lives and supporting the lover in them through those processes has helped me see the way that even as the lifeforce itself is waning, is busy battling cancer, is slipping away, we can direct our vitality toward our intimacy. Someone who does that is a great lover.
Even if their hair's falling out, even if their energy is very low, that life force brings an intimacy that a lot of people with six-pack abs and the ability to benchpress their partner don't have. I invite you to rethink what you think of as being a great lover in that context.
Making room for eroticism
Another aspect of energy is saving mental space for your erotic self and for the erotic adventure between you and your partner. So a lot of people don't think about sex a lot outside of sex, and they dedicate all of their energy to other things. Then they slam into the bedroom with an "Okay, let's do this" mentality as if they were hauling a TV dinner out of the freezer, throwing it on the counter still frozen, and saying "Dinner's served!" That's not very appetizing. It’s the same with sexuality. Great lovers make room.
For instance, if you know that you two tend to find the energy on a Wednesday or Thursday night, make some space to be together. Thinking about how you might like to show up by Monday or Sunday, pre-paving the path to that erotic space is a great way to make sure you're a great lover.
Attitude
The attitude that you bring to lovemaking is often the attitude you bring to other aspects of your life. Great lovers are people whose partners say, "Oh my gosh, yes, I just love being with my partner in an erotic space." Very seldom is that person also described by their partner as really negative and harsh, pessimistic and bummed out on life. Those attitudes just don't coexist.
Great lovers have a positive attitude toward life, toward lovemaking, and toward their relationship. They pour positive energy into the connection and into themselves so that they feel that vibrant aliveness, and then that shows up in how they dance with their partner inside the erotic space.
Generosity
There's a sense of play, fun, and generosity that is another facet of the energy that great lovers bring to sexuality. Sometimes people are eager to please, but in a needy way. That's not what I'm talking about here. To use a culinary metaphor: If you're a great cook, you can say, "I can see that you've been a little down this week. I think my chicken soup is just what the doctor ordered for you. How's that sound?" There's a sense of masterful generosity, of showing up and being of service in a way that's going to touch your partner deeply and then enjoying that. It’s getting off on giving and being playful, being you, in your body, and in bed.
Partnership
Finally, partnership and “adulting” together also falls into this category of energy. In particular, here, I'm talking about long-term committed relationships. If you share a life together, then having a partnership that is fair, and where your communication and the way that you share labor works well for both of you is essential. The resentment, the feeling of disrespect, and the stuck energy that come when you don't share duties in a way that's fair is a turn-off.
What's cool about that is that it means that sex can be the canary in the coal mine that can help you rewrite some of those unhealthy patterns and create more intimacy, more efficiency, and actually help you reach better goals in areas like your finances or your health because you're partnering better together. I love the way that sex can be an invitation for us to step forward and expand in other areas.
Final thoughts
Those are the four essential qualities of a great lover: body fascination, identity, presence, and energy. Now that you know what they are, you have a choice to make. You get to decide: are you going to stick with the myth that there's some unattainable set of skills and physical attributes that you need in order to become an amazing lover who has a delicious sex life with your partner? Or are you ready to embrace the truth about what makes an amazing lover for a lifetime so that you can start feeling turned on, confident, and adored right now and keep it growing for years and years and decades to come?
If you want to claim your true birthright as an amazing lover for your partner, take JUST ONE of the ideas here and go implement it.
Embody the lover who's right there inside the exact body that you have, with all its beauty and all its perceived flaws.
Bring the goofball you are into the bedroom without apology.
Enjoy your partner's body and your own and reveal your energy to them in a way that nobody else gets to see.
I can't wait to hear about what happens.